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Sean McHugh

Interview with Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen - Learning Stuff - 0 views

  • The consistent thing I’ve learned is that it’s very hard to make things simple. No matter how much you try, the first time you put it in front of someone, it’s too complex. You’re like, “Oh my God, how could they get this wrong?” But that’s your fault. It wasn’t simple enough. I came away from Google trying to build very simple experiences that lots of people can use.
  • The real enthusiasm at Google is around technology: “Let’s build a cool, new technology. We’ll find a lot of ways to apply it. Our technology will be better than our competitors.” The Facebook approach was, “Well, technology is a tool to achieve these things we’re trying to do. Let’s figure out how to make it work. Sometimes that means building our own technology and other times that means using something that someone else has built.”
  • But the people who kept using it over and over were all in schools. It wasn’t teachers using it to explain things, it was kids using it to document their thinking. They would take a picture of their art, and they would explain what they were thinking when they made it. Some kids would use it as a lightweight presentation tool. They would string together some photos of a science lab and make a lab report.
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  • Most of the tools we’ve used to document and communicate ideas haven’t changed much since the introduction of Microsoft Office. We have documents, spreadsheets, and slides. Those are sort of the universal formats for communicating information. That seemed kind of dumb given that those were invented in a world of keyboards, mice, and DOS prompts.We now had these things that had cameras and microphones and touch interfaces and decided that there should be some new way of communicating ideas.
  • We also heard from teachers about the practical problems
  • it was clear that touch devices unlocked something for computing
  • On the parents’ side, I was incredibly frustrated watching all the work that all my kids’ teachers were doing to communicate what was happening at school. There were weekly newsletters that were long and involved; photo albums with 300 pictures, only three of which were my child. All of this was behind a password I could never remember. Teachers were doing all this work that was taking away from actual teaching or their personal lives. The experience felt pretty broken to me.It also seemed that kids might be able to document their own learning and reflect on what they were making more independently.As a parent, I’d ask my kids, “What did you do at school today?” and they say, “Nothing,” and I had no idea what next question to ask because I just didn’t have a thread to pull on.
  • the magic of Seesaw is all about changing the conversation from “What did you do in school today?” to “Tell me about more about this thing you made.” It’s a starting point for a conversation
  • Seesaw is a learning journal. It’s a place where kids can document their learning over time
  • The child now has an audience for his work beyond the teacher. We hear time and time again from teachers that their kids want to do their best work with Seesaw because their parents are going to ask them about it when they come home. They also know their classmates are going to watch it.
  • I had to learn what issues teachers are struggling with, and then work through those problems
  • This became obvious around log-in. We knew this was a real hassle in classrooms, and we thought we could solve it using a simple text code. But a tech coordinator at one school suggested using a QR code instead. “What would really make this easy is if kids could just scan a QR code to log in.” Carl and I both thought this was weird — no one uses QR codes. They’re a technology from 10 years ago that no one adopted. But we decided to build it to see if it got used.It turned out to be one of Seesaw’s most important features, especially in the younger grades.
  • we really invested in those relationships. I would call them on the phone every week. We listened, we showed them stuff ahead of time. They would give us an idea, and we would actually build what they asked for. We developed a close connection with those teachers and they started talking to other teachers in their building and other schools and so on.Honestly, we took this word-of-mouth and advocacy approach because we were a little nervous to tell teachers how to use our product. We felt like we didn’t really understand the classroom enough to tell them what to do. So we went down this path of finding some teachers who are excited about using Seesaw and helped them tell other teachers about it. Our hope is that most teachers discover Seesaw from another teacher, not from us.
  • Get it in the hands of teachers, and if it’s good, it will probably spread. Teachers are asked to use a lot of crappy software. When they find something good, they tend to recognize it
  • I just wanted to tell you how life changing this app has been for me and my teaching, and for my students
  • but we get an email like that two or three times a week
  • I have had millions of people who are slightly more organized because I worked on Google Calendar. Good, but that’s not really what I want that on my tombstone
  • Parents don’t know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms. It’s not because someone wants to keep it secret, but the information is not easily shared
  • I cannot imagine a future where I will be okay sending my kids to school for eight hours a day and having no clue what they’re working on. This is the most important person in my life. I get immediate updates about everything else, and yet somehow I accept that I have no information on what my kids are doing for eight hours a day. It’s not possible that’s the future.
  • On the parents’ side, I was incredibly frustrated watching all the work that all my kids’ teachers were doing to communicate what was happening at school. There were weekly newsletters that were long and involved; photo albums with 300 pictures, only three of which were my child. All of this was behind a password I could never remember. Teachers were doing all this work that was taking away from actual teaching or their personal lives. The experience felt pretty broken to me.It also seemed that kids might be able to document their own learning and reflect on what they were making more independently.As a parent, I’d ask my kids, “What did you do at school today?” and they say, “Nothing,” and I had no idea what next question to ask because I just didn’t have a thread to pull on. When you ask a kid to describe something abstractly, particularly younger kids, it’s quite difficult for them to do it. If you show them a picture of something and say, “What’s going on in this picture,” they’ll say, “Oh, let me tell you all about this,” it totally gives them a thing to start with.
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    I cannot imagine a future where I will be okay sending my kids to school for eight hours a day and having no clue what they're working on. This is the most important person in my life. I get immediate updates about everything else, and yet somehow I accept that I have no information on what my kids are doing for eight hours a day. It's not possible that's the future.
Sean McHugh

