'complexity' Category
What now?
Maybe I’ll have ‘What now?‘ carved into my tombstone. It’s an ever-relevant question, and someone might even smile at it if they thought it was the last thing some dead guy wanted to know. Which it would be.
Now, after Doug Belshaw’s post - maybe even partly because of his question, Is Twitter Bad for [...]Fault Lines
Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, [...]
Meme: Passion Quilt
Social Justice
“All for the Common Good, each according to their abilities…”
Miss Proffe linked to me from her passion quilt meme post. I don’t always respond to these things, but I liked hers so much that I decided to join it.
The caption appears with the photo on flickr, but in Portuguese, and I discovered [...]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 [...]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 [...]
Setting the Dial on Rationality
Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story [...]
Putting Something Back
This coming week I begin teaching an after-school Web Tools for Teachers course. I’ve never done any professional development work, except on my own behalf, and I’m thinking about blogging and altruism today.
The idea of “sharing” is central to my understanding of blogging. I suppose that out of zillions of bloggers, others are [...]My NCLB Testimony
Since many people, including Linda Darling Hammond who offers (exceptionally) a comparative international perspective on education reform, are giving testimony in Washington this week at the ESEA reauthorization hearing…
“We’ve learned a lot, and we shouldn’t ignore that evidence,” said Miller, who is leading the overhaul of the law in the House, which starts this week. [...]Teaching to Inquire
Yesterday I talked to my students about the value of doing science - asking questions, predicting, observing, describing, measuring, classifying, generalizing, inferring, communicating - and I told them that I never did science in school. Science, for me, was reading the textbook and answering questions at the end of the chapter. We practiced none of [...]
Emergence
After a week with my new group of sixth graders, I want to get a handle on the basics of what some theorists call emergence. Teachers call it classroom management, which deceptively implies foreseeable results. Like other complex systems, the classroom is self-organizing, marked by numerous connections and unplanned interactions. These things, it seems to [...]
