you blog: June 2009

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

in search of edupunk and visual hygiene

comments on both: one blog post linked to another blog post
and yet another blog post

straight from this last one: advice is to get ever more familiar with the intricacies of the wikipedia community, because the future of higher ed and ed tech is not about infrastructure, applications, and enterprise, it is about helping faculty and students navigate the cultural specificity of communities like wikipedia.

then straight from devijver when asked why visual hygiene - as opposed to mental hygiene:
two reasons mainly
1 - not everything mental is visual
2 - we focus much too much on visual cues, and we pay much too little attention to how they are perceived

wow. chaos is coming together.

in my little brain.

thank you great thinkers...for sharing your insight...for free.

how edupunk.

disrupting class, clay christensen

here's a little insight into the book i'm currently consuming...

"managing innovation successfully has been the primary focus of my research and writing at harvard. i'm a teacher, the husband and son of teachers, but i'm not an "expert" in education. i've practiced it for sure, but until we began writing this book, i hadn't studied education. nearly a decade ago, however, representatives of a national network of school reformers called education evolving - men such as ted kolderie, joe graba, ron wolk, and curtis johnson who had played pioneering roles in the chartered school movement - visited me with a proposal: "clay, if you'd just stand next to the world of public education and examine it through the lenses of your research on innovation, we bet you could understand more deeply how to improve our schools." kolderie's arguments about schools' institutional capacity for change and graba's refrain that, "we simply cannot get all the schools we need by trying to fix the ones we have," compelled me to accept their invitiation........the harvard business school is an extraordinary place for teachers to learn because in the case method of instruction, the teacher asks the questions and the students do the teaching.

clay writes about co-authorship since in his previous book, innovator's dilemma, he single authored it: for this book i wrote with 2 co-authors because i desperately need colleagues who see things differently from the way i do.

and johnson, one of his co-authors writes of the book: we respect the nation's push for standards and accountability and the effort over the last decade to open up the supply side through chartering laws. but it is a mistake to confuse either the permission to create new school or setting rigorous standards with learning. what matters is what happens in class, whether physical or virtual.

fun math/physics game

find the game here:
attractors

image is the logo for heroes of hope living with cystic fibrosis - check it out -

there's always room for jello

the daily insight this man offers can be yours - check out his jello post - then notice - right under his head - you can subscribe to his post through email.

you should.
do it.

the long tail

another read it for (dot) me review, the long tail by chris anderson.

ignore everybody

steve cunningham with read it for (dot) me reviews this great book by hugh macleod.

Monday, June 29, 2009

cognitive outsourcing - copy copy copy

more amazing insight from mark earl...

"stop trying to teach people messages and check whether they remember them, seems to me a pointless exercise, give them stuff to do which spreads through the population cause they enjoy it and allow them space to do something with it"

Sunday, June 28, 2009

more from richard feynman

the pleasure of finding things out.
this one is a little longer - 49 min.

i'm feeling like a kid in a candy store - discovering all these interviews.
and wishing my students could/would feel this way.

oh the pleasure
of finding things out.

check out these videos - interviews of richard feynman (amazing physicist)

ways of thinking - part 1

ways of thinking - part 2

magnets and why questions

he's adorable. i wish he were still alive. how did i miss him?

how do we have to behave to create real value

check out umair hague's thinking.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

one laptop per child

sugar on a stick program seen on ted talk by alan kay
virtual box - free software to create a virtual pc

and thanks to steven divijver (aka belgium connection) - here is a how to video to get yourself set up.

best use of class time

check out this video of dr carl wieman explaining best way to make class time worthwhile.

see my highlights of the video here.

edupunk

it's visual hygiene.

yay. oh yay. best news ever.

the cool belgium connection is creating a course for teachers - on new media. yay.
he's looking for ideas from you. click here to read and chime in.

you so want to be a part of this....

oh yay.

(for those who don't know - steven set up my netvibes.)