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"It seems only fitting to explore the role of questions in education by asking questions about the process of doing so. I propose that we start with the customary way of framing this topic and then proceed to questions that are deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling. 1. WHICH QUESTIONS? To begin, let's consider what we might ask our students. The least interesting questions are those with straightforward factual answers. That's why a number of writers have encouraged the use of questions described variously as "true" (Wolf, 1987), "essential" (Simon, 2002), "generative" (Perkins, 1992; Perrone, 1998), "guiding" (Traver, 1998), or "fertile" (Harpaz & Lefstein, 2000). What the best of these share is that they're open-ended. Sometimes, in fact, no definitive right answer can be found at all. And even when there is one - or at least when there is reason to prefer some responses to others - the answer isn't obvious and can't be summarized in a sentence. Why is it so hard to find a cure for cancer? Do numbers ever end? Why do people lie? Why did we invade Vietnam? Grappling with meaty questions like these (which were among those generated by a class in Plainview, NY) is a real project . . . literally. A question-based approach to teaching tends to shade into learning that is problem- (Delisle, 1997) and project-based (Kilpatrick, 1918; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Wolk, 1998). Intellectual proficiency is strengthened as students figure out how to do justice to a rich question. As they investigate and come to understand important ideas more fully, new questions arise along with better ways of asking them, and the learning spirals upwards. Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What's required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather

1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, makin

"1. The teacher is choosing the technology. It's not always possible, but when you can, let the students choose, and see what happens. Not all of them will be able to. Some need help; so let other students help them. 2. The teacher is choosing the function. This doesn't mean you can't choose the function, but if you students can't control the technology the use nor its function, this can be problematic: the learning is passive from the beginning. 3. The teacher is determining the process. To an extent you have to, but don't overdo it. 4. The technology is distracting. If the technology is more magical than the project, product, collaboration, process, or content itself, try to muffle the bells and whistles. Or use them to your advantage. 5. The technology isn't necessary. You wouldn't use a ruler to teach expository writing, nor would you use a Wendell Berry essay to teach about the Water Cycle. No need for a Khan Academy account and a fully-personalized and potentially self-directed proficiency chart of mathematical concepts just to show a 3 minute video on the number line. 6. The process is too complex. Keep it simple. Fewer moving parts = greater precision. And less to go wrong. 7. Students have access to too much. What materials, models, peer groups, or related content do students actually need? See #6. 8. The teacher is the judge, jury, and executioner. Get out of the way. You're (probably) less interesting than the content, experts, and communities (if you're doing it right). 9. They artificially limiting the scale. Technology connects everything to everything. Use this to the advantage of the students! 10. They're not limiting the scale. However, giving students the keys to the universe with no framework, plan, boundaries or even vague goals is equally problematic. 11. Students access is limited to too little. The opposite of too board a scale is too little-akin to taking students to the ocean to fish but squaring of

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures, or simpl

"1. Blogging enables reflection. This is true for both students and educators. Too often do we go through our days, class to class, with minimal opportunities for reflection on our experiences or the information that we have acquired along the way. Blogging offers the opportunity to take a step back and connect with our learning and place it in the context of the bigger picture. Make reflection an assignment or part of another assignment - it is an important component to learning. For students: This is not the easiest thing to accomplish - blogging takes time and that is a finite resource during a busy class period. There is great opportunity in academic support periods or advisory classes for students (particularly in 1:1 schools) to blog. Many advisory classes take place throughout the day, which is a great break point for students to create based on their learning from that day. For teachers: This type of reflection can and should be compiled into your lesson planning for future lessons. Take what you learned from teaching and learning that day and incorporate it into the next day's lessons. Find time to do this during a conference period during your day or right after school. Yes, it is tough to get in the habit of doing a new thing - but once you start using reflection through blogging, I think that your lesson planning will be easier and much more meaningful. 2. Develop an Authentic Audience An authentic audience is a great way to increase rigor and in all of my experiences has led to increased performance by students. Authentic audiences in blogging could mean any number of things - family members, students from other classes, students from other buildings, other teachers, individuals interested in the content from around the world, etc. A student knowing that their work may be seen by people other than what they consider their 'typical audience' (read: teacher) typically spends more time and exerts more effort to creating a quality p

