Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Amy Burvall
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Word aversion: Hate moist? Slacks? Crevice? Why do people hate words? - Slate Magazine - 39 views
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This is an intriguing article about word aversion - and really links Sense Perception with Language as a WOK. I'd like you all to read it and offer a comment or excerpt with comment. Perhaps you found a particular quote or idea thought-provoking, or you can offer a good question. What words to you feel an aversion to? How do you know?
Connecting (Full Film) on Vimeo - 1 views
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A Nation of Wimps | Psychology Today - 4 views
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Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.
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With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life
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These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps
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The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that, says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "it is interfering with the core mission of the university."
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FOR SOME REASON IT'S NOT SHOWING ALL MY ANNOTATIONS, BUT IF YOU OPEN IT UP AND CLICK ON YOUR DIIGOLET TOOL IT SHOULD SHOW HIGHLIGHTS ON EACH PAGE. YOU MIGHT HAVE TO REOPEN THE DIIGOLET TOOL FOR EVER PAGE.
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DP1 Midterm Reading #2 - 78 views
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"How the Internet is Changing What We Think We Know" DP1 Midterm Reading #2: For this reading, you will need to copy and paste specific passages into this comment stream. When you come across a passage that inspires a question or thought, copy and paste, then write your question or thought. Example: "I fear that the Internet has already greatly weakened our sense of what is distinctive about knowledge, and why it is worth seeking" What IS distinctive about knowledge? If we have a glut of information, does this make knowledge less valuable?
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Knowing Knowledge reading - 96 views
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DP1 Midterm Reading #1: For this reading (which is a pdf), you will need to copy and paste specific passages into this comment stream (with page #s). When you come across a passage that inspires a question or thought, copy and paste, then write your question or thought. For example: "All Knowledge is Information, but Not all Information is Knowledge" (page vi) My question: What kinds of information could be considered "knowledge" and what do we exclude? or..."Is "information" or access to information/ ability to find and use information MORE important than knowledge in our current tech-based society? ***Each student should write at least 2 questions or comments with references in order for us to have a fulfilling socratic seminar. During the socratic seminar, the inner circle will discuss and the outer circle will tweet while remaining silent (tweet stream will be archived).
The Networking of Knowledge and Storytelling - Future of StoryTelling - 2 views
Stephen Wolfram Blog : Latest Perspectives on the Computation Age - 1 views
TeachThoughtWhat 100 Experts Think About The Future Of Learning | TeachThought - 0 views
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Analysis - Persuading The Consumer And The Citizen | The Persuaders | FRONTLINE | PBS - 0 views
Why knowledge is no longer enough: learning and living in the new world. | Julian Stodd... - 0 views
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Stop Stealing Dreams (the entire manifesto on the web), cleaned up HTML version - Stop ... - 89 views
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Feel free to read
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We will be reading this and highlighting and annotating with your thoughts. It will help you process the Cheating Scandal presentations as well as prepare you for the upcoming project on Rethinking Education. Please think about issue of knowledge and learning, as Mr. Godin asks the big question: What is School For?
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Dreams
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Dreams
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learning is not done to you. Learning is something you choose to do
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Often overlooked in the rush to waste time at Facebook and YouTube is the fact that the Internet is the most efficient and powerful information delivery system ever developed.
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We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen
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Instead, our chaotic world is open to the work of passionate individuals, intent on carving their own paths.
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That’s the new job of school. Not to hand a map to those willing to follow it, but to inculcate leadership and restlessness into a new generation.
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value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other.
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n the connected world, reputation is worth more than test scores. Access to data means that data isn’t the valuable part; the processing is what matters.
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Great knowledge issue stated here! It's not about the info/data...it's about how you access it, interpret it, critique or analyze it, evaluate it, and use it. Are we doing this enough in school?
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Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm. Figuring out how to leverage the power of the group—whether it is students in the same room or a quick connection to a graphic designer across the sea in Wales—is at the heart of how we are productive today.
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At LJA do you think we do enough collaborative work? What are some major issues that arise with collaborative or "group" projects? Is this a good way to assess your learning?
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The bottom of the pyramid stores the students, with teachers (middle managers) following instructions from their bosses.
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Not what a patron would say to a talented artist, though.
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I like this analogy using the artist/patron. What if we treated all students as artists and teachers/schools acted as patrons or even "masters" in the Renaissance connotation of the word?
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the only people who excel are those who have decided to do so. Great doctors or speakers or skiers or writers or musicians are great because somewhere along the way, they made the choice.
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As the industrial age peters out, as the growth fades away, the challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us. We can’t use the old tools, because resorting to obedience to teach passion just isn’t going to work.
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given that, how should we change? What would be some interesting new courses? What skills should we teach?