Is it time to swap your Mac for a Windows laptop? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • It’s one thing to have to relearn behaviours when you switch machines, it’s another to have to re-learn them every time you plug in a peripheral.
  • the necessity, or not, of drivers for accessories was a big part of that competitive push by Apple, which made a point of ensuring out-of-the-box support for many of the most commonly used peripherals like printers, cameras and mice. When Steve Jobs said “it just works”, this is the sort of thing he was referring to: the ability to plug in a mouse and have it Just Work. Installing drivers for a mouse to enable a niche behaviour is no great hardship, but it still left me moderately concerned. Microsoft made both the mouse and the laptop, yet the two weren’t able to play nicely together without my intervention. This digging in the nuts and bolts of the machine was not something I had missed.
  • It’s a fantastic machine. Small and powerful, with a long battery life, it impresses as a laptop, but its real strengths are revealed when you undock the screen from its base. Being able to carry my laptop around the kitchen when doing the weekly shop, before docking it back and typing up some recipes, was genuinely cool.
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  • Unfortunately, cool is all it was for me. The ability to pop out my laptop and write on it with a (very accurate) stylus was never that useful. If anything, it served to underscore how efficient the keyboard-and-touchpad combo is for a lot of hefty tasks.
  • I simply didn’t do it much, and most of the time when I did, it was just to see if I could.
  • Two-fingered swipe on the touchpad? The answer, of course, is to reach up to the screen, and swipe that way. A shortcut it is not, particularly if the screen is up on a dock and you’re already using a keyboard and mouse.
  • I was shocked by the amount of advertising and cross-promotion riddled throughout the OS, from adverts for apps in the start menu, to a persistent pop-up offering a free trial of Office 365. I was surprised by the paucity of solid third-party apps in general, and particularly by the lack of any good consumer productivity suite.
  • Most of all, though, I couldn’t stand the small irritations, from the failure of Chrome windows to correctly adapt when dragged from a high-res screen to a low-res one, to the trackpad’s inability to accurately click when I used it with my thumb rather than my finger.
  • Ultimately, the question comes down to how much you’re prepared to pay to keep things the same as they have been
Sean McHugh

The Touch-Screen Generation - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • he hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence
  • In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then.
  • To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?
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  • Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens.
  • A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active.
  • even very young children can be discriminating viewers—that they are not in fact brain-dead, but rather work hard to make sense of what they see and turn it into a coherent narrative that reflects what they already know of the world.
  • Children’s lives are filled with media at younger and younger ages, and we need to take advantage of what these technologies have to offer
  • More important, she made the video demonstration explicitly interactive.
  • That exchange was enough to nearly erase the video deficit.
  • That kind of contingent interaction (I do something, you respond) is what captivates a toddler and can be a significant source of learning for even very young children—learning that researchers hope the children can carry into the real world. It’s not exactly the ideal social partner the American Academy of Pediatrics craves. It’s certainly not a parent or caregiver. But it’s as good an approximation as we’ve ever come up with on a screen, and it’s why children’s-media researchers are so excited about the iPad’s potential.
  • something about tapping the screen, about getting feedback and being corrected in real time, is itself instructive, and enables the toddlers to absorb information accurately, regardless of its source
  • A TV is static and lacks one of the most important things to toddlers, which is a “two-way exchange of information
  • The statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics assumes a zero-sum game: an hour spent watching TV is an hour not spent with a parent. But parents know this is not how life works. There are enough hours in a day to go to school, play a game, and spend time with a parent, and generally these are different hours. Some people can get so drawn into screens that they want to do nothing else but play games. Experts say excessive video gaming is a real problem, but they debate whether it can be called an addiction and, if so, whether the term can be used for anything but a small portion of the population.
  • We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”
  • a useful framework—what she calls the three C’s—for thinking about media consumption: content, context, and your child. She poses a series of questions—Do you think the content is appropriate? Is screen time a “relatively small part of your child’s interaction with you and the real world?”—and suggests tailoring your rules to the answers, child by child.
Sean McHugh

Please don't learn to code | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.
  • Selling coding as a ticket to economic salvation for the masses is dishonest
  • engineering and programming are important skills. But only in the right context, and only for the type of person willing to put in the necessary blood, sweat and tears to succeed. The same could be said of many other skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn to program than I would urge everyone to learn to plumb.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Nice analogy, who uses plumbing? EVERYONE. Who knows how it works and how to fix it or fit it? Not many, and the small group of skilled individuals who do, are called Plumbers.
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  • An excessive focus on coding ignores the current plight of existing developers.Technology changes at a rapid pace in this industry.
  • The line between learning to code and getting paid to program as a profession is not an easy line to cross.Really.
  • If becoming an engineer is what you want, don’t let me — or anyone, for that matter — get in the way of your goal. And don’t let traditional confinements like the educational system slow you down
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    ... engineering and programming are important skills. But only in the right context, and only for the type of person willing to put in the necessary blood, sweat and tears to succeed. The same could be said of many other skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn to program than I would urge everyone to learn to plumb.
Sean McHugh

Parenting for a Digital Future - Media literacy - everyone's favourite solution to t... - 0 views

  • Media Literacy … provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet.
  • The more that the media mediate everything in society – work, education, information, civic participation, social relationships and more – the more vital it is that people are informed about and critically able to judge what’s useful or misleading, how they are regulated, when media can be trusted, and what commercial or political interests are at stake. In short, media literacy is needed not only to engage with the media but to engage with society through the media.
  • any media literacy strategy requires sustained attention, resources and commitment
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  • let’s get media literacy firmly embedded in the school curriculum
  • it might be wise to calculate the cost also – to individuals, to society – of not promoting media literacy, of having a population with insufficient critical knowledge to manage its digital safety, security, privacy, civic and health information needs or consumer rights.
  • it is commonly said that media literacy is, at heart, critical thinking (demand evidence, question sources, analyse claims, consider what’s at stake for whom, etc.) and, therefore, should be taught right across the curriculum from history to science or English
  • In order to enable citizens to access information, to exercise informed choices, evaluate media contexts, use, critically assess and create media content responsibly, they need advanced media literacy skills.
  • Media literacy should not be limited to learning about tools and technologies, but should aim to equip individuals with the critical thinking skills required to exercise judgement, analyse complex realities, recognise the difference between opinions and facts, and resist all forms of hate speech
  • Work to get media literacy firmly embedded as compulsory in the school curriculum.
  • Media education is a long term solution – it takes thought-through pedagogical strategies and years of teaching, not a one-shot campaign
Sean McHugh

