CTLT and Friends

From the 2 Steves at TLT Group - a series of blog posts are linked from this table view of 10 things they no longer believe about transforming Teaching & Learning with Technology. The right part of the table includes a summary of what they believe and suggest today.

Don't you wish students could be taught to think like this. Most people ask what, maybe why, but seldom how.

Inspirational about thought..

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either. "

I've long held that we learn far more from failure than success. Success doesn't teach us anything really, accept that it once worked the way it did. This is really from another point of view..

Neurons learn from success individually but not from failure..

At Books-A-Million (the big book store here in Gainesville, FL), I noticed the science section is very small, there is no psychology section (but only a large Self-Help section that is heavily religious), and no biology section. The religion section is by far the largest of all. I wondered, does this reflect the interests of people in the area? If so, the lack of interest in science is really sad. The contrasting (as opposed to just commparing) science and religion is also a sad societal phenomenon, I think. But then again--while stores mostly buy inventory they think will sell best, the inventory that builds up on the shelves is that which sells the least. So I don't know how to guage this.

"People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them." "We no longer search for the news, the news finds us... "

The relevance and importance of visual design. I've long suggested that all service design (including software) begin with a walk through of what the customer/user comes to and sees in succession.

A good explanation of how services are best designed with aesthetics as the means to functionality. I always remember from the military that building an effective fighting position required "walking the perimeter"--having one guy in the fighting position taking notes while another approaches systematically from every possible direction. Most importantly, what will the enemy (or customer) see step by step and what steps will he/she take in turn. Always center on the customer's experience (this is rarely done).

Twitter for Business, Text as UI: "A few days ago, I posted the announcement of our next usability conferences to Nielsen Norman Group's timeline on Twitter (@NNgroup). I don't have all the guidelines for stream-based postings yet, because we're still conducting usability studies (particularly of B2B users, like my audience). But, based on the user sessions I've observed already, I put this posting through 5 rounds of iterative design."

A great blog recapitulating a presentation on innovation. The picture provided by Alan Kay (inventor of the mouse) is important to Rain King.

The inevitable extension of the LMS from the Morgan study to now: the college hopes to install technology that will allow the flash drive to automatically connect to a folder hosted by the college, so students can submit assignments whenever the flash drive detects an Internet connection.

This is a very easy way to create a screencast and have it hosted, or twitted.

Yeah you read that right. They told you it couldn't be done - I'm tellin' ya it can be done.

A resource to track. The latest here is July 2nd's NWCCU new standards.

Interesting results of California's open source text book initiative.. Other references: http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/12225/ and http://about.ck12.org/