Group items tagged

I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.

I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.

I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.

Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research

I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.

 The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.

 Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:

 http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf

Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.

that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.

Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.

Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 

I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...

The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,

Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.

Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.

The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.

Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!

Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.

is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?

book's first chapter

Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).

what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?

ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm

The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.

* I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment

based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)

I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.

The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"

Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion

I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

“I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.

recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s

“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”

In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.

there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin