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Martin Burrett

UKEd Magazine - Issue 51 - 7 views

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    Special World War One Commemorative Edition
Michael Sheehan

Learning Never Stops: 30,000 World War II Pictures, the Inauguration, and Diagrams - 4 views

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    Over 30,000 World War II photographs, plus create diagrams and a funny take on the Inauguration.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Martin Burrett

Bomb Sight - Mapping the World War 2 London Blitz Bomb Census - 74 views

shared by Martin Burrett on 09 May 13 - No Cached
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    This is an amazing history resource which plots each bomb dropped in the London Blitz during the Second World War. Click on the point on the map to view information and photos. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/History
marcmancinelli

Think Again: Education - By Ben Wildavsky | Foreign Policy - 31 views

  • But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
  • By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      US has long been mediocre or at the bottom of international comparisons, but it's not a zer-sum game
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  • J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      People use crises to advance their own agendas...
  • But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
  • According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
  • And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain.
  • A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
  • But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades.
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    A great perspective piece on American education compared to the world.
Maggie Tsai

Sweeny's Canadawiki Weblog: Make Your Own Wiki Textbook With Web 2.0 - 6 views

  • Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]
Allison Haeussler

America on the Sidelines: The United States and World Affairs, 1931-1941 | EDSITEment - 36 views

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    Great interactive site for WWII
Rafael Morales_Gamboa

Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond - 38 views

  • So a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become workers in an industrial system.
  • we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.
  • One can at least be suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      My landlord in Edinburgh, Peter Sinclair, used to say that students do not protest these days because they all have loans to pay.
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  • "the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young."
  • It's not just you learned how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things. And that can be done from kindergarten on
  • There are a lot of factors. And one of them, probably, is just that students are trapped
  • First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars
  • there's no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt
  • It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself
Candy Boyer

Tom Wolfe, Author and Satirist of America, Dies at 88 | Time - 4 views

  • American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.
  • journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
  • Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
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  • “My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”
  • “new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
  • pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.
  • And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”
  • s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.
  • unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before
  • The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.
  • The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.” But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter. “For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.
  • “A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.
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    includes short VIDEO "Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master's programs would kill the novel."
Ed Webb

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com - 51 views

  • “PowerPoint makes us stupid,”
  • behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making
  • deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world
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  • Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.
  • Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
dabennett7

Remix Culture : Center for Social Innovation (CSI) - 12 views

  • there’s a war raging over what some now are calling a new art form in the emerging Web 2.0 culture—remix
  • remix is collage, a recombination of existing, reference images or music and video clips from popular digital culture, elements of which are mashed up into something new.
    • dabennett7
       
      Does this sound familiar? Common core and even the SBAC assessment are rooted in remix.
  • as long as the remix is significantly altered from the original—should remix be permitted by law
    • dabennett7
       
      How will copryright laws evolve for the 21st century? What skills must our students gradate with to prepare them for a world of Remix vs. Copyrights?
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  • Should remix be outlawed as a violation of an artist’s or photographer’s copyrigh
  • “Remix is literacy in the 21st century,” Lessig said. The chief of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society
    • dabennett7
       
      If digital literacy includes remixing, then the skills of citation and attribution are more important than ever.
  • failing to legally protect remixes as original forms of art and expression “will make pirates of our children...We cannot kill this form of expression;
  • Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, a new book about the history of information flows in American and British society, said remix has “deep roots in the Age of Enlightenment and among America’s Founding Fathers.”
    • dabennett7
       
      Remix is not new...  but it is easier and more accessible than ever.  A smartphone alone is a remix machine capable of remixing text, audio, video, images and more.  Then with a click you can publish your remix to the world from anywhere!
  • Where do we think innovation and creativity come from
  • Fairey rounded out the talk, citing remix as one of the early 21st century’s most popular forms of free political expression.
  • Remix is all about making references; references are how you establish a point of view in popular culture, and they are crucial to my work as an artist.”
    • dabennett7
       
      This is what we as educators are all about... We challenge students to make connections, identify themes, clarify or argue a point of view.  We push them to remix everyday. Are we challenging them to respect the ideas they build their learning upon?
Ian Jenkinson

Searching the Web - 7 views

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    Weblinks on issues of interest to humanities studies.
Martin Burrett

WW1 Coding Project ideas - 36 views

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    8 Child-friendly coding projects with examples on Scratch
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