how to create a sandbox
___________________
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
joe bower
for the love of learning: Interview with Mona Knudslien & Joe Bower: "Here is a 12 minute interview featuring my past principal Mona Knudslien and me. Together, we discuss how a school can innovate and improv..."
the brooklyn free school
great site
i love most all of their wording ... esp in faq on - what about the basics, etc.
____________________________
i love most all of their wording ... esp in faq on - what about the basics, etc.
____________________________
patricia ryan
languages today: 6000
in 90 years: 600
a language dies every 14 days
teaching english has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business
the best ed, is to be found in the uni's of the UK and the US, so everyone wants an english edu
but if you aren't native english and you want it you have to pass a test
if i met a monolingual dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would i keep them out of our uni's?
but.. all the research is in english..
well - what about translation?
love having a global language, but against having it as a barrier..
this system equated intelligence with a knowledge of english, which is quite arbitrary
the shoulders on which we stand did not have to pass an english test.. ie: einstein
toefl test costs - $150 - very prohibited to pour people
when a language dies, we don't know what we lose with that language
some children cannot pass our exams. and so we'll never know what they know. let us not keep ourselves and them in the dark.
mind your language... use it to spread good ideas.
_____________________________________
rachel botsman
tedxsydney:
technology is enabling trust between strangers
social networks and real time technologies are taking us back
ie: power drill - used 12-13 min in its lifetime... what you need is the hole not the drill
car costs $8000 a yr to run.. yet sits idle for 23 hours a day.
zipcar and goget
site
___________________________________
____________________________
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
sal khan
interesting in q&a -
doesn't see crowd sourcing on video based lecture
possibly but would have to be consistent with their brand
to get people to do the homework - best way is to track it or to gamifying it
1000's of people's behavior has changed with badges
5th graders went into code to find out how many pts needed to get badges
could you make this work for grammar, writing or competition
sal thinks grammar is perfect for it
writing and competition is much more activity based, so doesn't see it as much
another asked how to help -
and they all agreed - can't have everyone doing videos... they might not be good
so how can they help..
money
modules on grammar, etc, translations
how much prep:
try to prepare my brain, but not script my lecture
currently khan is in families where one parent is in ed.. or google families
he thinks once khan exists.. catalyst for laptops and broadband
cool that he says no grade levels..
how do you dance around copyright?
i have a very loose interpretation of fair use
listed places he has taken something from and then said...
i wouldn't take something from mcgraw hill and do it..
motivation problem
allow them to do it at their own pace - no embarrassment, allow them to get badges for motivation...
learning styles are a myth, there's actually good instruction and bad instruction (?)
making sure there's enough material out there that responds to different types of learners (?)
how have you been able to tap into unschoolers, sadbury schools, because general concepts are not new
mastery-based learning, mastering something before you move on..
when people watch a lecture they zone out after 10 min...
huge amount of research, just didn't exist because it wasn't practical until now..
[how is this practical? seems like people using it are using it just to get the curriculum done..]
khan academy - finally we have something that is something to do with the tech in the classroom... (?)
encountered any resistence? no.
now 5th graders who aren't doing the chain rule, and parents are getting worried
can college be disrupted - google could play a big role in that
best students are already using khan academy, so spend 6 mos at google, or wherever, do a series of projects, they are essentially your transcript, instead of paying tuition, we'll pay you
(interesting there - like our - college is quasi career, hatcheries)
faculties become the ceo's, kids don't pay to go to school, they get paid to go..
how do you do the next level of deep understanding
simulation based - ie: some unlock
maybe oral exams - to get to next level, have a skype oral exam... -
clear how this helps at elementary level, but worried about curriculum at higher levels..
you've cut the feedback loop here... is that a problem?
that would get closer to the peer to peer writing thing
i'm scared that this is going to be so successful it is going to dumb down the curriculum. so easy for teachers..
for bad teachers - they will at least get better at tests
for good teachers - khan has your back on that - we can go deeper in class
changes the convo at the dinner table when parents are doing the same math problems
is there a chance kids are gaming the system... just figuring out the game? are they retaining?
yes - but we are watching them... they sight the gaming and they continue to ask previous questions
have to add more modules to make sure people are understanding rather than just getting the mechanics
how do you assess, label kids, because people are expecting that?
khan thinks it's a good idea to have standardized tests, but do them when you are ready for them
a lot of people, when you say no grades, it's touchy feeling, the opposite is true, everyone should want 100% mastery... if you go through all of it and still don't know when to use it, what good is the non-mastery
if we say you know this... you know it at the A - level.
very interesting...
____________________________________________
will richardson
at bendigo hashtag: #bendigo11
his slideshare
RT @dmgregg33: #bendigo11 #willrich45
Why don't we ask our kids how THEY learn?
RT @bgosteve: #bendigo11 #willrich45 schools can no longer compete on content. Content is everywhere. schools MUST be about learning, n ...
