Students must still learn to communicate complex ideas. They must be able to create entire thoughts that run together in recognizable patterns in order to function in school and at work. Most importantly, they must be able to master this skill to participate as informed citizens in our shared civil discourse. Students who are flooded by facts think that the best way to answer a question is to search for more facts instead of organizing and marshalling the information they already have to develop a strong case. As long as the Internet is readily available, a search is faster and easier than a thoughtful and challenging discussion.
mLearning at Franklin & Marshall - 10 views
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Don't Poke the Bear: Scrimmaging with Anonymous - 28 views
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Learning to Slow Down - 116 views
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When my students learn to be nuanced, when they learn to listen carefully and find agreement, those are human tasks. When they learn to disagree carefully and logically, those are human tasks. These interactions that take place at the speed of conversation are essential building blocks for survival in the 21st or any other century.
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Langwitches Blog » 21st Century PD- Practice What you Preach - 74 views
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Nancy: You need a phased attack. Phase one involves marshaling the technologies you do have handy to create communication with parents. Use Twitter for homework updates, essential questions about reading assignments, a "writer's tip of the day" etc. This is what I call a "tier 1" communication. This technology gives few details, but provides parents talking points during dinner conversation with their kids. Then use your website to add the major details, evaluation rubrics, blogging, etc. What I like to provide are "desktop" videos that capture you using or modeling Web 2.0 technologies, and their potential in the classroom. Post these on your website and say something like, "Blocked here at [your school] but you can perhaps use these tools at home..." When parents start to see the same text appear over and over as a caption or comment in your video, they just might get angry enough to go to the superintendent, or the IT "integration specialist" and say, "Enough! Give this teacher the tools she needs!" We're fighting this battle everywhere. Educators are being treated like children who don't have a clue. Keep fighting the good fight and good luck!
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From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 1 views
www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able
iceresearch wesch web2.0 education knowledge technology
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Marshall McLuhan called it “the rear-view mirror effect,” noting that “We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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We have had our why's, how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether
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I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world.
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students quickly realize the importance of their role as co-creators of the learning environment and they begin to take responsibility for their own education.
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Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education.
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Reporting & Analysis of Mobile Learning: Is It Worth It? by Skip Marshall : Learning So... - 1 views
www.learningsolutionsmag.com/...780
social media social networking phd mobile learning analysis learning flexiblelearning fbl mlearning
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle - Scott Edinger - Harvard... - 99 views
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger | 9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78) In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most
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From Internet to Gutenberg 1996 - 30 views
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During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or other kinds of electronic device
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These same teen-agers, if by chance they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed. In this sense one can say that the computer made us to return to a Gutenberg Galaxy.
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Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of literacy must take into account the possibilities of all of these media. Educational preoccupation must be extended to the whole of media.
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who will receive pre-fabricated images and therefore prefabricated definitions of the world, without any power to critically choose the kind of information they receive, and those who know how to deal with the computer, who will be able to select and to elaborate information.
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This will re-establish the cultural division which existed at the time of Claude Frollo, between those who were able to read manuscripts, and therefore to critically deal with religious, scientifical or philosophical matters, and those who were only educated by the images of the cathedral, selected and produced by their masters, the literate few.
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With a hypertext, instead, I can navigate through the whole encyclopedia. I can connect an event registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated all along the text, I can compare the beginning with the end, I can ask for the list of all the words beginning by A, I can ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant, I can compare the dates of their birth and death - in short, I can do my job in few seconds or few minutes.
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Even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both.
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The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views
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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.
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it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
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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.
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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.’ ”
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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.
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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.
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those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
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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.
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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
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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.
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The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
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“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.”
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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.
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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.