Group items tagged

information that lies more than three clicks away simply doesn't exist

the implications for education and beyond are far wider

I hope you take lots of risks for the sake of learning this year. Not just for your students, but also for you. Make it a goal to try to learn something in a sustained and meaningful way that has little to do with your classroom life.

Be an expert when you need to be. Be a learner always. You are probably the most experienced learner in your classroom. But don’t assume you’re the most knowledgable person or object. If you’ve a computer handy, then you’re not. Embrace that. Relationships and mentoring cannot be outsourced or Googled. They take time and genuine concern.

You need no one’s permission to postpone a due date or modify an assignment for the benefit of a student, or to delay some grading for the benefit of yourself or your family.

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

In many schools and even states, it's been, rather, a movement to block and bust: no blogs, no cell phones, no IM. We take away the powerful social technologies our kids are already using to learn and, in doing so, tell them their own tools are irrelevant. Or, instead of using the complex and challenging phenomenon of a site such as Wikipedia to teach the realities of navigating information in this new world, we prohibit its use. In fact, at this writing, the U.S. legislature is in the process of deciding whether schools and libraries should have access to any of the potential of the Read/Write Web at all. When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus.

I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won't be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

For decades, comic books were derided as gaudy, sub-literate threats to children's brain cells. Now, teachers, researchers, and librarians are taking a new look at comics and they like what they see: a way, in a culture now dominated by TV, video games, and the Internet, to get children reading. It's not really a new concept. As far back as the 1940s, series such as "Classics Illustrated" and "Picture Stories From the Bible" were using comics as an educational tool. Today there are literacy and comics programs, such as the Comic Book Project, springing up all over the country. Sponsored by state officials and educators, these programs focus on the simple goal of promoting the reading habit.

Fox News hosts initially got a laugh out of recent allegations by a professor at Louisiana State University that tv personality Mr. Rogers produced a generation of kids who believe that "you're special just for being who you are" and therefore feel no need to work hard.

Researchers were quick to dig up vulnerabilities in the beta release of Apple's brand new Safari for Windows browser.