_______________________________________
his slideshare
RT @dmgregg33: #bendigo11 #willrich45
Why don't we ask our kids how THEY learn?
RT @bgosteve: #bendigo11 #willrich45 schools can no longer compete on content. Content is everywhere. schools MUST be about learning, n ...
_______________________________________
Sunday, March 27, 2011
michael wesch
thanks to a tweet from @ianchia and a post by Sumeet Moghe @sumeetmoghe
Media is therefore not just tools and communication - they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.
Our choices are so incredibly broad, you're not born knowing who you are and want to be. @mwesch #ls2011
The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.
This deeply matters. We know ourselves through our relations with others. New media is changing how we perceive ourselves and how we relate to each other. We have a cultural inversion today. There's a tension. We're expressing individualism like never before but we value community. We talk independence but we value relationships.
What's important to note is that knowledge is all around us. The classroom is not the place where we should be going for knowledge. As architects of culture, we need to understand this phenomenon and our environment. The walls of the classroom are not the truth. Information is not just a part of these walls. Authority isn't single source. The uncultured project is an example of someone walking out of class to change the world - Shawn Anand's story is truly inspirational.
We need three things:
___________________________________
Media is therefore not just tools and communication - they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.
Our choices are so incredibly broad, you're not born knowing who you are and want to be. @mwesch #ls2011
The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.
This deeply matters. We know ourselves through our relations with others. New media is changing how we perceive ourselves and how we relate to each other. We have a cultural inversion today. There's a tension. We're expressing individualism like never before but we value community. We talk independence but we value relationships.
What's important to note is that knowledge is all around us. The classroom is not the place where we should be going for knowledge. As architects of culture, we need to understand this phenomenon and our environment. The walls of the classroom are not the truth. Information is not just a part of these walls. Authority isn't single source. The uncultured project is an example of someone walking out of class to change the world - Shawn Anand's story is truly inspirational.
We need three things:
- Real world problems;
- People working together;
- Leveraging technology effectively
___________________________________
Saturday, March 26, 2011
pranav mistry
this is the guy on the ted with patti maes
and this was 2009
trying to bring a part of the physical world into the computer world
how about take digital world and paint physical world on it
you can carry your digital world with you.. any object can become your interface
this will help us in some way to stay human.. help us stay connected to the physical world
more interested in bringing tech to masses, rather than keeping tech in lab.
______________________________
mark pesce
sharing talk t educators in australia oct 29
sharing things or sharing thoughts
we teach kids how to share things, we never have to teach them how to share their thoughts [even tacit?]
1999 - shawn fanning sharing napster to share mp3 files freely, within 3 mos, millions of college students freely trading music, the idea of copyright and music piracy didn't enter their heads, it was all about sharing
when you connect people together they will automatically share the things they care about
for the first time, we can now share
same way steam engine did to human muscle power 200 yrs ago
in 2001 - here comes wikipedia
knowledge seems to have an almost gravitational quality, now just under 3 mill articles
wikipedia is only the most successful in producing a collective intelligence
wikipedia leaves us smarter - gives us opportunity to load up on facts, the best possible facts
if we peel off all the tech of wikipedia -
wikipedia is an agreement to share what we know
[yes - so can't that be our measure.. what have you shared back in wikipedia]
its that agreement that historians will be writing about in 100 yrs time, because that agreement
that agreement is one of the engines that is driving our cultures forward
1999 - teacher ratings dot com. like wikipedia it grew slowly, and became
rate my professors, owned by mtv
[perfect model for how we determine who's together in a room in your school design it]
10 mill readings of 1 mill profs
changes the power balance within the university
sharing has destabilizing all of our institutions
something big, all being driven by our ability to share
3 big events that will revolutionize ed in australia in the next decade - a compressed wave of change:
1) australia lives with medium to low broadband speeds, because of metering, since 1990's
the hidden lesson of the last 15 yrs is that the internet is something that needs to be rationed very carefully because there's not enough to go around. plans: 100 megabit per second connections to every home, business and school - govern wants this to be unmetered, they want the internet to be freely available
we don't know what will happen with that. critics say there's no good reason for it,
but there are schools often block youtube, not because it's distracting, but because they can't handle demand for bandwidth
broad band is the oxygen of the 21st century, once we can breath freely new horizons will open up
no predicted napster or youtube or skype, before we had access, those who say it's not important haven't watched history
2017 - 100 megabit/second will be medium
2) computer to every student in yrs 9-12
radically alters the power balance in the classroom, more students had more facility than their teachers
schools don't have budget or time for prof develop
students don't realize power - good or bad
currently, they're bling, not being used for what they can be
3) the national curriculum [of course i question this - help me guys - i don't see it]
math, science and history ready for 2011, the core elements
dr evan arthur, commonwealth dept, he describe the docs as a greenfields, a series of strings that could be handled like strings of a christmas tree.. so every educator in australia working to the same strings.. opportunity to start again, throw out old rule book and start fresh.