The Art of Staying Focused in a Distracting World - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • continuous partial attention to describe the modern predicament of being constantly attuned to everything without fully concentrating on anythin
  • Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad. We need different attention strategies in different contexts
  • The important thing for us as humans is to have the capacity to tap the attention strategy that will best serve us in any given momen
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  • We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that’s what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can’t put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That’s where it’s all at, that’s where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like “My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me” and “I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself.”
  • What we’re doing now is modeling a primary relationship with screens, and a lack of eye contact with people. It ultimately can feed the development of a kind of sociopathy and psychopathy.
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    We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that's what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can't put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That's where it's all at, that's where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like "My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me" and "I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself."
Sean McHugh

My First Year of One to One: A Reflection - 0 views

  • One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share.
  • One of the things I have come to value most highly is choice.  I have offered my students as much choice in how they learn and in how they demonstrate their learning as I can. The iPads have given my students so many more opportunities for choice.
  • the iPads have given us a rich variety of options that were just not available before
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  • My children were not using their iPads in every spare moment—they still liked other classroom tools such as Lego, dominos and drawing paper—but the iPads were a popular choice
  • I didn’t get around to figuring out how to use it, but my students did. They taught themselves and then taught me as well.
  • Some students preferred digital and some preferred non-digital, but most moved seamlessly back and forth between the two.
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    "One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share."
Sean McHugh

Opinion | Don't Go Down the Rabbit Hole - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.
  • It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information
  • the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.
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  • Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective
  • Internet users need to learn that our attention is a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely
  • four simple principles:1. Stop.2. Investigate the source.3. Find better coverage.4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.Otherwise known as SIFT.
  • The question we want students asking is: Is this a good source for this purpose, or could I find something better relatively quickly
  • We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top
  • The students are confused when I tell them to try and trace something down with a quick Wikipedia search, because they’ve been told not to do it,” she said. “Not for research papers, but if you’re trying to find out if a site is legitimate or if somebody has a history as a conspiracy theorist and you show them how to follow the page’s citation, it’s quick and effective, which means it’s more likely to be used
  • Use Wikipedia for quick guidance! Spend less time torturing yourself with complex primary sources
  • instill a reflex that asks if something is worth one’s time and attention and to turn away if not
Sean McHugh