"As an educator who is addicted to Twitter I have always read about students getting introduced to Twitter and wondered how it would work. After reading and reading I have finally decided to give it a go. Here is my introduction to Twitter in my classroom. Last Tuesday, the day started like any other. Roll call, discussion, introduction to an activity and a bit of a laugh with my Year 7 and 8 Technology class. We had been discussing the importance of being an active online user and being a positive digital citizen (the students are preparing some presentations for Year 2-3 children later in the term). The conversation moved into learning environments and we discussed the small and "un-student friendly" (their words) environment that they were currently sitting in. "Take the teachable moment and run with it" my inner, energetic teacher yelled from my shoulder. So there we were talking about the "Ultimate Learning Environment", when one of my students asked me "Why is social media so big?". Good question I thought, why is it 'so big'. So we unpacked that question and broke it down. We talked about Social Media and what it was and how it worked, they gave me excellent examples and we tied it back into our discussion about digital citizenship. From this point, as a class, we decided we would use social media to help us with our learning. The students had no idea how it could work. I suggested twitter and how I use it. We pulled up my profile and saw how it worked (discussion only). The decision was then made -> Let's ask the twitterverse to help us!! On rolled Monday 5th May and in our first class (I see this group twice a week) we decided that tomorrow would be the day, we would ask twitter for their advice on "What makes a GREAT learningenvironment?". The students already have some fantastic ideas and a plan of where they want to see their environment heading but they needed some depth to their plan and some other opinions outside of

"Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting." My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day. What did we learn last time? A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported by the idea that we don't learn from single exposure to material - we need to return frequently to whatever we are attempting to master.But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.Write it down. All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge - and not just the students most likely to

"By "NLRBE," I mean core resource-based economy ("RBE") concepts, as fleshed out and expanded by Peter Joseph and his organization, "The Zeitgeist Movement" ("TZM"). *Important Reminder* Please remember that, by using this site, you agree to leave no confidential information in blog post comments or elsewhere on the site, or to rely upon anything in this post, or on this site generally, without qualified, independent, confirming research (per this site's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which you agreed to by accessing this site). Why? Unfortunately, on this website and in my blog posts, I can and do offer nothing more than expressions of opinion and general information, which could be inadequately researched, inapplicable to your situation, out-of-date, and/or mistaken. Thus, no statement on my website or blog posts is intended to guarantee any particular outcome for you, or to constitute any kind of advice, legal or otherwise. Qualified "advice" is customized to your particular circumstances, current, accurate, and offered in direct relationship with a qualified professional. And qualified advice is critical to obtain before you take action. I do offer qualified legal advice and assurances of confidentiality, but only within the context of attorney-client relationships, which are formed exclusively via written attorney-client fee agreements, not through blog posts, blog post comments, website pages or communications, or any other means whatsoever (however, please visit my Services page to see whether or not I am currently accepting new clients). By "RBE," I mean the original economic model, as presented by Jacque Fresco and his "Venus Project" ("TVP"). My take on his RBE model is more fully explained in my last blog post, "What Do I Mean by 'Resource-Based Economy' (or 'RBE')?" Given what I heard in a recent talk by Joseph, I am now sorely tempted to begin using the term "NLRBE," rather than "RBE," to refer