national curric with all the above 1&2 could fundamentally alter the future of ed in australia
another path
rather than doing nat curric as a done deal, what if wiser if offer as open invitation, what but not how, teachers are free to pursue their own pedagogical ends. everyone is going to be pulling in the same direction, so makes sense to share that experience [ok - this is better, but i still see compromise, less buy-in, like finally getting the chance to swim in the ocean but deciding it would be safer if you let your brother do it and tell you about it]
board of studies.org, rate teachers.com, blogs, etc, but if it all happens out there... we would miss out.
teacher preps at beginning of year.. checking into resources for nat curric string that other teachers have shared - ie: education.edu, podcasts, lesson plans, etc
that ed needs to create an effective experience for students, then they share what they did back
curriculum becomes a focal point for organization - a point of contact rather than a point of order
[why can't wikipedia become the focal point? then there's something for everybody, and if not, they create it]
students can use those strings to contact other students
know where to go for help and advice
doesn't constitute peeking at the answers.. gives them every advantage of working through the standards [ugh]
straighterline.com $99 a month - tertiary - could take it down to secondary
not just about ed, but about assessment - always open global market for ed
random posts on the national curriculum in australia
a nat curric
mary ann's awesome 6-12 english curriculum via ian
and more from mary ann on standards ASCD
from Mark's blog - everything old is new again
your brains have limited space to store all those relationships – it’s actually the most difficult thing we do, the most cognitively all-encompassing task. Forget physics – relationship are harder, and take more brainpower
That is precisely what Facebook gives us. It makes those implicit connections explicit. It allows those connections to become conduits for ever-greater-levels of connection. Once those connections are made, once they become a regular feature of our life, we can grow beyond the natural limit of 150. That doesn’t mean you can manage any of these relationships well – far from it. But it does mean that you can keep the channels of communication open. That’s really what all of these social networks are: turbocharged Rolodexes, which allow you to maintain far more relationships than ever before possible.
Once these relationships are established, something beings to happen quite naturally: people begin to share.
__________________________________________
sharing things or sharing thoughts
we teach kids how to share things, we never have to teach them how to share their thoughts [even tacit?]
1999 - shawn fanning sharing napster to share mp3 files freely, within 3 mos, millions of college students freely trading music, the idea of copyright and music piracy didn't enter their heads, it was all about sharing
when you connect people together they will automatically share the things they care about
for the first time, we can now share
same way steam engine did to human muscle power 200 yrs ago
in 2001 - here comes wikipedia
knowledge seems to have an almost gravitational quality, now just under 3 mill articles
wikipedia is only the most successful in producing a collective intelligence
wikipedia leaves us smarter - gives us opportunity to load up on facts, the best possible facts
if we peel off all the tech of wikipedia -
wikipedia is an agreement to share what we know
[yes - so can't that be our measure.. what have you shared back in wikipedia]
its that agreement that historians will be writing about in 100 yrs time, because that agreement
that agreement is one of the engines that is driving our cultures forward
1999 - teacher ratings dot com. like wikipedia it grew slowly, and became
rate my professors, owned by mtv
[perfect model for how we determine who's together in a room in your school design it]
10 mill readings of 1 mill profs
changes the power balance within the university
sharing has destabilizing all of our institutions
something big, all being driven by our ability to share
3 big events that will revolutionize ed in australia in the next decade - a compressed wave of change:
1) australia lives with medium to low broadband speeds, because of metering, since 1990's
the hidden lesson of the last 15 yrs is that the internet is something that needs to be rationed very carefully because there's not enough to go around. plans: 100 megabit per second connections to every home, business and school - govern wants this to be unmetered, they want the internet to be freely available
we don't know what will happen with that. critics say there's no good reason for it,
but there are schools often block youtube, not because it's distracting, but because they can't handle demand for bandwidth
broad band is the oxygen of the 21st century, once we can breath freely new horizons will open up
no predicted napster or youtube or skype, before we had access, those who say it's not important haven't watched history
2017 - 100 megabit/second will be medium
2) computer to every student in yrs 9-12
radically alters the power balance in the classroom, more students had more facility than their teachers
schools don't have budget or time for prof develop
students don't realize power - good or bad
currently, they're bling, not being used for what they can be
3) the national curriculum [of course i question this - help me guys - i don't see it]
math, science and history ready for 2011, the core elements
dr evan arthur, commonwealth dept, he describe the docs as a greenfields, a series of strings that could be handled like strings of a christmas tree.. so every educator in australia working to the same strings.. opportunity to start again, throw out old rule book and start fresh.
national curric with all the above 1&2 could fundamentally alter the future of ed in australia
another path
rather than doing nat curric as a done deal, what if wiser if offer as open invitation, what but not how, teachers are free to pursue their own pedagogical ends. everyone is going to be pulling in the same direction, so makes sense to share that experience [ok - this is better, but i still see compromise, less buy-in, like finally getting the chance to swim in the ocean but deciding it would be safer if you let your brother do it and tell you about it]
board of studies.org, rate teachers.com, blogs, etc, but if it all happens out there... we would miss out.
teacher preps at beginning of year.. checking into resources for nat curric string that other teachers have shared - ie: education.edu, podcasts, lesson plans, etc
that ed needs to create an effective experience for students, then they share what they did back
curriculum becomes a focal point for organization - a point of contact rather than a point of order
[why can't wikipedia become the focal point? then there's something for everybody, and if not, they create it]
students can use those strings to contact other students
know where to go for help and advice
doesn't constitute peeking at the answers.. gives them every advantage of working through the standards [ugh]
[this is not an ed utopia - because the learner is still not learning per choice.. they are learning per a given set to choose from.. am i missing something?]
i think there is an even better path -straighterline.com $99 a month - tertiary - could take it down to secondary
not just about ed, but about assessment - always open global market for ed
[so i ask my friends in australia.. what do you think of the national standards in australia
whatedsaid @monk51295 It's restrictive for a school like mine. There are things that are good, but it's very prescriptive.
whatedsaid @monk51295 I don't like the history section, it's very content based.
jennyluca @monk51295 @suewaters worried it will become the testing regimen you experience in the US. Has potential if bureaucracy stays out of it.
i just wonder why we think learning has to be predetermined. i'm thinking that compromises so much of the power the web now allows.
it really does seem to me like words published in light.. we're missing the potential..
i just see whenever we decide on any content, not everyone will agree. nothing is for everyone. that's how we've gotten to too little time to cover everything... everyone keeps adding what they think, or interpreting how they think. so amazing is rare. we just don't have time. and with a given prescription, the urge to measure is ginormous.
it seems, since we can, the curriculum - or glue - that holds us all together should be - how to learn, practiced over and over no matter what you are learning - detox. (unless of course you don't need detox, then you wouldn't have needed a curriculum, as you are in the zone and pure and still haven't squelched that natural learning within you)]
random posts on the national curriculum in australia
a nat curric
mary ann's awesome 6-12 english curriculum via ian
and more from mary ann on standards ASCD
from Mark's blog - everything old is new again
your brains have limited space to store all those relationships – it’s actually the most difficult thing we do, the most cognitively all-encompassing task. Forget physics – relationship are harder, and take more brainpower
That is precisely what Facebook gives us. It makes those implicit connections explicit. It allows those connections to become conduits for ever-greater-levels of connection. Once those connections are made, once they become a regular feature of our life, we can grow beyond the natural limit of 150. That doesn’t mean you can manage any of these relationships well – far from it. But it does mean that you can keep the channels of communication open. That’s really what all of these social networks are: turbocharged Rolodexes, which allow you to maintain far more relationships than ever before possible.
Once these relationships are established, something beings to happen quite naturally: people begin to share.
[such good stuff here - read the post for sure]
love this part - rings of kevin kelly's what tech wants:
You’re going to need good tools to make this ambitious project a reality, and you’re going to need them for two entirely contradictory reasons: first, to be able to listen to everything going on everywhere, and second, because that chaotic din will deafen you. You need tools to help you find out what’s going on, but, more significantly, you need tools to help you winnow the wheat from the chaff.
and i think this is huge.. it's all about conversation, conversation and community:
don’t think of the Web as an advertising medium. Sure, it had a few good years where a business presence online was simply a great way to get your marketing materials out there inexpensively, but those days are over. Today everything is about engagement. Engagement begins with conversation.
__________________________________________
Friday, March 25, 2011
shelly blake plock
shelly's challenge
fav so far...
fav so far...
- 24/7 all you can learn buffet. Students choose when, what, and how to learn based on passion and life goals. lab's idea right now: ours: nothing is for everyone. choice empowers. your school/life design it. 1-1 mentors. share back: ie wikipedia. be you. ___________________________________
mark harvoth
up - uncultured project
apart from being homeless, we're just like anybody else.. - eric sheptock
recycled laptops
robert egger - dc central kitchen - using food from restaurants that is unserved
it's not about charity, it's about community
the way you spend your money has power
you chase money, you run forever, you chase results, money comes to you
_____________________________
apart from being homeless, we're just like anybody else.. - eric sheptock
recycled laptops
robert egger - dc central kitchen - using food from restaurants that is unserved
it's not about charity, it's about community
the way you spend your money has power
you chase money, you run forever, you chase results, money comes to you
_____________________________
erik hersman
via the author's of experience is what we make it
Erik is @whiteafrican
african fractals, something going on that many don't realize, so started looking more seriously about how african's design
Erik Hersman: Keynote
from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
bandwidth.mobiles.culture
Erik writes 2 blogs:
afrigadget - solving every day problems with african ingenuity
whiteafrica - high tech stuff, his personal blog
ushahidi - one of co-founders
ihub in nirobi - one of founders, co-working and community commons, for high tech community in niarobi, over 2600 members
maker fair africa, ghana and niarobi - innovation born of necessity
bandwidth in context,
you can't take about africa
aptivate - out of london, specializes in dealing with low bandwidth..
