Archive for November, 2007
The Larger Question
Gerald Bracey asks 3 questions that might interest education technology bloggers.
The first two:
The immediate questions that come to mind — or certainly should come to mind — are “What constitutes a 21st century skill?” and then “Who gets to define such a skill?” The answer to the first question is “nobody knows” and the answer [...]Limitations
It’s getting dark here. Not just kind of dark. But real winter-dark. As in, I took a picture of the sunset yesterday at 3:00 while everyone was getting their coats on to leave school.
Strangely, it’s not real cold yet, and we’ve only got just a lousy couple inches of leaf-covered snow in the [...]Ethos and Blogos in Education
Miguel Guhlin was responding to Ryan Bretag’s Death of a blogger II about whether blogs could be used as “a collaborative tool for the betterment of education.” Miguel wrote:
Blogs are as alive as the people who keep them, the people who join the conversation, but in the end, blogging is a conversation with the author [...]Into the Enigma
My daughter called me from Europe last week to tell me that she’d seen Into the Wild. We talked about the local (Alaskan) reaction to the film, which was interesting to her since none of those issues are brought out in the movie. As it happens, I watched the film later that day, and I’m [...]
Diagnostic Intervention
Bill Kerr’s post triggered some thinking related to education and curriculum design. Asking what sort of computer interface is suitable for learning, Bill said
We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is “user friendly” and which gives us access to the function of the computer. The user friendly user [...]Reader Returns
My Google Reader snag from last week has been cleared up. After my help request, I got an email from “The Google Team” with a list of helpful suggestions, all of which I’d tried - things like clearing the browser cache, disabling browser extensions, and so forth. It took a week, but they’ve got it [...]
Herd Poisoning
Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood.
Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda [...]Considering the Source in Reading Programs
Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:
…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are [...]Aggregator Aggravation
If John Lennon’s song had another verse that said, “Imagine there’s no Google….” I’d know something about that because my Google Reader has been “loading” for the past day. No, I haven’t actually been watching the little spinning icon in the yellow bar because I’ve got better things to do, but every now and then [...]
Thick Description
We had parent conferences last week. They’re a time for me to learn more about my students, just as much as they give me a chance to report on their progress. For the parents who don’t make it to the meeting, I give them a call some time during the following week. But the phone [...]