"The Minute Paper comes in many variations, but the simplest one involves wrapping up the formal class period a few minutes early and posing two questions to your students: What was the most important thing you learned today? What question still remains in your mind? Taken together, those two questions accomplish multiple objectives. The first one not only requires students to remember something from class and articulate it in their own words (more about that in a moment), but it also requires them to do some quick thinking. They have to reflect on the material and make a judgment about the main point of that day's class. The second question encourages them to probe their own minds and consider what they haven't truly understood. Most of us are infected by what learning theorists sometimes call "illusions of fluency," which means that we believe we have obtained mastery over something when we truly have not. To answer the second question, students have to decide where confusion or weaknesses remain in their own comprehension of the day's material. Closing connections. If we want students to obtain mastery and expertise in our subjects, they need to be capable of making their own connections between what they are learning and the world around them - current events, campus debates, personal experiences. The last five minutes of class represent an ideal opportunity for students to use the course material from that day and brainstorm some new connections.The metacognitive five. We have increasing evidence from the learning sciences that students engage in poor study strategies. Likewise, research shows that most people are plagued by the illusions of fluency. The solution on both fronts is better metacognition - that is, a clearer understanding of our own learning. What if all of us worked together deliberately to achieve that?Close the loop. Finally, go back to any of the strategies I introduced in my recent column on the first five minutes of clas

"Generating electricity is not only inefficient, it also makes pedal power less sustainable, less robust and more costly. To begin with, batteries have to be manufactured, and they have to be replaced regularly. This requires energy, which can completely negate the ecological advantage of pedal power. According to this research paper (pdf), the embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles (sources: 1/2), you are basically pedalling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery. If you also factor in the embodied energy of other electronics and parts, the ecological advantage of a pedal powered generator connected to a battery becomes rather doubtful. It might costs more energy than it delivers."

"The Kaua Moho was the last species of it's entire genus and it was the last genus in it's family. This male was not just the last of his kind, he was the last being on his entire branch of the evolutionary tree, there was nothing left on the planet that was even close to being like him. That kind of loneliness is unimaginable. No other avian family has had every single species within it go completely extinct in modern times. Different species of Moho lived on each island of Hawaii and their evolutionary cousins the kioea birds lived alongside them, but starting in 1800 (about the time Europeans started arriving to the islands in significant numbers and also about the time the native human population of Hawaii also got decimated by diseases) one by one they died out due to the introduction of foreign avian diseases and parasites, habitat loss, and hunting for their plumage. 2 hurricanes within 10 years of each other finished them off. They are all gone and that song or any song like it will never be heard again save for in recordings. The hurricanes dealt the final blow, but 95% of it was humanity's fault. This has become common in Hawaii due to having so many species that only exist there. A LOT of those species are gone now because the arrival of Europeans brought disease, invasive species, and people straight up killed them or destroyed their habitats. It is a similar situation on every isolated island or area in the world as humans have expanded and explored every nook and cranny on the planet, no matter how hard it is to get to or how little business we have there we feel the need to interfere in even the most delicate and tiny ecosystem. Even the large, continent sized ecosystems are suffering. It doesn't matter if there are millions or even billions of an animal or plant, we will find some way to kill them all. It is only in the last few decades that serious steps have finally been taken to preserve the few areas on this world that we have not destroyed, but

"the ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning."

The Atlantic covers consequential news and ideas in politics, business, entertainment, technology, health, education, and global affairs.

"In this Instructable, I'm going to be showing you how to build your own crack the code game in which you use a rotary encoder dial to guess the randomly generated code to the safe. There are 8 LEDs on the front of the safe to tell you how many of the digits you've guessed are correct and how many are in the right place as well. The safe is initially open, allowing you to put something into the inside compartment. The Arduino and battery are housed in a separate compartment in the back. You then push the dial to lock the safe, which is done using a servo on the inside of the door. You then need to input the code by turning the dial to select the digits and pushing the dial to confirm each digit. After your fourth digit is chosen, the safe displays how many of your digits are correct and how many of them are in the correct place using the red and green LEDs on the door. "

"Here's how you can add email notifications to any Google Form in 5 easy steps: Install the Google Forms add-on, then click the add-ons icon inside the Forms Editor (it is the shape of a puzzle icon), choose the Email Notification for Forms menu and then click the Create New Rule menu. The configuration window will open inside the form editor. Enter your full name (or the sender's name) and also specify the list of one or more email addresses (comma separated) who should receive automatic email notifications when a form is submitted. If you would like to send an auto-confirmation email to the form's respondent after they submit the form, check the Notify Submitter option. You'll also need to select the question in your Google Form that asks the respondent for their email address. Go to the next screen and enter the subject line and message body of the email notification. You can customize the emails and include any of the {{form fields}} in the subject or body as explained in the next section. Click the Create Rule button to activate the form notification. Now open your Google Form, submit a test entry and then go to your Gmail Sent Items folder to see the email notification that has gone out to the recipients."