size of pages
fb (zero rated) so most fundamental change in last 2 years in africa
tropically tolerant software
paradigm mobiles
default device
blurring of lines between web and mobile - device is less important
mocality
lowest end nokia phone
he caries what his users use
40% of subscribers don't have credit on their phone, they load it up every 90 days and don't make calls they just take them
can you zero rate data connectivity through mobiles and get to the rest of the market
iyam.mobi- anyone with a mobile phone (no email even) can sign up and then go there and create apps sms
might not be the sexiest thing, or the prettiest thing, but it's what people use
it's more expensive than data, but it's what people use
in africa, the phone number always trumps the email address
mobile payments - more empessa - more money transferred everyday in kenya using empessa than western union does for the world in a year
mxit - hs 12 mill users - because they understood that the mobile counts first - south africa and indonesia -
mpedigree - check if your meds are real - fight counterfeit drugs
john white bochie, had gone up from others, nokia merchants, for marrying up mobile phones and pc's with bottle distributers, decreases the time to market by 4 days
interactive design culture
people
jeb chumba: african digital art
so tons of sites, but
the challenge:
even if you don't like olpc, olpc is important because it gets computers in the hands of kids
who's been trained in field of interaction design: 57% self taught
if you're living in rural africa, you don't ever come into contact with the tech to be able to be the people to do it, so all the builders are middle class or above, how to you get to the group that needs it..
nairo bits - a Digital Design School that provides education to the Nairobi slum youth
the case for ushahidi
problem - mobile phones were being used to spread a lot of hate
so juliana rotich, erik, ory okolloh, and david koba banded together to start ushahidi
allows people to participate, instead of one organization, many to many instead of one to many
aid is more effective if the loop is round, close that loop by feeding info to the citizens
disconnect between what they were hearing from sources and from the media was wide
at the time they built ushahidi, it was using tech that was already 3 years old, anybody could have built it, it's the use of this tech in a more dynamic way that is so groundbreaking
saving one life alone has validated ushahidi entirely
openness, innovation, community
however you can get the info in, we can take it and map it - now completely global
took them 3 days to build that app in 2008, then took it down to 3 hours, then 3 min,
now there are all kinds of apps for it
currently over 10000 deployments of ushahidi globally
in australia: pothole theory: you care about the pothole on your street but not the one 2 streets over
in atlanta: aggregating crime
voice of kibera: open street mappers, wiki for mapping, training up local guys in the slums to use gps's and map their neighborhood, and now is the most densely mapped space in all of open street map
biggest thing for ushahidi - haiti - 4636
info from people in need and get it to people who need help
but have to do translation, categorize, etc, etc, and all in 10 min
170 situation room volunteers in 4 diff universities, 3 in us one in switzerland
10000 volunteers at disposal in haite, only used a couple thousand - things google maps didn't know
local pop also translated into 3 languages
uchaguzi - them using ushahidi in home town
effort to see if they could deal with slow burn
everybody's upset but not upset enough to do something about it - huduma
there's a new generations of africa that are using tech to deal with inefficiencies
most inefficiencies are government and media, always been very top down
using tech to bring info from the bottom up
kenya is a leading example of how to do mobile payments, anywhere in the world, who would have expected that 3 years ago
the new africa - trying to solve problems in their neighborhood, ...
___________________________________________
Erik is @whiteafrican
african fractals, something going on that many don't realize, so started looking more seriously about how african's design
Erik Hersman: Keynote
from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
bandwidth.mobiles.culture
Erik writes 2 blogs:
afrigadget - solving every day problems with african ingenuity
whiteafrica - high tech stuff, his personal blog
ushahidi - one of co-founders
ihub in nirobi - one of founders, co-working and community commons, for high tech community in niarobi, over 2600 members
maker fair africa, ghana and niarobi - innovation born of necessity
bandwidth in context,
you can't take about africa
aptivate - out of london, specializes in dealing with low bandwidth..
size of pages
fb (zero rated) so most fundamental change in last 2 years in africa
tropically tolerant software
paradigm mobiles
default device
blurring of lines between web and mobile - device is less important
mocality
lowest end nokia phone
he caries what his users use
40% of subscribers don't have credit on their phone, they load it up every 90 days and don't make calls they just take them
can you zero rate data connectivity through mobiles and get to the rest of the market
iyam.mobi- anyone with a mobile phone (no email even) can sign up and then go there and create apps sms
might not be the sexiest thing, or the prettiest thing, but it's what people use
it's more expensive than data, but it's what people use
in africa, the phone number always trumps the email address
mobile payments - more empessa - more money transferred everyday in kenya using empessa than western union does for the world in a year
mxit - hs 12 mill users - because they understood that the mobile counts first - south africa and indonesia -
What is MXit?
