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Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Angela Hagan

Aspirin stimulates insulin - 6 views

  • AbstractNormal subjects and patients with adult-onset diabetes received 10 gm. of aspirin in four days. On the fourth day, the fasting serum glucose and the glucose response to oral glucose were decreased in both groups. These changes were associated with increased levels of serum insulin and pancreatic glucagon, although the glucagon responses to oral glucose were unchanged. In the diabetic patients, aspirin therapy was followed by a decreased glucose response to I.V. glucose and by the appearance of an early insulin peak, which could not be demonstrated before treatment. Aspirin did not affect the I.V. glucose tolerance in normal subjects, although it did enhance the early insulin peak. A decrease in the fasting levels of free fatty acids was noted in both groups, whereas the fasting level of triglycerides decreased only in the diabetic patients. Cholesterolemia did not change in either group. A few preliminary observations indicate that, in normal subjects, ibuprofen and ketoprofen, two other presumed prostaglandin inhibitors, did not affect fasting glycemia, glucose tolerance, or the insulin response to glucose. No changes were noted after the administration of placebo. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #2 trinitarian3n1 D.D. Family Moderator Join Date November 2007 Location In the mitten, USA Age 41 Posts > 100 About T2 dx 3/07, tx w/very lo carb D&E Met, bolus R Blog Entries 127 That's a hefty dose of aspirin. John C.A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.Last HgbA1c - 5.5% 2/2011 Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #3 MCS D.D. Family Join Date August 2010 Posts > 100 About T2, trying to live a healthy life Yes it is, 650mg 4 times a day. I wonder if they did that to make sure they had a response and if there is a break point of some lower dose. I am on 325 once a day now. Been that high in the past for other things, lots of ringing in the ears when you get that high of a dose. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #4 furball64801 D.D. Family Join Date December 2009 Posts > 100 About type 2 25 yrs mother aunt type 2 thin 50 yrs Blog Entr
  • The therory is that it helps to regenerate the once turned off Beta cells, not over working the exiting ones. This is just one article I found, they are many, most of them concern Salsalate a drug used for arthritis. It works by lowering the inflammation of the liver and pancreas. Lowers IR, its a pretty interesting concept based largerly on inflammation of one muscles and organs. Originally Posted by jeanne wagner i know for heart health they recommend the baby 81 mg a day. I would think you wouldn't have a stomach lining left if you took that on a daily basis. Also just because it stimulates insulin doesn't mean it is a good thing. Sulfonyureas also overstimulate insulin and there is some thought they lead to beta cell burnout. I think it is better to find things like metformin that make you more sensitive to the insulin you naturally make. Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote 11-08-2010 #7 MCS D.D. Family Join Date August 2010 Posts > 100 About T2, trying to live a healthy life Here is a few more articles concerning NSAID's and insulin if you are interested.http://www.annals.org/content/152/6/346.abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...026.x/abstracthttp://www.theannals.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/7/1207 Last A1C 4.8No Rx, Diet modification, exercise, Supps and HerbalsI am a retired HYPOGLYCEMIC Reply With Quote MCS was thanked for this post by: Nan-OH 11-08-2010 #8 CalgaryDiabetic D.D. Family Join Date June 2009 Location Calgary,Canada Posts > 100 About diabetic since 1997, on insulin 2000 Guarantied tummy ulcer with so much aspirin. Reply With Quote 11-09-2010 #9 MCS
Christophe Gigon

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - 17 views

  • Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I aggree that as teachers we need to realize that technology has changed instruction and the way that our students learn and the way that we learn and instruct.
    • Orlando Gonzalez
       
      Technology has always changed the way we live. How did we respond to changes in the past? One thought is that some institutions, some businesses disappeared, while others, who took advantage of the new tech, appeared to replace the old. It will happen again and we as educators need to lead the way.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      With technology our students brains are wired differently and they can multi-task and learn in multiple virtual environments all at once. This should make us think about how we present lessons, structure learning and keep kids engaged.
    • Mike Burnett
       
