Group items tagged

1. How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

2. Curiosity Cultivates Creativity

3. Widen Your World

That, ultimately, is the challenge: to identify digitally driven, innovative practices that work and scale them up. Schools can look to a growing number of models to meet that challenge, as well as the lessons that can be learned from others' mistakes.

many schools are turning to open educational resources. They're convinced that the free, malleable, and shareable academic content offers advantages that traditional commercial materials cannot match.

administrators and teachers are learning to embrace the eclectic jumble of student-owned devices, in the belief that taking a flexible approach will benefit instruction.

Teachers should focus on students' efforts and not on their abilities. When students succeed, teachers should praise their efforts or their strategies, not their intelligence. (

When students fail, teachers should also give feedback about effort or strategies -- what the student did wrong and what he or she could do now.

teachers should help students value effort.

Soccer is a zero-sum, winner/loser finite game. But life, it turns out, is a magical opportunity for up, and for forward.

Here's the key question: Which feeling/experience/state do you look back on fondly? Which one engages you, challenges you, makes you the best version of yourself? When you tell yourself your story—the story of last week, last month or last year—is it about how boring and secure life has become? What you learn isn't up to someone else's curriculum or syllabus any more--it's on you, on each of us, to decide what's next, to decide who we will become. We're not in fifth grade, wondering if something is going to be on the test.

Now, they're available to those willing to make the commitment.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

"The new digital content that is being developed is so superior to old-world print, and it's cost-efficient," says Mark Edwards, the superintendent of the Mooresville, N.C., district, which attracts hundreds of visitors who want to see how its schools have integrated digital teaching and learning.

Biases cause people to focus too much on success, take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on experts.

Challenge #2: A fixed mindset. The psychologist Carol Dweck identified two basic mindsets with which people approach their lives: “fixed” and “growth.” People who have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and talents are largely a matter of genetics; you either have them or you don’t. They aim to appear smart at all costs and see failure as something to be avoided, fearing it will make them seem incompetent.

people who have a growth mindset seek challenges and learning opportunities.