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David McGavock

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 2 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com

education Larry Cuban reform technology

shared by David McGavock on 28 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Beginning in the mid-1970s, the decline of U.S. workplace productivity, rising unemployment, losses in market share to Japan and Germany, and swift technological changes led corporate and civic leaders to locate reasons for poor economic performance. Within a few years, these policy elites “educationalized” the problem by pointing to low SAT test scores and high school graduates unprepared for the workplace. Schools got blamed for U.S. slipping competitiveness.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 28 Nov 10
       
      School Failure or Social Failure. Interesting that people identify a problem (poor economic performance) and assign a cause (school failure).
  • Missing in all of the talk and mandates aimed at improving teacher quality are the traditional moral obligations of teaching the young be they preschoolers or graduate students….
  • Intellectual attentiveness means concentrating on what students know, feel, and think about the content and skills to be learned–the technical side of teaching–but then go on to deepen their understanding of the world and their capacity to continue learning.
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  • Moral attentiveness means to concentrate on helping students grow as persons in grace and sensitivity, becoming more rather than less thoughtful about ideas, becoming more rather than less respectful of others’ views, and becoming more rather than less responsible for reducing social injustice. Questions of what is fair, right, and just arise constantly in classrooms; students learn moral sensibilities from how their teachers answer those questions….
  • If a professor, for example, only calls on the brightest, most verbal students in the class, snipes at students’ answers that call into question the professor’s statements, and provides few comments on students’ written work, students learn about fairness, independent inquiry, and the moral character of their professor.
  • In teaching we display our views of knowledge and learning, we advertise our ideas, how we reason, and how we struggle with moral choices whether we intend to or not.
  • Technical competence, as important as it is in teaching, is insufficient to make a whole teacher or a complete student
  • approach life and the classroom with humility.
  • what troubles me is the cramped image of teaching that has emerged from these reforms. The constricted picture is one where the teacher is a technically competent supplier of information and skills. It is an incomplete image of teaching.
  • David McGavock on 28 Nov 10
     
    control turning around failing schools? Hardly. Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein continue to run the New York City schools. Boston and Chicago mayors will still have their appointees overseeing schools. Business and civic leaders' faith that mayoral control is the key to "real" reform may be tarnished somewhat by D.C., Detroit, and Baltimore but it continues to entrance venture fund entrepreneurs and policy wonks inside the Beltway. Other mayors will learn from Fenty's loss that voters can turn on you if you fail to heed your community and give your
BTerres

Stephen Downes: Things You Really Need To Learn - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...u-really-need-to_b_788989.html

downes learn

shared by BTerres on 03 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • to educators, I ask, if you are not teaching these things in your classes, why are you not?
  • 1. How to predict consequences
  • The prediction of consequences is part science, part mathematics, and part visualization. It is essentially the ability to create a mental model imaging the sequence of events that would follow, "what would likely happen if...?"
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  • 2. How to read
  • how to look at some text and to understand, in a deep way, what is being asserted (this also applies to audio and video, but grounding yourself in text will transfer relatively easily, if incompletely, to other domains).
  • 3. How to distinguish truth from fiction
  • Do not simply accept what you are told. Always ask, how can you know that this is true? What evidence would lead you to believe that it is false?
  • 4. How to empathize
  • this will allow other people to become a surprising source of new knowledge and insight.
  • 5. How to be creative
  • Sometimes people think that creative ideas spring out of nothing (like the proverbial 'blank page' staring back at the writer) but creativity is in fact the result of using and manipulating your knowledge in certain ways.
  • creativity involves a transfer of knowledge from one domain to another domain, and sometimes a manipulation of that knowledge.
  • pattern recognition can be learned
  • 6. How to communicate clearly
  • 7. How to Learn
  • Learning to learn is the same as learning anything else. It takes practice.
  • 8. How to stay healthy
  • 9. How to value yourself
  • You can have all the knowledge and skills in the world, but they are meaningless if you do not feel personally empowered to use them; it's like owning a Lamborghini and not having a driver's license.
  • 10. How to live meaningfully
  • When you realize you have the power to choose what you are doing, you realize you have the power to choose the consequences. Which means that consequences -- even bad consequences -- are for the most part a matter of choice
David McGavock