Let's Ban The Classroom Technology Ban. - 0 views

  • The claim that the students who didn’t use tablets performed better academically is based upon exam scores, which were only one-third of a standard deviation higher for the non-tablet crowd than the others. Some might see this as a large difference; I do not, and I doubt a majority of statisticians would either. But hey–why let the fact that this was a superficial study conducted with a small sample size of atypical students examining only one type of technology deter you from claiming that all technology in the classroom is bad? This is what people in the psych business call “confirmation bias,” I believe.
  • no mention of pedagogy at all
  • They don’t even acknowledge, much less control for, pedagogy.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Although to be fair in terms of the study all students would be experiencing the same learning environment and would be equally "disadvantaged". Given that the actual impact of the technology was negligible this would explain why, the technology wasn't really able to be much of an advantage in that kind of teaching and learning environment.
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  • If students in a large lecture course with no laptop or device policies are doing poorly, is it because they’re on Facebook or because they’re in a cavernous auditorium with several hundred other captives, being talked at by someone who’s likely had no formal pedagogical training whatsoever?
  • unilateral bans on technology in the classroom accomplish nothing but demonstrating an off-putting rigidity and an adversarial view of students.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      "Adversarial" the tone of the entire study clearly spoke to this as the dominant perspective when considering tech use in classrooms.
  • If you’re the grumpy faculty member who kvetches about students not being taught penmanship in primary school, and who makes their classes take notes by hand to build character or whatever, take a step back and think about what you’re actually saying to your students: that some are inherently deficient, that they will fall short, and that your way is the only possible way to learn.
  • But if two-thirds of the class is doing non-class related stuff on a laptop or cell phone, why is that happening? Are they incorrigible internet addicts, or is it a pedagogical issue? If they’re not getting to where you want them to be, is it Twitter’s fault? Or is it the side effect of a lecture-based, passive pedagogy that doesn’t engage anyone?
  • Let’s be real: it’s not as if students paid rapt attention to everything faculty said until the smart phone was invented.
  • Of course, there are situations where you’ll want your students to not use devices. But there will also be occasions where you’ll want to encourage their use (quick polling, checking something online). That’s the whole point–there are no hard and fast rules, nor should there be. Good pedagogy is, above all, flexible. And, rather than an end unto itself, technology is a tool that can support good pedagogy if it’s used appropriately.
  • Rather than banning the tool because of an instance where someone used it improperly, we should work to prevent the processes which led to that instance. Our students need to be our allies, not our adversaries, if genuine learning is to occur. Students cannot experience the transformative effects that higher education can and should inculcate if we refuse to treat them as responsible agents who are the co-architects of their learning.
Sean McHugh

Literature, Ethics, Physics: It's All In Video Games At This Norwegian School | MindShift - 0 views

  • game-based learning seems to be a misnomer, as the learning is not based on games, but enhanced by them. Commercial games are repurposed and modified to support curricular goals, as opposed to driving them. Of course, learning can and should also be based on games, as they are valid texts that can be studied in and of themselves, but it is important to see video games as elastic tools whose potential uses exceed their intended purpose.
  • It’s important that video games are regarded as useful and engaging learning tools in their own right.” To that end, he uses popular commercial games that would not outwardly seem suitable for the classroom.
  • the game gives students a different perspective on the laws of physics, where mechanics are simulated by a computer to create a realistic gaming environment. It can also be a great source of discussion when the laws of physics are broken!” Students think about how the simulation deviates from reality and transform what might be perceived as a game’s shortcoming into a critical thinking opportunity.
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  • Civilization holds a unique value in letting students experiment with “what if” scenarios to see how changing variables like political structures or social policies affect and alter the course of a nation.
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    A Model for Game-Enhanced Learning In each case, game-based learning seems to be a misnomer, as the learning is not based on games, but enhanced by them. Commercial games are repurposed and modified to support curricular goals, as opposed to driving them. Of course, learning can and should also be based on games, as they are valid texts that can be studied in and of themselves, but it is important to see video games as elastic tools whose potential uses exceed their intended purpose.
Sean McHugh

Tony Wagner: All Students Need Digital Portfolios - Pathbrite - 0 views

  • [Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.
  • We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.
  • I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.
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  • teachers have to give students work that demands critical thinking, problem solving, and that they expect a high standard for communication skills and collaboration skills. And the digital portfolio provides students with an opportunity to show mastery. And also—this is very important—to show progress over time.
  • the skills you need to succeed in a competitive academic environment bear absolutely no relationship to the skills you need to succeed in an innovation economy.
  • in fact the real world is evidence-based, not merely data driven. And a digital portfolio can be one of the best forms of evidence of competency and accomplishments.
Sean McHugh