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The obligation of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.
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We can teach kids to engage in poetry, to write poetry, and to demand poetry—or we can take a shortcut and settle for push-pin, YouTube, and LOLcats.
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Can risk-taking be taught?
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When's the last time you took a big risk? What did you learn? Did someone teach you to take risks?
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Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer from the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.
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It would be a mistake to say that scientific education doesn’t work. It does work. It creates what we test. Unfortunately, the things we desperately need (and the things that make us happy) aren’t the same things that are easy to test.
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what do you think about this statement? What are some things we need and that make us happy that are virtually impossible to test?
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The good jobs of the future aren’t going to involve working for giant companies on an assembly line. They all require individuals willing to chart their own path, whether or not they work for someone else.
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The jobs of the future are in two categories: the downtrodden assemblers of cheap mass goods and the respected creators of the unexpected.
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few who figure out how to be linchpins and artists. People who are hired because they’re totally worth it, because they offer insight and creativity and innovation that just can’t be found easily.
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Seth's "linchpin" is someone who is indispensable due to the fact that despite whatever title they hold, they rise above the occasion and do more than expected, connect and inspire others, and offer creative solutions
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n artist is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better.
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A bit like Google's 20% time - spend 20% of your work week working on a free-choice project that will make either the world or the company better
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The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.
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The Internet is making the role of content gatekeeper unimportant. Redundant. Even wasteful.
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What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.
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Thinking about thinking...how can teachers persuade you why you want to learn something, and then help you to be more self-directed?
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I wouldn’t want to live in an uneducated world. I truly believe that education makes humans great, elevates our culture and our economy, and creates the foundation for the engine that drives science which leads to our well being. I’m not criticizing education.
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No. But I am wondering when we decided that the purpose of school was to cram as much data/trivia/fact into every student as we possibly could.
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aggressively testing for trivia.
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Computers changed that. Now the receptionist can’t lose your messages, because they go straight into voice mail. The assembly-line worker can’t drop a tool, because it’s attached to a numerically controlled machine. The telemarketer who interrupts your dinner is unlikely to over-promise, because the pitch is carefully outlined in script form on paper.
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LEGO isn’t the problem, but it is a symptom of something seriously amiss. We’re entering a revolution of ideas while producing a generation that wants instructions instead.
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I agree. And at our house, we throw away all instructions and just make stuff with Legos- no fear of failure or "staying in the lines"
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Make something different
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Jeremy Gleick, a sophomore at UCLA, has devoted precisely an hour a day to learning something new and unassigned.
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Available resources and instruction have gone from scarce to abundant in less than a decade, and the only barrier to learning for most young adults in the developed world is now merely the decision to learn.
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Think of the art we haven’t seen, the jobs that haven’t been created, and the productivity that hasn’t been imagined because generations have been persuaded not to dream big.
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creative jobs lead to more creative jobs. Self-starting, self-reliant, initiative-taking individuals often start new projects that need new workers
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short and brutish
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These students are trained to dream small dreams.
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Dreamers don’t have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams
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As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it
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knowledge is becoming inextricable from—literally unthinkable without—the network that enables it
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great Knowledge Issue..is knowledge changing due to connectivity and data overload?
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notion that each of us can assemble a network (of people, of data sources, of experiences) that will make us either smart or stupid
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only way for a student to get respect inside the system of school is to earn temporary approval from a teacher he won’t likely see again any time soon
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yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level.
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If we spend more time training inquisitive humans, we’ll have to give up on the basics, and that will mean nothing but uneducated dolts who don’t even know who Torquemada was.”
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Counterargument: when we sacrifice content to focus on meta (thinking about thinking), what happens? And will it matter?
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I’m concerned about fact ignorance and history ignorance and vocabulary ignorance. I’m petrified, though, about attitude ignorance.
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If we teach our students to be passionate, ethical, and inquisitive, I’m confident that the facts will follow.
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Users type “Google” into Bing to get to Google so they can do a search (the very search they could have done in Bing, of course). And then, when they get to Google, one of the most popular terms? Facebook.
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They self-describe as Dummies and give up, not for lack of genetic smarts, but for lack of initiative and because of an abundance of fear.
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I find this happens a lot- especially with people dealing with technology..instead of trouble-shooting, people give up and personalize it
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The bad decisions we see every day aren’t the result of lack of data, or lack of access to data.
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No, they’re the result of a schooling culture that is creating exactly what it set out to create. Along the way, we teach students to be open to and trusting of marketing messages
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This is the essence of TOK- to get you to question knowledge claims and examine perspectives
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The way we save the written word, intellectual discourse, and reason is by training kids to care.
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should sell students on why.
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matters is that motivation is the only way to generate real learning, actual creativity, and the bias for action that is necessary for success.
