Group items tagged

Hmmm... "Discussions about the future of education should never undersell the social import of sitting side by side, of holding conversations with students vastly unlike oneself, and of students being able to see their peers respond to their newly acquired insights..."

"In this "nothing left to take away" version, the LMS becomes the smooth, brown, plastic oval of Mr. Potato Head. All of the traditional "features" of the LMS are independent, swappable components that plug in via LTI - the way Mr. Potato Head's happy eyes are swappable for his angry eyes. Or, if you prefer a more technical analogy, the LMS becomes an operating system like iOS (but hopefully WAY more open) and all previous system features become apps that you can install and uninstall as you will."

Toward a Synthesis of Schooling and Apprenticeship

"If you've heard me speak in the last several months, you've probably heard me rail against "disposable assignments." These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They're assignments that add no value to the world - after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!"

""That's our goal: To make a computer much more like a human being, in the sense that it integrates data and can make decisions," Littlewood told me. "So the future definition of computer may be like the original. It may be like a person after all.""

Read this. Then read it again.

This comes up every so often. h/t D'Arcy Norman

The middle road . . . Comments are well worth reading.

"Think of yourself as someone who sells aspirin. And realize that the best customer for your aspirin is someone who is in pain. Not a lot of pain. Not a migraine. Just a little. Piaget called that pain "disequilibrium." Neo-Piagetians call it "cognitive conflict." Guershon Harel calls it "intellectual need." I'm calling it a headache. I'm obviously not originating this idea but I'd like to advance it some more. One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin. They may oblige you if you have some particular kind of authority in their lives but that aspirin will feel pointless. It'll undermine their respect for medicine in general."

Not that I think there's much actual merit in the "find your voice" theory, but you've just conflated being a good (that is, literary) writer with being an employed writer, and also your "voice" with grammatical minutiae. Read any essay by Benjamin and you'll find it unmistakable, no matter what the format of publication. Perhaps it's time to stop longing for the day you find your own voice. The second-worst kind of writing is committed by those struggling to find their voice (the worst kind being by those who think they have found it).

"The Nifty Assignments session at the annual SIGCSE meeting is all about gathering and distributing great assignment ideas and their materials. For each assignment, the web pages linked below describe the assignment and provides materials -- handouts, starter code, and so on."

"But first it is about this question: What is web writing in 2015? * * * You know, web writing - that chatty, affable, ephemeral old thing. The thing that prized personality over pomp, the thing with feathers (and links). What does it look like?"

"Deliberate rote memorization is an attempt to take a shortcut in the learning process… Instead of having people learn important facts by themselves through practice, we decide once and for all what the important facts are, we delay practice, and start with the memorization of the "important facts". "

Do millenials like to read? That is my question. My nephew doesn't.

The original Pew study's worth a look; much more nuance, especially breaking down the Millennials into three distinct groups. And this interesting finding: "Millennials' lives are full of technology, but they are more likely than their elders to say that important information is not available on the internet."