      Rubbish. The idea that digital native are adept at multitasking is wrong. They may be doing many things but the quality and depth is reduced. There is a significant body of research to support this. Development of grit and determination are key attributes of successful people. Set and demand high standards. No one plays sport or an instrument because it is easy rather because they can clearly see a link between hard work and pleasure.
  • Information development was slow.
  • Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience.
  • Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime.
  • Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains.
  • Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.
  • Principles of connectivism:
  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I think it is important for us to realize the importance of connections.
  • The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
  • Classrooms which emulate the “fuzziness”
    • Maureen Curran
       
      So what does this look like? I feel that when I attempt this, evaluators and administrators don't necessarily understand. They want a neat, quiet, well-managed, orderly classroom.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      If new learning approaches are required, then why are we still being evaluated in a linear way?
  • John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few.
  • The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.
  • Knowledge is growing exponentially
  • amount of knowledge
  • is doubling every 18 months
  • To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”
  • (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
  • know-where
  • learning
  • a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”
  • Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned.
  • The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.
  • knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner
  • What is the impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process on learning
  • An entirely new approach is needed.
  • Chaos is the breakdown of predictability, evidenced in complicated arrangements that initially defy order.
  • Meaning-making and forming connections between specialized communities are important activities.
  • Chaos, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything to everything.
  • If the underlying conditions used to make decisions change, the decision itself is no longer as correct as it was at the time it was made.
  • principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole.
  • Connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations.
  • Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual
  • decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations
  • The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital.
  • Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism do not attempt to address the challenges of organizational knowledge and transference.
  • The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
  • This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.
  • This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.
  • Diverse teams of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely exploring ideas
  • An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy surviva
  • As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
    • BalancEd Tech
       
      Access is not enough. Prior knowledge and understanding is needed. Processing is needed. Evaluation of processing and outputs is needed. Feeding that back into the "system" is needed.
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
Carol Ansel

The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views

  • Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
  • 4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
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    Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
JD Pennington

Diigo in College/University - 253 views

Some questions: Is it possible to get an RSS feed of group annotated links that are no longer live pages, but are instead highlighted static pages? This way I can get a feed of a the links that ...