"To revert the current ecological overshoot and build a sustainable society, we have to collectively engage in changing our economic model. "Sufficiency: moving beyond the gospel of eco-efficiency" suggests introducing hard limitations to unsustainable trends-in particular to overconsumption-and putting emphasis on distributional justice. Seven chapters written by sustainability and economics experts plus a foreword by Janez Potočnik (Co-chair of the International Resource Panel and former European Commissioner for the Environment) shed light on different angles of sufficiency and formulate concrete recommendations to EU policy makers. The booklet ends with a discussion of several eco-social policies that can start the transition towards an "economics of enough". Many new ideas for an economic paradigm shift have been developed and discussed at the academic and grassroots levels in recent years. The aim of this booklet is to build on a rich body of knowledge and bring these ideas to the attention of engaged citizens and policy makers in order to advance the debate on how to implement sufficiency."

"EdX is a nonprofit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and composed of dozens of leading global institutions, the xConsortium. EdX offers interactive online courses and MOOCs from the world's best universities and institutions. Open edX is the open source platform that powers edX courses. Through our commitment to the open source vision, edX code is freely available to the community. Institutions can host their own instances of Open edX and offer their own classes. Educators can extend the platform to build learning tools that precisely meet their needs. And developers can contribute new features to the Open edX platform. Our goal is to build a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere. We invite you to explore Open edX and participate in our growing movement. Frequently Asked Questions What is Open edX? The Open edX platform is a free--and open source--course management system (CMS) that was originally developed by edX. The Open edX platform is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules."

"... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity. ..."

"Last year I went to West Kalimantan in Borneo to see for myself the effects of the runaway growth of the palm oil industry. I came home firm in the belief that Iceland would not continue using palm oil until companies delivered on their zero deforestation commitments. This is because palm oil has had devastating consequences for local communities, who are being displaced, and on endangered species like the orangutan (our closest relative in the wild), which are being driven close to extinction. Palm oil has many benefits, chiefly that its yields are better than the alternatives. But it is grown almost exclusively in areas of tropical rainforest, which are the 'crown jewels' of our planet's biodiversity. With 146 football pitches of rainforest being lost every hour in Indonesia alone, the urgency of the crisis cannot be overstated. And global demand is set to double by 2050. At Iceland the 1,000 tonnes of palm oil we used annually pale into insignificance compared to many of our competitors. As such a tiny player we took the decision that the only way we could create meaningful change was to shout very loudly from outside the established palm oil industry. So we decided simply to stop using palm oil until the industry cleaned up its act. It was our own decision to give consumers a choice where previously there was none. We never called for a wider industry ban, and accept entirely that a wholesale boycott of palm oil is not the right long term solution. ..."

"Imagine you could use any kind of small head difference in a river or canal. The power those drops contain might surprise you. We created a technology that can make use of all these small waterfalls or rapids in a way that's safe for the environment. Gone are the days that communities had to choose between having power or fish to eat. Our robust and fish friendly vortex turbiness will generate energy 24/7 at an incredibly low cost of energy. That way you can have a project with high return on investment that improves the world just that little bit. Now, if you look at a river or canal, you'll notice that it's full of these small cascades, that's how nature builds rivers. We have created a distributed turbine system that can combines a large amount of turbines into one big virtual hydropower powerplant. These virtual hydropower plants can be as large as 10MW in power output. That's the power production of a small city! We can do this because our civil structures are designed to be easy to install, and the electronics and robust power take-offs are designed to keep working with minimal maintenance. The energy produced can be directly connected to your appliances or machinery, and at the same time connected to the national distribution grid, so you can inject the unused power to it, maximizing the revenue through a net billing connection."