Being a Better Online Reader | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • there’s still no longitudinal data about digital reading. As she put it, “We’re in a place of apprehension rather than comprehension.” And it’s quite possible that the apprehension is misplaced: perhaps digital reading isn’t worse so much as different than print reading
  • they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again.
  • Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention
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  • The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book
  • It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact
  • some data suggest that, in certain environments and on certain types of tasks, we can read equally well in any format
  • We need to be aware of the effects of deeper digital immersion, Wolf says, but we should be equally cautious when we draw causal arrows or place blame without adequate longitudinal research
  • Deep-reading skills, Wolf points out, may not be emphasized in schools that conform to the Common Core, for instance, and need to meet certain test-taking reading targets that emphasize gist at the expense of depth. “Physical, tangible books give children a lot of time,” she says. “And the digital milieu speeds everything up. So we need to do things much more slowly and gradually than we are.” Not only should digital reading be introduced more slowly into the curriculum; it also should be integrated with the more immersive reading skills that deeper comprehension requires.
  • Wolf is optimistic that we can learn to navigate online reading just as deeply as we once did print—if we go about it with the necessary thoughtfulness.
Sean McHugh

Technology in Education | American Federation of Teachers - 0 views

  • pedagogy (i.e., teaching practice) and not the medium (i.e., technological tools and resources, such as whiteboards, hand-held devices, blogs, chat boards) that made a difference in learning, stating that instructional media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition
  • there was no proof to show that a medium was capable of ensuring that pupils and students could learn more or more effectively. He saw the medium as a means, a vehicle for instruction, but that the essence of learning remained—thankfully—in the hands of the teacher
  • it is not the medium that decides how effectively learners learn
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  • the effectiveness of learning is determined primarily by the way the medium is used and by the quality of the instruction accompanying that use
  • The crucial factor for learning improvement is to make sure that you do not replace the teacher as the instrument of instruction, allowing computers to do what teachers would normally do, but instead use computers to supplement and amplify what the teacher does
  • the use of both e-learning and contact education—which is known as blended learning—produces better results than lessons given without technolog
  • the medium does not influence the learning
  • the medium seldom influences teaching, learning, and education, nor is it likely that one single medium will ever be the best one for all situations
    • Sean McHugh
       
      But 'ordinary real life is mediated by computers! I'm still only in classrooms where the myth that this is not true still persists! 
  • students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the newest technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds
  • the main reasons young people use technology. These reasons are mainly social
  • Digital natives! Whenever the question of digital innovation in education is discussed, this is a term that immediately comes to the surface. But it should be avoided. Even the person who coined the term digital natives, Marc Prensky, admitted in his most recent book, Brain Gain, that the term is now obsolete.2
  • Prensky’s coining of this term—and its counterpart for people who are not digitally native—was not based on research into this generation, but rather created by rationalizing phenomena that he had observed
  • The students use a large quantity and variety of technologies for communicating, learning, staying connected with their friends, and engaging with the world around them. But they are using them primarily for “personal empowerment and entertainment
  • university students do not really have a deep knowledge of technology, and what knowledge they do have is often limited to basic Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), emailing, text messaging, Facebook, and surfing the Internet
  • There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus. Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.
  • Note that many of these studies examined the influence of television rather than the influence of interactive technology, such as smartphones and social media
  • when people think that young people today read less, it’s not about reading online content or text messages, it’s about reading book
  • young people are still doing a lot of reading, and these statistics make clear that many of them are reading for pleasure. However, we need to be careful about making too many sweeping assertions, since the reading figures in many countries are falling. Even so, we know that reading continues to be important: both reading by young people themselves and parents reading to their childre
Sean McHugh

Nir Eyal on how to beat tech addiction: 'We need a new skill set' | Technology | The Gu... - 0 views