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so if motivation is the key, should students only learn what they are passionate about? How do we open ourselves up to new passions?
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contact lenses hooked up to the Internet.
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skill of memorizing a fact for twelve hours (and then forgetting it) is not only useless, it’s insane.
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synthesize complex ideas and to invent new concepts is far more useful than drill and practice
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love this....so what would that look like, for example, in one of your courses?
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What we can’t do, though, is digitize passion. We can’t force the student to want to poke around and discover new insights online.
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Find the best homework questions ever devised and create world-class tutorials in how to solve each one
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When we free access to information from the classroom setting, the leverage of the great teacher goes way up
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I’m arguing that the connection revolution sets the table for a return of emotional labor. For the first time in a century, we have the opportunity to let digital systems do work while our teachers do labor.
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Isn’t it interesting that the movies we love about sports always feature the dark horse who dreams, the underdog who comes off the bench and saves the day?
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In Hansen’s estimation, it’s easy for natural gifts to escape the notice of people who aren’t focused on finding them and amplifying them.
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raise a generation of math hackers, literature hackers, music hackers and life hackers?
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Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. You don’t do followership for years and then someone anoints you and says, “here.” In fact, it’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority.
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the only thing holding us back is the status quo (and our belief in the permanence of status).
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School serves a real function when it activates a passion for lifelong learning
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Your work is worth more than mere congruence to an answer key
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Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run
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Will the next generation know more facts than we do, or will it be equipped to connect with data, and turn that data into information and leadership and progress?
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School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only dream big, but dream dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish them—not because they were chosen by a black-box process, but because they worked hard enough to reach them.
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The challenge is that the connected economy demands people who won’t hide, and it punishes everyone else. Standing out and standing for something are the attributes of a leader, and initiative is now the only posture that generates results.
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If the dream is huge, we get applause from our peers and our teachers, but are able to hide out because, of course, the dream is never going to come true
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We need more brave artists, too, and some poets. We need leaders and people passionate enough about their cause to speak up and go through discomfort to accomplish something. Can these skills be taught or amplified?
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reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results.
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When we associate reading with homework and tests, is it any wonder we avoid it?
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The effective writer in the connected revolution can see her ideas spread to a hundred or a million people. Writing (whether in public, now that everyone has a platform, or in private, within organizations) is the tool we use to spread ideas.
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think of every piece of writing you do as if was to be published to the entire world on the Internet
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Katherine did what so many kids are capable of doing, but aren’t expected to do.
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how to figure things out and make them happen
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Because we can see whom you know and what they think of you, because we can see how you’ve used the leverage the Internet has given you, because we can see if you actually are able to lead and actually are able to solve interesting problems—because of all these things, college means something new now.
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The definition of “best” is under siege.
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The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in U.S. News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?
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we’re about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass-market degrees.
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Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people.
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great point - status of libraries once extremely important..now, not so much...so how does our perception of these universities change? What can they do for you?
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Things like gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new
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How to be usefully wrong.
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If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
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We can (and must) teach these skills, starting with kids who are happy to build towers out of blocks (and watch them fall down) and continuing with the students who would never even consider buying a term paper to avoid an essay in college.
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It’s essential that the school of the future teach music. The passion of seeing progress, the hard work of practice, the joy and fear of public performance—these are critical skills for our future.
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Real learning happens when the student wants (insists!) on acquiring a skill in order to accomplish a goal.
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When access to information was limited, we needed to load students up with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to them, we need to load them up with understanding.
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What if we put 80 percent of that effort into making huge progress in teaching every kid to care, to set goals, to engage, to speak intelligently, to plan, to make good decisions, and to lead?
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Textbooks rarely teach us lessons we long remember. We learn about self-reliance when we get lost in the mall, we learn about public speaking when we have to stand up and give a speech.
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If you could add just one course Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer and head of the Museum of Natural History in New York, adds this one: “How to tell when someone else is full of it.” I’d augment that with: “And how to tell when you are.”
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Other topics that are just like computer programming
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Shepard Fairey,
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And being cared about, connected with, and pushed is the platform we need to do the emotional heavy lifting of committing to learn.
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our responsibility is to amplify drive, not use lack of talent as a cheap excuse for our failure to nurture dreams
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Let’s define dumb as being different from stupid. Dumb means you don’t know what you’re supposed to know. Stupid means you know it but make bad choices.
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Today, dumb is a choice, one that’s made by individuals who choose not to learn. If you don’t know what you need to know, that’s fixable. But first you have to want to fix it.
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Give me a motivated block builder with a jumbled box of Legos over a memorizing drone any day. If we can’t (or won’t, or don’t want to) win the race to the bottom, perhaps we could seriously invest in the race to the top.