Free online mobile chat, and so much more. Shop, play and explore a multi-million user social network.john white bochie, had gone up from others, nokia merchants, for marrying up mobile phones and pc's with bottle distributers, decreases the time to market by 4 days
interactive design culture
people
jeb chumba: african digital art
so tons of sites, but
the challenge:
even if you don't like olpc, olpc is important because it gets computers in the hands of kids
who's been trained in field of interaction design: 57% self taught
if you're living in rural africa, you don't ever come into contact with the tech to be able to be the people to do it, so all the builders are middle class or above, how to you get to the group that needs it..
nairo bits - a Digital Design School that provides education to the Nairobi slum youth
the case for ushahidi
problem - mobile phones were being used to spread a lot of hate
so juliana rotich, erik, ory okolloh, and david koba banded together to start ushahidi
allows people to participate, instead of one organization, many to many instead of one to many
aid is more effective if the loop is round, close that loop by feeding info to the citizens
disconnect between what they were hearing from sources and from the media was wide
at the time they built ushahidi, it was using tech that was already 3 years old, anybody could have built it, it's the use of this tech in a more dynamic way that is so groundbreaking
saving one life alone has validated ushahidi entirely
openness, innovation, community
however you can get the info in, we can take it and map it - now completely global
took them 3 days to build that app in 2008, then took it down to 3 hours, then 3 min,
now there are all kinds of apps for it
currently over 10000 deployments of ushahidi globally
in australia: pothole theory: you care about the pothole on your street but not the one 2 streets over
in atlanta: aggregating crime
voice of kibera: open street mappers, wiki for mapping, training up local guys in the slums to use gps's and map their neighborhood, and now is the most densely mapped space in all of open street map
biggest thing for ushahidi - haiti - 4636
info from people in need and get it to people who need help
but have to do translation, categorize, etc, etc, and all in 10 min
170 situation room volunteers in 4 diff universities, 3 in us one in switzerland
10000 volunteers at disposal in haite, only used a couple thousand - things google maps didn't know
local pop also translated into 3 languages
uchaguzi - them using ushahidi in home town
effort to see if they could deal with slow burn
everybody's upset but not upset enough to do something about it - huduma
there's a new generations of africa that are using tech to deal with inefficiencies
most inefficiencies are government and media, always been very top down
using tech to bring info from the bottom up
kenya is a leading example of how to do mobile payments, anywhere in the world, who would have expected that 3 years ago
the new africa - trying to solve problems in their neighborhood, ...
___________________________________________
Thursday, March 24, 2011
james paul gee
James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.
games are so complex, things a kid will never get in school
assessments drive school today. we're not going to change the paradigm unless we change the test.
why are we not tempted to test a person after playing 6 weeks of halo, but we feel compelled to test a person after 6 weeks of algebra
you trust the design and learning of that halo game better than you trust the design and learning of that algebra class
design learning that is so rich and so deep, the idea that we let a test made in a different state, trump what happens outside of that learning will become primitive
not pushing digital media, but situated and embodied learning: being able to solve problems with what you know, just not knowing a bunch of facts, being able to do stuff
return to earlier age, 18-19th cent most scientists were amateurs, people wrote letters, instead of journal articles, helped each other, mentored each other
schools in america, for 1st time in history, have genuine competition, you can learn whatever, however, outside of school, some are doing it for profit
it's in some schools, library, and affluent homes
it's making skill and drill schools look bad
already operating by deeper forms of assessment, where assessment is integrated and used to customize learning
Henry Jenkins interview with Gee
Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable.
situated embodied learning: that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum.
__________________________________
gever tulley
from Ewan McIntosh's new post
we can offer the kids time
leave with a deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around.
success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed
another video on Ewan's post:
inetresting what you learn when you zoom out, by fast forwarding, a different perspective to how we spend out time, on what, and why.
things we normally miss, come to light.
______________________________
we can offer the kids time
leave with a deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around.
success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed
another video on Ewan's post:
inetresting what you learn when you zoom out, by fast forwarding, a different perspective to how we spend out time, on what, and why.
things we normally miss, come to light.
______________________________
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
mary ann reily
bravo sweet... i love this
In contrast, this new vision is based on a model of distributed communities of practice, where knowledge is composed among and between people. Knowledge is not what is kept in one's head, but rather what is made by a collective
The academic coaching experience will posit experienced others (teachers, peers, and virtual "teacher-learners") to work alongside students in work (passion projects) the students and coaches co-determine.
_________________________
In contrast, this new vision is based on a model of distributed communities of practice, where knowledge is composed among and between people. Knowledge is not what is kept in one's head, but rather what is made by a collective
The academic coaching experience will posit experienced others (teachers, peers, and virtual "teacher-learners") to work alongside students in work (passion projects) the students and coaches co-determine.