  • we need to stop using the word “addicted” when it comes to technology – because most of us aren’t addicted at all; we’re just guilty of overuse
  • It’s amazing, he adds, that people don’t see that the alarm around tech is just a repeat of a very old storyline. “In the 1950s, fearmongers were saying the exact same thing about comic books, literally verbatim: it’s reducing kids’ attention spans; it’s causing them to commit suicide; it’s leading to mental health issues.” Distraction, he stresses, is an age-old problem that is far bigger than technology
  • If we want to avoid distraction, we can’t just throw our phones away or go on a digital detox; we need to deal with the psychological reasons we’re looking for distraction in the first place
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  • stop blaming technology for your personal failings and start blaming yourself
  • the fact we’re all carrying smartphones means that “distraction is easier than ever to find”. But he stresses that “This doesn’t mean we’re powerless – it means we need a new skill set
  • There are only three reasons for a distraction,” he adds. “An internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem
  • Eyal calls email the “mother of all habit-forming products”, one of several technologies he refers to in the book as “slot machines”. The uncertainty of what’s in our inbox means we’re constantly checking it, but most email is a complete waste of time.
  • but it takes me for ever to figure out how to label my emails
  • “hack back” my iPhone by adjusting my notification settings, reducing “external triggers” from apps.
  • The route to a healthier relationship with technology isn’t necessarily going cold turkey; it’s learning moderation and good habits.
Sean McHugh

Teens, Technology and Friendships | Pew Research Center - 1 views

  • Social media and online gameplay are the most common digital venues for meeting friends
  • Along with texting, teens are incorporating a number of other devices, communication platforms and online venues into their interactions with friends
    • Sean McHugh
       
      The overlap between socialising within a gaming context and within the context of platforms like Facebook is an interesting one... Teen use of social media has many parallels with MMORPGs, I wonder how the time spent on these platforms compares... I'd bet the girls spend as much, if not more time on social media than the boys do, even combined with their gaming time.
  • Video games play a critical role in the development and maintenance of boys’ friendships
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  • Playing video games is not necessarily a solitary activity; teens frequently play video games with others.
  • video gameplay, particularly over online networks, is an important activity through which boys form and maintain friendships with others:
  • 38% of all teen boys share their gaming handle as one of the first three pieces of information exchanged when they meet someone they would like to be friends with
  • Teens face challenges trying to construct an appropriate and authentic online persona for multiple audiences, including adults and peers. Consequently, many teens feel obligated to project an attractive and popular image through their social media postings.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Again, classic gamification of social media, where the online persona becomes more like a 'role' than the true character of the person, the equivalent of social media becoming a 'massive, multiplayer online, role playing game', but with the critical difference that this is IRL, which is a little scary, Black Mirror crazy...!
  • Some 76% of teens ages 13 to 17 use social media
  • Social media helps teens feel more connected to their friends’ feelings and daily lives, and also offers teens a place to receive support from others during challenging times.
  • But even as social media connects teens to friends’ feelings and experiences, the sharing that occurs on these platforms can have negative consequences. Sharing can veer into oversharing. Teens can learn about events and activities to which they weren’t invited, and the highly curated lives of teens’ social media connections can lead them to make negative comparisons with their own lives
  • 88% of teen social media users believe people share too much information about themselves on social media
  • 78% of teen online gamers say when they play games online it makes them feel more connected to friends they already know
  • Girls are more likely to use text messaging – while boys are more likely to use video games – as conduits for conversations with friends
Sean McHugh

Video Games Are The Perfect Way To Teach Math, Says Stanford Mathematician - Forbes - 0 views

  • the ability for a game to teach multiple skills simultaneously
  • does not build video games to ‘teach mathematics.’ Rather, we build instruments which you can play, and we design them so that when you play them, you cannot fail to learn about mathematics. Moreover, each single game can be used to deliver mathematical challenges of increasing sophistication.
  • I love the instrument analogy because I’m often explaining to my students why the Ancient Greeks saw math and music as part of the same realm–that area of experience that belonged to the god Apollo. Of course, the relationship has to do with intervals. But both math and music are also related to Apollo’s other domains, such as light, prophecy, healing, etc. The connection has been hard to understand from the rigidly measured viewpoint that has dominated Western thinking since Nietzsche inadvertently cemented the Apollonian into strict opposition with the Dionysian in The Birth Of Tragedy.
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  • Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life, and all the other divisions. Then the internet came along. Now work increasingly means desktop computer. Fifteen years into the digital revolution, one machine has reconnected the very things–personal life, social life, work life, and even sexual life–that we’d spent the last hundred years putting into neatly separated categories, cordoned off in their separate spaces with as little overlap as possible.
Sean McHugh

