Group items tagged

"the "active" in "active use of technology" we are referring to is what is happening in the mind of the child. Active use for young children occurs when they use technologies in generative ways, that is, when they are generating insights, associations between new and existing knowledge, or creating their own content. This encourages more active cognitive processing that leads to deeper, longer lasting learning."

"In case you can't tell, I'm incredibly proud of all of my students.  They were permitted to choose their own subjects and conduct their own research, and they really enjoyed writing for a wider public beyond their professor. "

Education research has shown that an effective technique for developing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills is to expose students early and often to "ill-defined" problems in their field. An ill-defined problem is one that addresses complex issues and thus cannot easily be described in a concise, complete manner. Furthermore, competing factors may suggest several approaches to the problem, requiring careful analysis to determine the best approach.

"Another type of newsletter has taken off recently, aggregating links like Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs, Alexis Madrigal's 5 Intriguing Things, and 5 Useful Articles by Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong. This what Jason Kottke and Things Magazine have done for more than a decade on the web. Who? Weekly from Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber -all about "wholebrities" the not particularly famous people who somehow make their way in celebrity gossip magazines - definitely would have been a blog ten years ago (or a zine twenty years before that). A couple of TinyLetters are written in a voice that I haven't heard since the early years of blogging. Dan Hon's Things That Have Caught My Attention and 6 by Charlie Loyd write commentary that is somewhere in between editorial and diary, for friends and potential friends. "

"This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking. "

An early rough draft of the Hollywood Cemetery data . . .

"Intellectual skills, in contrast, have to do with a person's ways of reasoning, hypothesizing, exploring, understanding, and, in general, making sense of the world.  Every child is, by nature, an intellectual being--a curious, sense-making person, who is continuously seeking to understand his or her physical and social environments.  Each child is born with such skills and develops them further, in his or her own ways, through observing, exploring, playing, and questioning.  Attempts to teach intellectual skills directly inevitably fail, because each child must develop them in his or her own way, through his or her own self-initiated activities.  But adults can influence that development through the environments they provide.  "

"Of course, I am little disappointed that the students aren't all actually reading Plato. But I'm also impressed with their ability to find and use the content they need, just when they need it. It is still pretty early in the semester so they haven't yet realized that spewing facts does nothing to improve their overall grade. Soon, they will be confused to discover that I don't assess according to one's ability to retain information. It will take them a while to adjust, most have over a decade of schooling that has systematically conditioned them to believe in the value of isolated proofs."