_________________________
Sunday, March 20, 2011
rey junco
his talk at sxsw - using twitter to improve college student engagement
started saying..
i'm just going to go with the wisdom of the crowd, nice..
pos:
time spent on facebook, 4th strongest neg predictor of engagement, but what they were doing was more strongly related
time spent on fb neg, but time related checking things on fb not neg at all
all studies have been correlational and don't let us determine causality
could be that less engaged students spend more time on fb
what you want to do is have some controls
why twitter
needed to find a group that wasn't using tech
twitter penetration hasn't been as heavy as fb, but with faculty, more have been more into integrating twitter
too much drama on fb
does twitter have an affect on engagement?
does twitter have an affect on 1st sem grades?
control group used ning, other used twitter (one twitter account and followed each other - how is that twitter? - aren't you missing the others out there? - i guess i don't understand.)
sent out class reminders, which led to study groups
students pulled profs in more than on ning - positive feedback loop
Rey is a quantitative researcher
end of semester - findings
engagement - twitter group more engaged
twitter kids kept talking to the profs, the students on ning didn't
the research part was a huge time commitment, calling on the api daily to get the data
but much more efficient, ie: to get these results would have had to spend much more face time
grades - the twitter group had significantly higher gpa's by half point, very robust, randomized at the level of the section, if would have done it at level of student.. would have been higher
left alone, does student use of twitter have affect on engagement, so tried in large lecture course - did a hashtag and projected it up on the screen, but didn't bring attention to it, let them self-select if they wanted to used twitter or not, no encouragement as to how to use it
same design, some using, some not, ended up 50/50.
no results yet
no control
results:
usage is not usage
how much time do you spend studying? what are you doing when you are studying?
time is not time
on the surface, looked like they were getting into course content, there was no affect
engagement clearly is important, the connections/modeling/using it from profs is important
if you leave students to their own devices, they'll use twitter and other soc devices, they'll use it for lots of things
but if you coop with them, you can focus success toward engagement and grades
important to engage with students. ed is a relationship
(so weren't those results more about the size of the class and the original relationships before twitter)
in study #1 - one student posted tweet on wanting to harm self, other, that didn't know them tweeted back, had a convo in public, got the profs to notice and bring student in to talk to
instructional prompts were same between ning and twitter group, twitter was crazy into it
all this costs so much. crazy.
what is it about the students that picked up on the twitter thing..
(weren't they already in a closer knit setting?)
2nd group was open, other wasn't
1st group all freshman, 2nd group fresh and soph
Rey hopes what comes out of his work - kids using communities that go beyond college
lms (learning management system) rant... static systems, incredibly non-engaging
the magic and fun happens with comments in a blog post, and twitter and facebook
doing research on fb is really hard?.. how so
_________________________________________________
started saying..
i'm just going to go with the wisdom of the crowd, nice..
pos:
time spent on facebook, 4th strongest neg predictor of engagement, but what they were doing was more strongly related
time spent on fb neg, but time related checking things on fb not neg at all
all studies have been correlational and don't let us determine causality
could be that less engaged students spend more time on fb
what you want to do is have some controls
why twitter
needed to find a group that wasn't using tech
twitter penetration hasn't been as heavy as fb, but with faculty, more have been more into integrating twitter
too much drama on fb
does twitter have an affect on engagement?
does twitter have an affect on 1st sem grades?
control group used ning, other used twitter (one twitter account and followed each other - how is that twitter? - aren't you missing the others out there? - i guess i don't understand.)
sent out class reminders, which led to study groups
students pulled profs in more than on ning - positive feedback loop
Rey is a quantitative researcher
end of semester - findings
engagement - twitter group more engaged
twitter kids kept talking to the profs, the students on ning didn't
the research part was a huge time commitment, calling on the api daily to get the data
but much more efficient, ie: to get these results would have had to spend much more face time
grades - the twitter group had significantly higher gpa's by half point, very robust, randomized at the level of the section, if would have done it at level of student.. would have been higher
left alone, does student use of twitter have affect on engagement, so tried in large lecture course - did a hashtag and projected it up on the screen, but didn't bring attention to it, let them self-select if they wanted to used twitter or not, no encouragement as to how to use it
same design, some using, some not, ended up 50/50.
no results yet
no control
results:
usage is not usage
how much time do you spend studying? what are you doing when you are studying?
time is not time
on the surface, looked like they were getting into course content, there was no affect
engagement clearly is important, the connections/modeling/using it from profs is important
if you leave students to their own devices, they'll use twitter and other soc devices, they'll use it for lots of things
but if you coop with them, you can focus success toward engagement and grades
important to engage with students. ed is a relationship
(so weren't those results more about the size of the class and the original relationships before twitter)
in study #1 - one student posted tweet on wanting to harm self, other, that didn't know them tweeted back, had a convo in public, got the profs to notice and bring student in to talk to
instructional prompts were same between ning and twitter group, twitter was crazy into it
all this costs so much. crazy.
what is it about the students that picked up on the twitter thing..
(weren't they already in a closer knit setting?)