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Because we’re in such a hurry to drill and practice the techniques on the SAT or Regents exam, we believe we don’t have time to have students spend a week to independently invent the method of completing the square.
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“what did you figure out today?”
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Is the memorization and drill and practice of advanced math the best way to sell kids on becoming scientists and engineers? If not, then let’s fix it.
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Is there a better way to learn than by doing?
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Davidson doesn’t use term papers in her class—instead, she has created a series of blog assignments as well as a rotating cast of student leaders who interact with each and every post. Her students write more, write more often, and write better than the ones down the hall in the traditional “churn it out” writing class. She is teaching her students how to learn, not how to be perfect.
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It doesn’t matter if you’re able to do high-level math or analyze memes over time. If you’re unable or unwilling to build bridges between the real world and those symbols, you can’t make an impact on the world.
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The shift now is this: school used to be a one-shot deal, your own, best chance to be exposed to what happened when and why. School was the place where the books lived and where the experts were accessible.
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Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.
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Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad)
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They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.
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ost-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resources are knowledge and insight, not access to data.
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The next library is filled with so many Web terminals that there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight—it’s the entire point.
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If we view the purpose of college as a stepping stone, one that helps you jump the line while looking for a good job, then a famous college is the way to go. The line for those good jobs is long, and a significant benefit of a famous college is more than superstition—associating with that fame may get you a better first job.
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Access to information is not the same as education
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Stanford University has put up many of their courses online for free, and some have more than 30,000 active students at a time.
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A university delivers four things: Access to information (not perspective or understanding, but access) Accreditation/A scarce degree Membership in a tribe A situation for growth (which is where you’d file perspective and understanding)
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Given that all the major universities ought to/should/will create a university of the people—giving access to information and great teachers to all (and if they don’t, someone should and will, soon)—which of the other three really matter?
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The best way to complain is to make things”
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g Dreams
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Dreams
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handy PDF
TEST: knowledge maps and stories - Google Docs - 1 views
Knowledge: Maps vs. Stories - 2 views
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Progress on TIB Film - 88 views
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please write what you accomplished in your "Studio Day" and display any evidence if you can. Also, write a brief plan of how you will finish by your due date (Sept. 28 for per. 6, Oct. 1 for the rest).
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@Casey - ok...we can do that. Let's move your class deadline until Oct. 2 :)
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@katie - please come see me if you need help..I have lots of experience with student video making :)
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@ Brad - you could, or you could explain your beliefs with examples and anecdotes more so that your film becomes about 3 minutes in length...or write an essay-type like Grace did.
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Stephen Fry Interview: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18 - 22 views
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4byn2CIwec0&feature=player_embedded
This is an amazingly heartfelt, funny, intelligent (wise) interview about life - including many topics we study in TOK (nature of knowledge, truth, perceptions, technology, ethics, etc.). I would like you to watch it (about 30 min with one ad in the middle you can skip), and comment on at least one part in this thread. You can write the time that pertains to your comment(s). Feel free to respond to others' comments. (video and topics below)
TOPICS:
2:25 Goals
3:05 "Work is more fun than fun"
4:37 Self-Absorbtion/ Egoism
5:52 The Blame Game
6:27 American Whiny TV
7:16 Real Heroism
7:43 Opportunity and Networking
8:21 Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
9:45 The Benefits of Travel
9:45 The Book Game
10:29 Perspectives
11:03 Admiration
12:45 What Real Learning Looks Like
14:14 On Giving
15:25 Regret / Life Lessons
16:34 On Knowledge, Truth, and Metadata
17:22 On Empiricism and Inquiry
18:20 On Authority
20:18 Socratic Questioning and Ethics
20:35 "Never stop being a child who asks why"
21:15 Age of Consent
21:50 Citizen Journalism (democracy and technology)
23:00 Conspiracy Theories
23:31 Transparency and Privacy
24:30 On Being Different
25:53 Creative Tension - Belonging and Standing Alone
26:51 Youth Culture
27:41 Connected World
29:27 YouTube Trolls
30:45 on Anti-Apple Madness
31:14 What Counts the Most in Life -
Period 6 TOKers did this in class and used Twitter. Here is a link to the Storify created from their tweets.
http://storify.com/amyburvall/stephen-fry-tok-period-6 -
Period R3 TOkers also tweeted - here are their reactions archived in Storify:
http://storify.com/amyburvall/stephen-fry-tok-perr3
Susan Greenfield on Storytelling on Vimeo - 0 views
Explainer: what is memory? - 0 views
Amy Burvall
IB Hum/TOK teacher, maker of history music vids, lover of Apple, photography, design, fashion. Also @historyteacherz Survived the big C so far. Edupunk!