education diigo

Todd Campion

Great Expectations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Miss Havisham and her family Miss Havisham, wealthy spinster who takes Pip on as a companion and whom Pip suspects is his benefactor. Miss Havisham does not discourage this as it fits into her own spiteful plans. She later apologizes to him as she's overtaken by guilt. He accepts her apology and she is badly burnt when her dress catches aflame from a spark which leapt from the fire. Pip saves her, but she later dies from her injuries. Estella (Havisham), Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, whom Pip pursues romantically throughout the novel. She is secretly the daughter of Molly, Jaggers' housekeeper, and Abel Magwitch, Pip's convict, but was given up to Miss Havisham after a murder trial. Estella represents the life of wealth and culture for which Pip strives. Since her ability to love has been ruined by Miss Havisham, she is unable to return Pip's passion. She warns Pip of this repeatedly, but he is unwilling or unable to believe her. At one point, Estella is walking up some iron stairs representing how she is of a higher class than Pip when in fact she is of the same class. Arthur (Havisham), Miss Havisham's half-brother, who felt he was shortchanged in his inheritance by their father's preference for his daughter. He joined with Compeyson in the scheme to cheat Miss Havisham of large sums of money by gaining Miss Havisham's trust through promise of marriage to Compeyson. Arthur is haunted by the memory of the scheme and sickens and dies in a delirium, imagining that the still-living Miss Havisham is in his room, coming to kill him. Arthur has died before the beginning of the novel and gambled heavily, being drunk quite often. Matthew Pocket, a cousin of Miss Havisham's. He is the patriarch of the Pocket family, but unlike others of her relatives he is not greedy for Havisham's wealth. Matthew Pocket has a family of nine children, two nurses, a housekeeper, a cook, and a pretty but useless wife (named Belinda). He also tutors young gentlemen, such as Bentley Drummle, Startop, Pip, and his own son Herbert, who live on his estate. Herbert Pocket, a member of the Pocket family, Miss Havisham's presumed heirs, whom Pip first meets as a "pale young gentleman" who challenges Pip to a fist fight at Miss Havisham's house when both are children. He is the son of Matthew Pocket, Pip's tutor in the "gentlemanly" arts, and shares his apartment with Pip in London, becoming Pip's fast friend who is there to share Pip's happiness as well as his troubles. He is in love with a girl called Clara. Herbert keeps it secret because he knows his mother would say she is below his "station". Camilla, an ageing, talkative relative of Miss Havisham who does not care much for Miss Havisham and only wants her money. She is one of the many relatives who hang around Miss Havisham "like flies" for her wealth. Cousin Raymond, another ageing relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. He is married to Camilla. Georgiana, an ageing relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. Sarah Pocket, "a dry, brown corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made out of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers." Another ageing relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money
  • Characters from Pip's youth The Convict, an escapee from a prison ship, whom Pip treats kindly, and who turns out to be his benefactor, at which time his real name is revealed to be Abel Magwitch, but who is also known as Provis and Mr. Campbell in parts of the story to protect his identity. Pip also covers him as his uncle in order that no one recognizes him as a convict sent to Australia years before. Abel Magwitch, the convict's given name, who is also Pip's benefactor. Provis, a name that Abel Magwitch uses when he returns to London, to conceal his identity. Pip also says that "Provis" is his uncle visiting from out of town. Mr. Campbell, a name that Abel Magwitch uses after he is discovered in London by his enemy. Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, simple folk who think they are more important than they really are. They live in Pip's village. Mr. Wopsle, the clerk of the church in Pip's village. He later gives up the church work and moves to London to pursue his ambition to be an actor, even though he is not very good. Mr. Waldengarver, the stage name that Mr. Wopsle adopts as an actor in London. Biddy, Mr. Wopsle's second cousin; she runs an evening school from her home in Pip's village and becomes Pip's teacher. A kind and intelligent but poor young woman, she is, like Pip and Estella, an orphan. She is the opposite of Estella. Pip ignores her obvious love for him as he fruitlessly pursues Estella. After he realizes the error of his life choices, he returns to claim Biddy as his bride, only to find out she has married Joe Gargery. Biddy and Joe later have two children, one named after Pip whom Estella mistakes as Pip's child in the original ending. Orlick was attracted to her, but his affection was unreciprocated
Shannon Smith

Need resources to assist in creating a 21st century learner training/ professional deve... - 133 views

Thank you! This is great information! James McKee wrote: > Shannon, > > I was recently referred to this video of Michael Wesch who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. He ...

professional development 21st century learners technology

Misha Miller

Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles » Edurati Review - 50 views

  •  
    "Conversation is key . Sawyer succinctly explains this principle: "Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity." When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction lead to richer collaborative conceptualization. Set a clear but open-ended goal . Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a group's final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative thinking from finding an entry point. Try not announcing time limits. As teachers we often use a time limit as a "motivator" that we hope will keep group work focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work. Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a need to "keep one eye on the clock," the group's focus can be fully given to the task. Do not appoint a group "leader." In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group's thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction. Keep it small. Groups with the minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more efficient and effective. Consider weaving together individual and group work. For additive tasks-tasks in whicha group is expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another-research suggests that better results develop
Adrienne Michetti

Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views

    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is, I think, why I'm more keen on today's social networks than I am on games -- games do not provide deep emotional support.
  • "bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Putnam - need to check this article. Interesting; not sure I agree.
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  • According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
  • The evidence to date is mixed
  • A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      SO True
  • It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
  • combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
  • By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
  • loosely structured by open-ended narratives
  • They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
  • from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
  • the conclusions of both studies were remarkably aligned.
  • the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Love this quote.
  • demonstrate the "effects" of game play vs. no game play.
  • first project was a traditional effects study
  • second project, a qualitative study of cognition and learning in MMOs (
  • ethnography
  • sociocultural perspective
  • as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
  • a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      but I wonder why he chose these games -- this is not specified. Only their success in US and abroad?
  • brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
  • the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals.
  • In what ways might MMOs function as new third places for informal sociability?
  • virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
  • in this section we analyze the structural form of MMOs that warrants this "third place" assertion.
  • eight defining characteristics of third places
  • there is no default obligation
  • To oblige any one person to play requires that explicit agreements be entered into by parties
  • the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
  • Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      and this is why, in my opinion, you will never see games in school. The game cannot be the Third Place because school is a Second Place.
  • Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
  • the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
  • an individual's rank and status in the home, workplace, or society are of no importance
  • appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
  • conversation plays an analogous role
  • "In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
  • third places must also be easy to access
  • such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
  • accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
  • barriers to initial access.
  • "What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
  • "It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
  • affective sense
  • As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
  • engendering a sense of reliable mentorship and community stability.
  • Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
  • In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
  • Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
  • Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
  • The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
  • the home-like quality of third places in rooting people
  • Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
  • create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
  • Are virtual communities really communities, or is physical proximity necessary?
  • Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
  • Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
  • operates cyclically within social networks because of their associated norms of reciprocity
  • bridging social capital is inclusive.
  • This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
  • On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
  • bonding social capital is exclusive.
  • social superglue.
  • it can also result in insularity.
  • shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
  • Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
  • One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
  • While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
  • Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
  • It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
  • It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
  • In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
  • However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
  • Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
  • Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
  • Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
  • is to what extent such environments shift the existing balance between bridging and bonding
  • In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
  • Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
  • it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
Laura Doto

Final Report: Friendship | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • Social relations—not simply physical space—structure the social worlds of youth.
    • Laura Doto
       