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views

www.sfgate.com/...detail

twitter literacy rheingold socialmedia

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jan 11 - Cached
  • It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
  • use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
  • successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
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  • Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
  • The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
  • My reasons: Openness - anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
  • Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
  • I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
  • Reciprocity - people give and ask freely for information they need
  • A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
  • Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
  • A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
  • A window on what is happening in multiple worlds
  • Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
  • A platform for mass collaboration:
  • Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
  • successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding.
  • If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
  • Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
  • My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    "Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.
David McGavock

Critical Reading - 1 views

aix1.uottawa.ca/...critical.html

shared by David McGavock on 03 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Critical reading means thinking carefully about an author’s claims, rather than accepting these claims at face value. It requires several skills: ·        identifying the claims or arguments of a text; ·        evaluating the logic of these arguments; ·        determining whether the author has presented sufficient and valid evidence in support of these arguments; and ·        considering alternative evidence and arguments that might challenge the author’s claims. Why bother?  Because if you don’t read critically, you may miss the main arguments of the text, or – worse – your opinions may be influenced by bogus arguments.
  • 1.       Claims:  What are the main claims or arguments in the text?  What is the author’s main point? 2.      Logic:  How does the author reach these conclusions?  What are the steps in the author’s reasoning or logic?  Is this logic sound? 3.      Evidence:  What evidence does the author present to support the argument(s)?  Does the author offer enough evidence?  Is this evidence convincing?  Can you think of any counter-evidence that would challenge the author’s claims? 4.      Assumptions:  Does the author rely on hidden assumptions?  If so, are these assumptions correct? 5.      alternative arguments:  Can you think of alternative arguments that the author has not considered?
  • David McGavock on 03 Jan 11
     
    "Critical reading means thinking carefully about an author's claims, rather than accepting these claims at face value. It requires several skills: · identifying the claims or arguments of a text; · evaluating the logic of these arguments; · determining whether the author has presented sufficient and valid evidence in support of these arguments; and · considering alternative evidence and arguments that might challenge the author's claims. Why bother? Because if you don't read critically, you may miss the main arguments of the text, or - worse - your opinions may be influenced by bogus arguments."
  • David McGavock on 03 Jan 11
     
    When you are reading for understanding, here are some questions to ask. They will help you weigh the arguments and check for validity.
  • David McGavock on 03 Jan 11
     
    How does this apply to Internet searches? We are looking for authority. What are the practices we should adopt to navigate the network world?
David McGavock

In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating - page 3 - 3 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011021902888_3.html

cooperation corporate google twitter facebook washingtonpost

shared by David McGavock on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc.
  • How are conflicts resolved?
  • Zuckerberg engages in the conversation and offers his perspective.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Twitter's growing really quickly, and something that allowed us to do so much with so few people early on was this culture of trust, where you knew people around you were smart and had the best of intentions," Mark Trammell,
  • "TeamTeam," a forum for employees to gather around common interests.
  • Trammell spends roughly 10 percent of his time helping his colleagues build personal relationships around "things that people are passionate about."
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 0 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept.
  • Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but ornamental.
  • Merton proposes an articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of this work.
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  • Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an unequivocal way.
  • It was in the 1930s that Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • As Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal work – On the Shoulders of Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
  • Merton provides interesting statistics to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time, serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000, serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on the World Wide Web in 2001.
  • The Italian version was published in 2002, after Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could welcome the appearance of the original English version.
  •  Now let us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its significance to the sociology of science.
  • The first few chapters elucidate the origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes of Serendip in Venice.
  •  In a letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
  • in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with Horace Mann was published.
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  • Serendipity was used in print for the first time by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
  • Edward Solly had the honor
  • Solly defined serendipity as “a particular kind of natural cleverness”
  • he stressed Walpole’s implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
  • Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
  • The ambiguity was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute and an event or phenomenon
  • the word appeared in all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909 and 1934.
  • authors reveal disparities in definition
  • To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal attribute respectively.
  •  Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
  • “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
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