It's Time For a Serious Talk About the Science of Tech "Addiction" - 0 views

  • Anxieties over technology's impact on society are as old as society itself; video games, television, radio, the telegraph, even the written word—they were all, at one time, scapegoats or harbingers of humanity's cognitive, creative, emotional, and cultural dissolution. But the apprehension over smartphones, apps, and seductive algorithms is different. So different, in fact, that our treatment of past technologies fails to be instructive
  • To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance," Turkle wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. "But we are not going to 'get rid' of the Internet. We will not go ‘cold turkey’ or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to the television as the family hearth.
  • it's really hard to do purely observational research into the effects of something like screen time, or social media use," says MIT social scientist Dean Eckles, who studies how interactive technologies impact society's thoughts and behaviors. You can't just divide participants into, say, those with phones and those without.
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  • that 0.36 percent means that 99.64 percent of the group’s depressive symptoms had nothing to do with social media use.
  • In datasets as large as these, it's easy for weak correlational signals to emerge from the noise. And a correlation tells us nothing about whether new-media screen time actually causes sadness or depression
  • research on the link between technology and wellbeing, attention, and addiction finds itself in need of similar initiatives. They need randomized controlled trials, to establish stronger correlations between the architecture of our interfaces and their impacts; and funding for long-term, rigorously performed research
Sean McHugh

The Overselling of Ed Tech - Alfie Kohn - 0 views

    • Sean McHugh
       
      Classic RAT practices 
  • these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we’re already being innovative
  • The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well
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  • teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning
  • even if ed tech were adopted as thoughtfully as its proponents claim, we’re still left with deep reasons to be concerned about the outmoded model of teaching that it helps to preserve — or at least fails to help us move beyond
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Which means is why tech without coaches who adopt a pedagogical stance is pointless. 
Sean McHugh

Panicked about Kids' Addiction to Tech? - NewCo Shift - 0 views

  • Verbalize what you’re doing with your phone
  • They also get their cues about technology from people around them. A child would need to be alone in the woods to miss that people love their phones. From the time that they’re born, people are shoving phones in their faces to take pictures, turning to their phones to escape, and obsessively talking on their phones while ignoring them.
  • Once you begin saying out loud every time you look at technology, you also realize how much you’re looking at technology.
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  • most people are aware of when something that they’re doing isn’t healthy. They may not be able to stop. Or they may not want to stop. Untangling that is part of the challenge
  • parenting is about helping children navigate the world and support them to develop agency in a healthy manner
  • That requires communication and energy, not a new technology to police boundaries for you
Sean McHugh

Ten Kid-Friendly Rules for Texting With Respect and Dignity | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • “What is the “right” age for youngsters to begin texting and using social media?”
  • If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t send it via text or the internet.
  • Don’t gossip about other people
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  • Once you share something online, you lose control of where it goes, who can forward it, who will see it, and how it can potentially be used.
  • Never post a photo or message that you wouldn’t want “everyone” to be able to view.
  • Once you put something out there online, it’s almost impossible to take it back.
  • In this immediate world of instant messaging and constant contact, you may be tempted to say whatever comes to your mind in a given moment. Don’t give in to the temptation.
  • You have the ability to instantly end a digital conversation and should plan to do so the minute you recognize that cruelty has begun.
  • there is a very, very, VERY big difference between real friends and online followers
  • make sure that the only person who is speaking for you is YOU
  • Your accounts are your accounts. It is in your best interests not to let any friend—even a best friend—post or text from your account. Ever.
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