I discuss his key idea: that systemic thinking is a liberal art, and I explain a corollary idea, that textbooks suck
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
1More
shared by Vicki Davis on 21 Apr 12
- No Cached
Teaching Resources, Classroom Resources & Lesson Plans - TES Resources - 5 views
www.tes.co.uk/TaxonomySearchFunnel.aspx
education inquiry-based learning teaching lessonplans research
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Here is an interesting point as I research inquiry based learning and move to look in a database that is largely built from overseas. Many places called "inquiry" "enquiry" so in this set of lessons across the curriculum, I have to search using the term "enquiry" to turn up what have been tagged as "inquiry based" lesson plans. There are many nuances like that as you start looking at best practices across the world to remember. Eventually, hopefully, language searches will translate between common languages (like English) to help us bridge best practices. If you're looking into inquiry-based learning (or equiry-based depending upon where you're from) - this is a database of lesson plans from Kindergarten up in different categories.
12More
shared by Ed Webb on 26 Apr 12
- No Cached
Alan Kay, Systems, and Textbooks « Theatrical Smoke - 2 views
wedaman.wordpress.com/...lan-kay-and-why-textbooks-suck
education learning systems LiberalArts gaming
![](/images/link.gif)
-
the story of the last few hundred years is that we’ve quickly developed important ideas, which society needs to have to improve and perhaps even to continue to exist, and for which there are no pre-existing, genetically created categories. So there’s an idea-receiving capacity gap.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
Education’s job should be, says Kay, to bridge this gap. To help, that is, people form these necessary new idea-receiving categories–teaching them the capacity for ideas–early on in their lives, so that as they grow they are ready to embrace the things we need them to know. Let me say that in a better way: so that as they grow they are ready to know in the ways we need them to know.
-
cultivate the ability to conceive of, work with, create, understand, manipulate, tinker with, disrupt, and, generally, appreciate the beauty of systems
-
a game, or a simulation, thought of as a thing we might create (rather than a thing we only act within), is a visceral example of systems thinking
-
It’s the Flatland story–that we need to train our 2D minds to see in a kind of 3D–and Kay’s genius is that he recognizes we have to bake this ability into the species, through education, as close to birth as possible.
-
Systems thinking is to be conceived of as a platform skill or an increased capacity on top of which we will be able to construct new sorts of ideas and ways of knowing, of more complex natures still. The step beyond seeing a single system is of course the ability to see interacting systems – a kind of meta-systemic thinking – and this is what I think Kay is really interested in, because it’s what he does. At one point he showed a slide of multiple systems–the human body, the environment, the internet, and he said in a kind of aside, “they’re all one system . . .”
-
The point is to be able to see connections between the silos. Says Kay, the liberal arts have done a bad job at “adding in epistemology” among the “smokestacks” (i.e. disciplines)
-
What happens when you’re stuck in a system? You don’t understand the world and yourself and others as existing in constant development, as being in process; you think you are a fixed essence or part within a system (instead of a system influencing systems) and you inadvertently trap yourself in a kind of tautological loop where you can only think about things you’re thinking about and do the things you do and you thus limit yourself to a kind of non-nutritive regurgitation of factoids, or the robotic meaningless actions of an automaton, or what Kay calls living in a pop culture
-
A downside of being epistemologically limited to thinking within a system is that you overemphasize the importance of the content and facts as that system orders them
1More
shared by Vicki Davis on 12 Feb 14
- No Cached
Interoperability Bridges and Labs Center - 3 views
www.interoperabilitybridges.com/wmp-extension-for-chrome
education news media extension Chrome ecm wecm
![](/images/link.gif)
ScienceDirect - System : Bridging the gap between teacher educator and teacher in a com... - 0 views
11More
Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » We have the ideas and the te... - 0 views
-
I argued that our present systems are unable to keep up with the requirements of society and of industry for learning and knowledge development
-
One of the barriers to such self driven and social learning has been centrally controlled and regulated curricula
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Put all the parts together and we have a new model, a model which can extend learning to all those who want it and support lifelong learning. A model which is affordable and scalable. But of course it requires imagination and change to implement such a model.
-
he main point of this post was to say that we have the ideas and the technologies to support an alternative to the present education systems, systems which are failing so many indiviidals and failing society as a whole.
11More
eSchoolNews - Students want more use of gaming technology - 0 views
-
-
Nearly two-thirds of middle and high school students said “let me use my own laptop, cell phone, or other mobile device at school.”
-
While 53 percent of middle and high school students are excited about using mobile devices to help them learn, only 15 percent of school leaders support this idea. Also, fewer than half as many parents as students see a place for online learning in the 21st century school.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
And even fewer teachers, parents, and school leaders want students to have access to eMail and instant-messaging accounts from school.
-
Keeping school leaders well informed is the first step toward helping to bridge this disconnect
-
Hopefully, the results of this survey will reach them. If school leaders become more familiar with student views,
-
his vision for the ultimate school is one where the teachers and the principal actively seek and regularly include the ideas of students in discussions and planning for all aspects of education—not just technology.
9More
Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 13 views
-
Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
-
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
-
When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to
-
one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so
-
if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant
-
our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue
-
some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation?
-
The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
1More
The digital melting pot: Bridging the digital native-immigrant divide - 0 views
-
Educational technology advocates claim today's students are technologically savvy content creators and consumers whose mindset differs from previous generations. The digital native-digital immigrant metaphor has been used to make a distinction between those with technology skills and those without. Metaphors such as this one are useful when having initial conversations about an emerging phenomenon, but over time, they become inaccurate and dangerous. Thus, this paper proposes a new metaphor, the digital melting pot, which supports the idea of integrating rather than segregating the natives and the immigrants.
5More
shared by Suzie Nestico on 05 May 11
- No Cached
Jim Klein :: Weblog :: To those who would lead... - 9 views
community.saugususd.org/...1375.html
education technology K-12 21 Century Classroom 21stcentury teaching learning administrator all_teachers bestpractices edu_trends
![](/images/link.gif)
-
What we must never forget, no matter what circumstances are forced upon us, is that without failure, there is no success. We learn when we fail. We grow when we fall. Science is all about learning from failure, and failure is a key component of innovation, without which nothing would ever be tried. The right technology brings with it the opportunity to create environments where students have the opportunity to not just fail, but to fail gracefully, recover quickly, and move forward having learned from the experience in a non-threatening way.
-
As is so well stated by Weston & Bain (2010), "Bransford et al (2000), Jonassen (2000, 2004, 2006, 2008), and Jonassen et al. (1999), fix the future of educational technology in cognitive tools that shape and extend human capabilities. Cognitive tools blur the unproductive distinctions that techno-critics make between computers and teaching and learning (Bullen & Janes, 2007; Hukkinen, 2008; Kommers et al., 1992; Lajoie, 2000). When technology enables, empowers, and accelerates a profession's core transactions, the distinctions between computers and professional practice evaporate.
-
For instance, when a surgeon uses an arthriscope to trim a cartilage (Johnson & Pedowitz, 2007), a structural engineer uses computer-assisted design software to simulate stresses on a bridge (Yeomans, 2009), or a sales manager uses customer-relations-management software to predict future inventory needs (Baltzen & Phillips, 2009), they do not think about technology. Each one thinks about her or his professional transaction."
‹ Previous
21 - 31 of 31