      A critical conclusion to be realized that can inform our assumptions as educators.
  • When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers
  • these dynamics reinforce existing friendship patterns as well as constitute new kinds of social arrangements.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • Homophily describes the likelihood that people connect to others who share their interests and identity.
  • One survey of Israeli teens suggests that those who develop friendships online tend toward less homogenous connections than teens who do not build such connections
  • Teens frequently use social media as additional channels of communication to get to know classmates and turn acquaintances into friendships.
  • Some teens—especially marginalized and ostracized ones—often relish the opportunity to find connections beyond their schools. Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, such as those described in the Creative Production and Gaming chapters, often build relationships with others online through shared practice.
  • there are plenty of teens who relish the opportunity to make new connections through social media, this practice is heavily stigmatized
  • the public myths about online “predators” do not reflect the actual realities of sexual solicitation and risky online behavior (Wolak et al. 2008). Not only do unfounded fears limit teenagers unnecessarily, they also obscure preventable problematic behavior
  • As she described her typical session on Photobucket, it became clear that a shared understanding of friendship and romance was being constructed by her and other Photobucket users:
  • The fact that they draw from all of these sources suggests that youth’s friendship maintenance is in tune with a discourse of love and friendship that is being widely displayed and (re)circulated.
  • “It’s like have you noticed that you may have someone in your Top 8 but you’re not in theirs and you kinda think to yourself that you’re not as important to that person as they are to you . . . and oh, to be in the coveted number-one spot!”
  • Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive-aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.
  • Top Friends are persistent, publicly displayed, and easily alterable. This makes it difficult for teens to avoid the issue or make excuses such as “I forgot.” When pressured to include someone, teens often oblige or attempt to ward off this interaction by listing those who list them
  • Other teens avoid this struggle by listing only bands or family members. While teens may get jealous if other peers are listed, family members are exempt from the comparative urge.
  • to avoid social drama with her friends:
  • The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works.
  • teens have developed a variety of social norms to govern what is and is not appropriate
  • The problem with explicit ranking, however, is that it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations. The give-and-take over these forms of social ranking is an example of how social norms are being negotiated in tandem with the adoption of new technologies, and how peers give ongoing feedback to one another as part of these struggles to develop new cultural standards.
  • While teen dramas are only one component of friendship, they are often made extremely visible by social media. The persistent and networked qualities of social media alter the ways that these dramas play out in teen life. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the role that social media play in the negotiation of teen status.
  • primarily a continuation of broader dramas.
  • social media amplify dramas because they extend social worlds beyond the school.
  • Gossip and rumors have played a role in teen struggles for status and attention since well before social media entered the scene
  • social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. Because of this, there is greater potential for gossip to spread much further and at a faster pace, making social media a culprit in teen drama. While teen gossip predates the Internet, some teens blame the technologies for their roles in making gossip easier and more viral
  • That’s what happened with me and my friends. We got into a lot of drama with it and I was like, anyone can write anything. It can be fact, fiction. Most people, what they read they believe. Even if it’s not true (C.J. Pascoe, Living Digital).
  • finds the News Feed useful “because it helps you to see who’s keeping track of who and who’s talking to who.” She enjoys knowing when two people break up so that she knows why someone is upset or when she should reach out to offer support. Knowing this information also prevents awkward conversations that might reference the new ex. While she loves the ability to keep up with the lives of her peers, she also realizes that this means that “everybody knows your business.”
  • Some teens find the News Feed annoying or irrelevant. Gadil, an Indian 16-year-old from Los Angeles, thinks that it is impersonal while others think it is downright creepy. For Tara, a Vietnamese 16-year-old from Michigan, the News Feed takes what was public and makes it more public: “Facebook’s already public. I think it makes it way too like stalker-ish.” Her 18-year-old sister, Lila, concurs and points out that it gets “rumors going faster.” Kat, a white 14-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, uses Facebook’s privacy settings to hide stories from the News Feed for the sake of appearances.
  • While gossip is fairly universal among teens, the rumors that are spread can be quite hurtful. Some of this escalates to the level of bullying. We are unable to assess whether or not bullying is on the rise because of social media. Other scholars have found that most teens do not experience Internet-driven harassment (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Those who do may not fit the traditional profile of those who experience school-based bullying (Ybarra, Diener-West, and Leaf 2007), but harassment, both mediated and unmediated, is linked to a myriad of psychosocial issues that includes substance use and school problems (Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Ybarra et al. 2007).
  • Measuring “cyberbullying” or Internet harassment is difficult, in part because both scholars and teens struggle to define it. The teens we interviewed spoke regularly of “drama” or “gossip” or “rumors,” but few used the language of “bullying” or “harassment” unless we introduced these terms. When Sasha, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, was asked specifically about whether or not rumors were bullying, she said: I don’t know, people at school, they don’t realize when they are bullying a lot of the time nowadays because it’s not so much physical anymore. It’s more like you think you’re joking around with someone in school but it’s really hurting them. Like you think it’s a funny inside joke between you two, but it’s really hurtful to them, and you can’t realize it anymore. Sasha, like many of the teens we interviewed, saw rumors as hurtful, but she was not sure if they were bullying. Some teens saw bullying as being about physical harm; others saw it as premeditated, intentionally malicious, and sustained in nature. While all acknowledged that it could take place online, the teens we interviewed thought that most bullying took place offline, even if they talked about how drama was happening online.
  • it did not matter whether it was online or offline; the result was still the same. In handling this, she did not get offline, but she did switch schools and friend groups.
  • Technology provides more channels through which youth can potentially bully one another. That said, most teens we interviewed who discussed being bullied did not focus on the use of technology and did not believe that technology is a significant factor in bullying.
  • They did, though, see rumors, drama, and gossip as pervasive. The distinction may be more connected with language and conception than with practice. Bianca, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, sees drama as being fueled by her peers’ desire to get attention and have something to talk about. She thinks the reason that people create drama is boredom. While drama can be hurtful, many teens see it simply as a part of everyday social life.
  • Although some drama may start out of boredom or entertainment, it is situated in a context where negotiating social relations and school hierarchies is part of everyday life. Teens are dealing daily with sociability and related tensions.
  • Tara thinks that it emerges because some teens do not know how to best negotiate their feelings and the feelings of others.
  • Teens can use the ability to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship.
  • So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships. This spirit of reciprocity is common across a wide range of peer-based learning environments we have observed.
  • From this perspective, commenting is not as much about being nice as it is about relying on reciprocity for self-gain
  • That makes them feel like they’re popular, that they’re getting comments all the time by different people, even people that they don’t know. So it makes them feel popular in a way (Rural and Urban Youth).
  • Gossip, drama, bullying, and posing are unavoidable side effects of teens’ everyday negotiations over friendship and peer status. What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. The scale of this varies, but those who experience mediated harassment are certainly scarred by the process. Further, the ethic of reciprocity embedded in networked publics supports the development of friendships and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks. While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.
  • While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections. Teens leverage social media for a variety of practices that are familiar elements of teen life: gossiping, flirting, joking around, and hanging out. Although the underlying practices are quite familiar, the networked, public nature of online communication does inflect these practices in new ways.
  • Adults’ efforts to regulate youth access to MySpace are the latest example of how adults are working to hold on to authority over teen socialization in the face of a gradual erosion of parental influence during the teen years.
  • learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.
  • articulating those friendships online means that they become subject to public scrutiny in new ways;
  • This makes lessons about social life (both the failures and successes) more consequential and persistent
  • make these dynamics visible in a more persistent and accessible public arena.
  • co-constructing new sets of social norms together with their peers and the efforts of technology developers. The dynamics of social reciprocity and negotiations over popularity and status are all being supported by participation in publics of the networked variety as formative influences in teen life. While we see no indication that social media are changing the fundamental nature of these friendship practices, we do see differences in the intensity of engagement among peers, and conversely, in the relative alienation of parents and teachers from these social worlds.
  •  
    MacArthur Foundation Study - Friendship chapter
Josh Flores

