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Thieme Hennis

Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind - 10 views

  • Let's return to the computer system analogy.
    • Thieme Hennis
       
      Stephen Downes proposes an operating system for the mind: take the analogy of a computer. We do not program each and every program into the computer. The more flexible and programmable computer (Apple, Linux), are far more useful than the pre-programmed ones (Windows). The education system should not try pre-program everything that will be needed by people to be useful or to be able to learn skills they might need, because the knowledge (i) facts change, (ii) there is much more knowledge out there that can be useful and wee need to be able to utilize that too in case we come across new facts, (iii) it is impossible to see what skills might be needed in the future, (iv) you need to be able to filter out irrelevant or false facts, (v) you need to be able to create facts (mechanism for agency). "People need such greater capacities in literacy, learning, prioitizing, evaluation, planning and acting." The analogy of the computer system learns us to think of the brain not as a database full of information, but a place where each person develops methodologies or approaches to deal with reality. Facts are necessary, of course, but the learning paradigm should not be to learn facts, but to learn how to deal with facts. Facts are, IMHO, essential but follow from interest/need combined with a learned methodology or approach to deal with these facts.
edtechtalk

iZotope Ozone - 64-bit analog modeled mastering effects for Pro Tools, VST, MAS, Audio ... - 0 views

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John Evans

"If We Didn't Have Today's Schools, Would We Create Today's Schools?" - 0 views

    • Sharon Elin
       
      This analogy of equipping sailing vessels with steam engines works well as an illustration of technology being plugged into traditional classrooms.
  • We need to get the teacher into the game. The teacher needs to get in there and be part of the learning process, actively engaged in solving the problem with the students and learning with the students—not teaching but modeling learning with the students by functioning as an expert learner solving problems and constructing new knowledge with the students.
    • John Evans
       
      Totally agree with this. Teachers MUST be learning along with their students to continue to expand their professional repetoires.
  • modeling the learning process
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  • we will get the same result if we introduce modern learning technologies in our schools but do not prepare teachers to work in this new learning environment.   If we want to take advantage of these new technologies and the billions we are investing in equipment for our schools, we have to prepare teachers very differently than we have in the past. We have to change our own model of teaching and instruction in higher education.
  • Any organization that adopts a new technology without significant organizational change is doomed to failure. You have to change the organization. You cannot just add the technology. You have to actively work on changing the roles of the teachers, the roles of the students, the roles of the parents, and the roles of the administrators, and start to work toward building new relationships and new structures
  • Trying to introduce new technologies into schools without these changes would be similar to efforts in the sailing industry during the 1800s, when steam engines were installed in wooden sailing ships.
  • We will not get out of our wooden ship schools until we use communication technologies for two-way interactivity that allows us to collaboratively construct the learning experience and new knowledge.
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    CITE Journal Article
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    CITE Journal Article
Reynold Redekopp

Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone - Journal of Democracy 6:1 - 5 views

  • ocial scientists in several fields have recently suggested a common framework for understanding these phenomena, a framework that rests on the concept of social capital. 4 By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital--tools and training that enhance individual productivity--"social capital" refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.
  • Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.
  • the most fundamental form of social capital is the family, and the massive evidence of the loosening of bonds within the family (both extended and nuclear) is well known.
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  • Across the 35 countries in this survey, social trust and civic engagement are strongly correlated; the greater the density of associational membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens. Trust and engagement are two facets of the same underlying factor--social capital.[End Page 73] America still ranks relatively high by cross-national standards on both these dimensions of social capital. Even in the 1990s, after several decades' erosion, Americans are more trusting and more engaged than people in most other countries of the world. The trends of the past quarter-century, however, have apparently moved the United States significantly lower in the international rankings of social capital. The recent deterioration in American social capital has been sufficiently great that (if no other country changed its position in the meantime) another quarter-century of change at the same rate would bring the United States, roughly speaking, to the midpoint among all these countries, roughly equivalent to South Korea, Belgium, or Estonia today. Two generations' decline at the same rate would leave the United States at the level of today's Chile, Portugal, and Slovenia.
  • Other demographic transformations. A range of additional changes have transformed the American family since the 1960s--fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, lower real wages, and so on. Each of these changes might account for some of the slackening of civic engagement, since married, middle-class parents are generally more socially involved than other people. Moreover, the changes in scale that have swept over the American economy in these years--illustrated by the replacement of the corner grocery by the supermarket and now perhaps of the supermarket by electronic shopping at home, or the replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms--may perhaps have undermined the material and even physical basis for civic engagement.
  • The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television. Time-budget studies in the 1960s showed that the growth in time spent watching television dwarfed all other changes in the way Americans passed their days and nights. Television has made our communities (or, rather, what we experience as our communities) wider and shallower. In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests? It is a question that seems worth exploring more systematically.
  • who stress that closely knit social, economic, and political organizations are prone to inefficient cartelization and to what political economists term "rent seeking" and ordinary men and women call corruption.
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    An article about the loss of social capital in America
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