Vientiane College Cyberspace Learning Community

I remember doing this in Junior High English and then in Linguistics at uni. Does it serve any purpose in helping students understand sentence structure?

I saw May had this on her laptop and everything typed would be read out. What uses could this have for our students?

I agree with the theme of this argument but not the points used to present it. I believe students have become less adept when it comes to forming and framing questions for research, and because of that, they either misunderstand their goals or readily lose sight of them, especially as a process. However, the argument that because a question is able to be google means it's a bad question is both a logical fallacy and a specious claim. Also, the interdependence position effaces the culture of criticism students use to derive context in even the most trivial situation because that's what Google is - trivia. I think the writer misses the phenomenon that Google, and social media, act as both a closed and open narrative, but either way, it's continuous and interdependent.

IL search article

Last year about this time in an AAS/NZAS meeting an article about 10 short assessments was looked at. The team then created some suggested applications of these. This article has extended that list and has some good ideas for wrapping up the term. PS If anyone wants a copy of the concrete ideas from last year, let me know.

Some interesting thoughts about teachers and change.

Thought this was interesting.

A nice little essay by a university professor about what he sees as the goals of teaching.

Thinking about unit / lesson planning.... I have a book about Understanding by Design if anyone is interested in seeing it.

This is pretty direct, and it hits on the point of education as transformative instead of distributive or directive. I think his reference to Winnicot's "holding environment", and it's awkward maternalism could be supplemented by good ol' Vygotsky's ZPD, Zone of Proximal Development, and his general theory of intersubjectivity, which provides us with the common term "scaffolding". Plus, I like that both Vygotsky and Piaget regard this portion of cognitive development as continuous and culturally recursive.