TODAYMoms - Should parents be blamed when kids fail at school? - 106 views

    • Josh Flores
       
      Who the heck would click "NO"???
    • Josh Flores
       
      Parents should be held accountable, teachers should be held accountable AND students should be held accountable.
    • Josh Flores
       
      from Lynn Jones (to me?) "How many children do you have? I am an educator and I have 6 children who are all different. My second child, a son, was never told to study, never had a spelling word called out to him, and strieved to make all A's and B's since the 2nd grade. His older brother with an IQ of 128 in the 5th grade didn't care about grades and passing. His younger brother almost graduated high school before him even though they were 3 years apart in age. The oldest son has ADHD. His grandmother was a math teacher and I am a math teacher, but yet that was the subject he failed almost each year and had to go to summer school. He had the same parents and the same environment as his younger brother, but he was lacking the drive that is born in you. I won't go into the differences of the other 4 just to say that the good Lord gifted me with 3 ADHD children when not much was known about it (the oldest is 44). Every child is different and parents must learn not to judge one by the others, just like teachers must not assume that about siblings they teach. A parent can be their to help and try to point them in the right direction with the right work ethics in school, but the bottom line is how much the child cares and wants to achieve. The envolved parent can help the child that sits on the fence and can go on either side, but the ultimate choice is going to be the child's. It is the same with church. You can take the child to church every Sunday, but when they get older it is their decision how to direct their life. I am not saying that a parent shouldn't try every day to give the guidance their children need and deserve, but you can't beat yourself up when things don't go the way you think they should. All a parent can do is standby their child and give them all the love they can and to know that sometimes that is not enough for the child."
    • Josh Flores
       
      My Reply to Lynn Jones: 1. Parents should be held accountable along with teachers and the students themselves. 2. Six kids????? You are a saint! I plan on having two at the most and pray to the gods they're not girls! 3. Is there a specific reason you sent me your family history?
    • Josh Flores
       
      From Lynn: "I sent you the history to show that no two children are alike and not to judge one child by the behavior of another. In education we teach all types and there is no one way to approach all children. Sometimes it is not the parent that can make a difference, but someone else and not always a teacher."
    • Josh Flores
       
