קטגוריה: למידה

The process benefit accrues when students make selections about what to note and when they use at least some of their own words to record that material. When students record lecture content using their words, it becomes easier for them to connect new material with things they already know. This process benefit is lost when students are provided with complete notes.

The researchers looked at the impact of the complete versus the partial notes on exam scores, final grades, and attendance. They found that those students who received partial notes performed better … and earned significantly higher course grades.

This seems extremely short-sighted to me, and somewhat old-fashioned with regard to what happens in the classroom. It sounds as though the recommendation is based on the idea that professors are going to lecture to the students so don't give them all the notes. It apparently leaves out the possibility of NOT lecturing constantly and replacing that time with active learning opportunities based on the complete notes that students could have.

I'm disturbed by the fascination with connection for connection's sake that I see in the first few minutes of the video. I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world – just like they do on Facebook or MySpace – and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.

We don't want to just ape the rest of the world in schools. Schools should remain something different than the lives kids lead outside of school. That's ok. That's even good. Because I think much of the input that kids have outside of school (marketing, specifically, I suppose) isn't a good thing. Schools should be different than that.

Because nowhere in that talk … is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

Because it is plenty hard… ask SLA teachers… it ain't easy. And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way… you can't have traditional credit hours… you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment – everything we do in schools – has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about.

And missing from this conversation is any sort of historical sense of education. The fact is ideas like the ones that Kay and Pink are talking about have been around in schools for a long, long time…. The technology can be transformative, but only when coupled with a sense of where you are going and why.

It’s the last day of school, the kids are gone for the summer, and I’m writing a little book review here. This book was not recommended to me. I found it almost by accident at the library when I was there on an errand. It was written nearly 60 years ago, and the fact that nobody ever mentioned it to me is the reason I’m writing this now.

No education professor, no colleague, no-body ever said to me, “You know, Dewey laid out a theory of what makes experiences educative – or not – in Experience and Education. And, along the way, he touched on just about every major controversy in the discourse of school reform.”

He suggests that we use ‘continuity’ and ‘interaction’ as two principles for educative experience, since they provide links from the past to the future, and require us to pay attention to the responses of students to whatever situation they may find themselves in. Preparing kids for an imagined future by insisting that they ignore the present is a self-defeating practice.

This kind of bright-eyed idealism is appealing, but alas, just not backed by fact. No, we don't know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they'd largely prefer the damn software works and doesn't need fixing. While we think and even hope that constructionist principles, as embodied in the free software culture, are helpful to education, presenting the hopes as rooted in fact is simply deceitful.

And there sure as hell doesn't exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.

The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software.

that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences.

As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don't know that it'll work, especially not without teachers. And that's okay – the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory – we thought that's what could make OLPC work.

יש טעם לציין שבנושא של המלאכה של צדיקים נעזרתי ברשת הלמידה האישית שלי. רציתי לבדוק אם אותה אמירה מופיעה במקורות באותן מילים, וקצת הסתבכתי. שני ידידים עזרו לי למצוא את המקור (שהוא דומה, אם כי לא זהה – מדובר ב-תלמוד בבלי, מסכת ברכות, דף לה, עמוד ב).

The book is a rallying cry for more creativity and arts, especially in K-12 education. It's hard to argue with that. Stories of schools canceling recess, arts, music, even history and science to focus on boosting math and reading test scores makes your heart hurt. It's beyond tragic to know in your bones that we are boring kids, wasting their time prepping for tests that don't matter, and ultimately losing them.

What if it's a misleading accumulation of misinterpreted anecdotes, pseudoscience, made up "exercises" and a profound misunderstanding of math, engineering, and science. Does this help or hurt educators who are trying to improve schools?

Pink describes so called left-brain characteristics as "sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic" and assigns them to programmers, accountants, and people who got good grades in school. According to Pink, these attributes are "…prized by hardheaded organizations, and emphasized in schools." This is in contrast to right-brain people who are "creators and caregivers, shortchanged by organizations, and neglected in schools."

To draw a hard line between the sciences and creativity shows a profound misunderstanding of both. I can tell you that programming is as close to composing music as anything else. It's something that you feel, that you can lose yourself in, that comes from a place inside that is sometimes unexplainable.

It's a shame that this beauty is often lost in the K-12 curriculum. But that's a problem with curriculum, not a problem with people's brains.

Building his case on such an impoverished view of creativity in the sciences weakens everything Pink says. It shows a profound misunderstanding of people who aren't like him and sloppy thinking about the cause and effect relationships he claims exist.

One of the many distinctions that I frequently make in my presentations is a comparison between how my generation views information and my children's generation. For us (oldsters), information is a product to be consumed. We purchase a book so that we can read it, a CD so that we can listen to it, a DVD so that we can watch it. As I watch my son and daughter in their information experiences, I see that at least part of the value of the content that they use is in what they can do with it – text, video, audio, images, that can be mixed and remixed together to make something new, valuable, or interesting. For them, information is a raw material.

Think about taking Roosevelt’s Day in Infamy speech and running it through a tagcloud generator, and then laying that next to Churchill’s Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat speech.