Group items tagged

Earlier we talked about how a single botnet could harness more compute power than our largest super computers. Well, that's just the start of it. The amount of computer power available to the Ambient Cloud will be truly astounding.

By 2014 one estimate is there will be 2 billion PCs. That's a giant reservoir of power to exploit, especially considering these new boxes are stuffed with multiple powerful processors and gigabytes of memory. 7 Billion Smartphones By now it's common wisdom smartphones are the computing platform of the future. It's plausible to assume the total number of mobile phones in use will roughly equal the number of people on earth. That's 7 billion smartphones. Smartphones aren't just tiny little wannabe computers anymore either. They are real computers and are getting more capable all the time.

One Google exec estimates that in 12 years an iPod will be able to store all the video ever produced.

The third group is more difficult to discuss, and I don't want to dismiss or demean, but I think of them as "the colonized." These are people from traditionally out-of-power groups who have decided to fully "play the game" of their oppressors. They tend to wear the charter school ideology around their necks the way certain Nigerians and Indians and other "citizens of the Empire" in the early 20th Century donned British powdered wigs and joined the colonial governments. It is tough to argue with much of what they say: They are looking to "save kids now." To open "real opportunities." To build "within the realities we have." And to argue with this is to engage in that oldest of battles among the colonized - do we achieve freedom and power on "their" terms, or "ours." Do we want our children to grow up as -and this will depend on the argument you are making - Brits and citizens of the world/Second-class Brits or to grow up as Nigerians, Indians, South Africans, Irish, Israelis/poor separatists in a global economy. As with most great issues, the answers are not clear cut, not "black and white," as they say. We want our identities, we want freedom and possibility based in our culture, and yet, yes, we also live and work in a world designed and controlled by the powerful. So when people like @dropoutnation argue for charters and vouchers as their "answer," it is not just a matter of being co-opted. They have convinced themselves that this is the only logical solution in the world they see now. And I can argue for greater faith in the future, for greater faith in diverse communities, but altering someone's fundamental world view is tough.

The common characteristics that I find in what I describe as "the best schools" (see primary and secondary), that is, schools which "work" for the broadest range of students, is student choice. These are schools which help students discover their path, not their parents' path. These are schools which are willing to help students find success even if their parents are incapable, or destructive, or just uninterested. Parent choice - the concept of charters and vouchers - is socially reproductive from the start.

great public schools have student choice. No two classes in the same grade or subject should be anything alike. No common reading lists or classroom management. No common grading system. No common organization. Ideally, even schedules should vary. Only with that kind of choice can students find what they need, not what even the most well-meaning adults find for them. And great public schools are being made impossible by "choice" advocates, who pull a certain segment of students out of the mix, reducing workable choices for those left behind. I'm a parent, and I like parents. But I've also known all kinds of parents, and I value children too much to leave all the decisions in parental hands.

Bottom line is that we will see learners becoming responsible to their peers, audiences, and communities for their learning.  ..and that responsibility will not be based on a measure of their learning (how much or how well), but on what they have learned and what they can do with what they’ve learned.

motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.

We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.

There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?

There are two keys to building the kind of trust required to make the new system successful. The first is to train teachers to effectively facilitate student learning without being the center of attention on a daily basis. This means teachers must develop a new skill set that hybridizes their content knowledge as well as their ability to transfer that knowledge to other fields. The number one trait that districts will be using to judge new teachers in the years to come: flexibility.

The second emphasis should be on generating this type of hybrid learning on a district level before extending beyond the walls of local control.

districts should begin working with isolated courses and training their staff gradually to facilitate these types of learning environments.

Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.

A series of studies that have had a great deal of influence on the research and decision-making discussions concerning school library media programs have grown from the work of a team in Colorado—Keith Curry Lance, Marcia J. Rodney, and Christine Hamilton-Pennell (2000).

Recent school library impact studies have also identified, and generated some evidence about, potential "interventions" that could be studied. The questions might at first appear rather familiar: How much, and how, are achievement and learning improved when . . . librarians collaborate more fully with other educators? libraries are more flexibly scheduled? administrators choose to support stronger library programs (in a specific way)? library spending (for something specific) increases?

high priority should be given to reaching teachers, administrators, and public officials as well as school librarians and school library advocates.

as I come across EduCon2.3-related content, I'll be adding it here. If you have a wikispaces account, you should be able to make additions as well (I welcome your help!).

I am embarrassed that it is 2011 and we are still trying to convince teachers and administrators who run schools to use technology in their classrooms, as if we still have a choice

We do not really need conferences because we are teaching in an environment that resembles an ongoing global conference.

If you want your staff to do amazing things you have to hire the right people and give them an opportunity to play, experiment and grow. You must give them time to play, experiment and grow. You must give them money to play, experiment and grow. You must give them room to play, experiment and grow.

she observes student-led parent/student conferences.

improvement of instruction and for evaluation,

there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)