      I don't think the article is about differentiation but sure, I'm confident it's in the back of any high quality educator's mind. Regardless, we can always do more than standby our kids. 
  •  
    How many children do you have? I am an educator and I have 6 children who are all different. My second child, a son, was never told to study, never had a spelling word called out to him, and strieved to make all A's and B's since the 2nd grade. His older brother with an IQ of 128 in the 5th grade didn't care about grades and passing. His younger brother almost graduated high school before him even though they were 3 years apart in age. The oldest son has ADHD. His grandmother was a math teacher and I am a math teacher, but yet that was the subject he failed almost each year and had to go to summer school. He had the same parents and the same environment as his younger brother, but he was lacking the drive that is born in you. I won't go into the differences of the other 4 just to say that the good Lord gifted me with 3 ADHD children when not much was known about it (the oldest is 44). Every child is different and parents must learn not to judge one by the others, just like teachers must not assume that about siblings they teach. A parent can be their to help and try to point them in the right direction with the right work ethics in school, but the bottom line is how much the child cares and wants to achieve. The envolved parent can help the child that sits on the fence and can go on either side, but the ultimate choice is going to be the child's. It is the same with church. You can take the child to church every Sunday, but when they get older it is their decision how to direct their life. I am not saying that a parent shouldn't try every day to give the guidance their children need and deserve, but you can't beat yourself up when things don't go the way you think they should. All a parent can do is standby their child and give them all the love they can and to know that sometimes that is not enough for the child.
  •  
    I sent you the history to show that no two children are alike and not to judge one child by the behavior of another. In education we teach all types and there is no one way to approach all children. Sometimes it is not the parent that can make a difference, but someone else and not always a teacher.
Peter Beens

Education Week Teacher: Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents - 1 views

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    Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent
Gareth Jones

Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views

  • We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
  • The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
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  • That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
  • but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
  • We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction. For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
  • There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
  • If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
  • Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
  • Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
  • I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
  • That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
Steven Szalaj

Raise the bar with national exam for teachers - chicagotribune.com - 53 views

  •  
    Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...
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  •  
    About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
  •  
    Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
  •  
    Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
  •  
    You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • “Creativity can be taught,”
  • it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
    • Bill Genereux
       
      This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
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  • When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
  • The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
  • When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
    • Ed Webb
       
      Surely, "more quickly"?
  • Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
  • What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
  • kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
  • project-based learning
  • highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
  • When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
  • solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
  • The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
  • When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
  • The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
  • The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
  • The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
  • “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
  • In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
  • fact-finding
  • problem-finding
  • Next, idea-finding
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  •  
    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
Martin Burrett

Book: Hairdresser or Footballer by @year6missNW with @RossMcGill via @JohnCattEd - 1 views

  •  
    "We often tend to think about gender as the biological differences between women and men - however, this is incorrect. Gender is what actually gets expressed - how we look, how we act and how we feel. While sex is determined by what is dictated by our biology or what is written into the chromosomes, known as genotype, it is the interaction between the genes and the environment that determines gender. The amazing thing about gender is that it is completely created by society. It is a social construct that has been accepted by many, and from the moment a child is born, they are faced with gender stereotypes from clothing to how boys and girls are treated and expectations of behaviour. The question is, how do we as educators eliminate gender stereotypes?"
tthomasuscu

Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views

    • tthomasuscu
       
      Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
  • What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
    • tthomasuscu
       
      Should this be changed to prevent criminals from buying guns from private sellers? How is something this dangerous allowed to take place?
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
  • I felt uneasy
  • He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
  • There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
  • We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
  • Rarely do we mention what we carry
  • I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
  • Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
  • or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
  • had a gun put to my head
  • I can remember that
  • steel
  • I can remember
  • In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
  • surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
  • I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
  • I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
  • his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
  • I stood there trembling while they apologized.
  • Jackson County
  • I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
  • hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
  • Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
  • A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
  • centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
  • the .308 blew apart the morning.
  • There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
  • Life is sustained by death
  • the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
  • would feed me for a year
  • I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
  • He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
  • As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
  • situation was re
  • All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
  • versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
  • It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
  • Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs
    • tthomasuscu
       
      This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
  • There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
  • firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
  • I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
  • they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
  • as they wait for the end of the world.
  • they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
  • step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
  • None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
    • tthomasuscu
       
      Where is the fault in this logic? It just doesn't add up.
  • They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
  • I understand what’s at stake
  • I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
  • changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
  • an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
  • a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
  • He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
  • I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
  • question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
  • Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
  • As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
  • there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
  • ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
  • The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
  • The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
  • I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
  • Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
  • I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
  • I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
  • I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
  • we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
    • tthomasuscu
       
      How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?
meghankelly492

Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views

  • n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
  • "Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
  • The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
  • Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
  • Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
  • raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
  • It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
  • n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
  • I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
  • This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
  • Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
  • I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
  • When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
  • Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
  • ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
  • as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
  • In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
  • n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
  • Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
  • Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
  • I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
  • Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
  • Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
  • In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
  • If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
  • After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
  • n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
  • In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
  • Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
  • After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
  • Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
  • Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
  • Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
  • Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
  • n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
  • While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
  • By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
  • which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
  • . On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
  • Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
  • Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
Robert Parker

Andragogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 36 views

  • Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term ‘andragogy’ has been used in different times and countries with various connotations
  • Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept). Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives (Readiness). Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation). Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators (Motivation). The term has been used by some to allow discussion of contrast between self-directed and 'taught' education
    • GoldenLuca Oake
       
      Andragogy - man-leading as in leading man Pedagogy - child-leading as in leading children
    • Robert Parker
       
      I like this term, it reflects much of waht happens in higher education as the springboard for life-long learning
  •  
    Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    Really not seeing the difference in how children and adults learn here. I have heard the term first about 20 or more years ago. From this definition the principals behind it are no different from those behind what a good learning environment is for all ages. What changes is the content not that the student, regardless of age, leads in their own learning facilitated by a trained practitioner.
  •  
    "Andragogy" is another sexist term, using "andro" = male to stand for all humanity. Why wouldn't it by called "Gynogogy"? Can't we use a different term? Bring the concept up-do-date from 1833?
  •  
    Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be
  •  
    Andragogy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience. The term 'andragogy' has been used in different times and countries with various connotations. Nowadays there exist mainly three understandings: 1. In many countries there is a growing conception of 'andragogy' as the scholarly approach to the learning of adults. In this connotation andragogy is the science of understanding (= theory) and supporting (= practice) lifelong and lifewide education of adults. 2. Especially in the USA, 'andragogy' in the tradition of Malcolm Knowles, labels a specific theoretical and practical approach, based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners and teachers as facilitators of learning. 3. Widely, an unclear use of andragogy can be found, with its meaning changing (even in the same publication) from 'adult education practice' or 'desirable values' or 'specific teaching methods,' to 'reflections' or 'academic discipline' and/or 'opposite to childish pedagogy', claiming to be 'something better' than just 'Adult Education'. The oldest document using the term "Andragogik": Kapp, Alexander (1833): Platon's Erziehungslehre, als Pädagogik für die Einzelnen und als Staatspädagogik. Leipzig. Originally used by Alexander Kapp (a German educator) in 1833, andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading"). Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:[1][2] Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Need to Know) Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities (Foundation). Adults need to be
anonymous

What are the Disadvantages of Online Schooling for Higher Education? - 18 views

  •  
    "hat Are the Disadvantages of Online Schooling for Higher Education? Today, online schooling for higher education is prevalent across many fields. While there are several benefits to online schooling, such as flexibility and convenience, there are also real and perceived disadvantages. Explore some of the potential drawbacks of online learning. View 10 Popular Schools » Online Schooling In 2012, about a quarter of undergraduate college students were enrolled in distance education courses as part -- if not all -- of their studies, according to a 2014 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. That same data found that 29.8% of graduate students in this country are enrolled in some or all distance learning classes as well. A 2013 report from Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC, pointed out that approximately 86.5% of higher education institutions offer distance learning classes. Clearly, online schooling is commonplace. Disadvantages: Student Perspective Despite advantages, online schooling is not the right fit for every student. Taking online courses is generally believed to require more self-discipline than completing a degree on campus, a belief that is supported by SCHEV -- the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Because online schooling options often allow students to complete much of the coursework at their own pace, students must be motivated to stay on schedule and manage their time accordingly. Other potential disadvantages from a student's viewpoint may include the following: Less Instructional Support Although instructors are available to students via e-mail, telephone, Web discussion boards and other online means, some students may see the lack of face-to-face interaction and one-on-one instruction as a challenge. A lack of communication or miscommunication between instructors and students may frustrate students who are struggling with course materials. That could be exacerbated by the casual nature
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