2nd group was open, other wasn't
1st group all freshman, 2nd group fresh and soph
Rey hopes what comes out of his work - kids using communities that go beyond college
lms (learning management system) rant... static systems, incredibly non-engaging
the magic and fun happens with comments in a blog post, and twitter and facebook
doing research on fb is really hard?.. how so
_________________________________________________
Saturday, March 19, 2011
ellen langer
ABOUT DR. ELLEN LANGER
Dr. Ellen Langer is a world renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. In addition she has written the bestselling book, Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, and On Becoming An Artist. Her website is at www.ellenlanger.com Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books. Her work has led to numerous academic honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to Applied Psychology award from the American Association of Applied & Preventive Psychology, the Adult Development and Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattel Award, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize.
The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, "…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making."
Dr. Langer is a Fellow of The Sloan Foundation; The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science; Computers and Society; The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; The Society of Experimental Social Psychologists. In addition to other honors, she has been a guest lecturer in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Argentina.
Included among her books are:
Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1989. (Translated into thirteen languages.)
The Power of Mindful Learning. Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1997. (Translated into nine languages.)
On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. Ballantine Books, 2005.
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. Ballantine Books, 2009.
Additional Resources
Ellen's Website at www.ellenlanger.com
Chronicle of Higher Education Profile: The Art of Living Mindfully: Nothing is ever certain, says the psychologist Ellen Langer. We should make the most of that.
Harvard Magazine profile: "The Mindfulness Chronicles: On the psychology of possibility"
Radio Boston Interview by Deborah Becker
Ellen's Blog
Can the power of thought stop you ageing? Click here.
Video on Mindfulness and Leadership
Video on Ellen's Classic Research on the Psychology of Control
change in the men - just from a change in mindset
concept of mindfulness is a different order of variable, because
no matter what you're doing,
you're doing it mindfully or not
no matter what you're doing, if you do it in a mindful manner, you reap the benefits
mindfulness is contagious
audio recording
if you are always mindful of what you are doing,
you are never procrastinating
one problem people have is a lack of respect
the awareness of, at this moment, this is what i need
behavior always makes sense
from the actors perspective,
so be aware of why, then you're ready to take yourself to the task, in a positive way
once one allows oneself to do what they want to do, then the task they need to do seems less odious
we have all sorts of limits for ourselves that are wired in
all the things you think you know you need to question
Ellen: I love being wrong
the absolutes we take as real, were only researched based at best
when we think we know something absolutely,
there's no need to pay any attention to it
when you recognize everything is uncertain,
you stay tuned in
Jenifer (Aniston - who's playing her in the movie) reaks authenticity and that's what Ellen values in herself
huge diff between curiosity and mindfulness,
curiosity can lead you to mindfulness, but if it leads to a solution, then mindfulness is gone
interest is a function of a degree to which you are willing to engage yourself, things don't have any inherent meaning, we make it meaningful
if you preface everything with, .. in my view...
if you're enjoying what you're doing, you're doing it openly and honestly, there's no reason to get defensive
no evidence that mindfulness takes more time than mindlessness
practice makes imperfect, because once you've practiced you think you've learned it and then you stop, so practice with the mindset of always being a learner
telling people to be in the present, is not resonating because everything thinks they are in the present
rather, tell people to notice things
when asked her future plans... she said, 5 yrs out is too far out, every moment determines the moment after
________________________________________
clay shirky
ontology overrated
- words straight from the article, which appears to have been written around 2005, entire article in link above
what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
people have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.
yahoo:
The charitable explanation for this is that they thought of this kind of a priori organization as their job, and as something their users would value. The uncharitable explanation is that they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.
google:
One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.
A lot of the conversation that's going on now about categorization starts at a second step -- "Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should..." But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing.
The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining it, to say nothing of the amount of force you have to get to exert over users to get them to drop their own world view in favor of yours.
The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.
You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.
Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier. This should be easy, since that's the world we currently live in -- the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to. ... But the basic scheme gives us ways to create a globally unique identifier for anything.
And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now.
The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value.
"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.
There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.
It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value. We're early in the use of tags, so we don't yet have large, long-lived data sets to look at, but they are being built up quickly, and we're just figuring out how to extract novel value from whole collections of tags.
We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system.
It's all dependent on human context.
by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
______________________________________________
- words straight from the article, which appears to have been written around 2005, entire article in link above
what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
people have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.
yahoo:
The charitable explanation for this is that they thought of this kind of a priori organization as their job, and as something their users would value. The uncharitable explanation is that they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system.
google:
One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.
A lot of the conversation that's going on now about categorization starts at a second step -- "Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should..." But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing.
The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining it, to say nothing of the amount of force you have to get to exert over users to get them to drop their own world view in favor of yours.
The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.
You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.
Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier. This should be easy, since that's the world we currently live in -- the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to. ... But the basic scheme gives us ways to create a globally unique identifier for anything.
And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now.
The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value.
"Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.
There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody.
This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.
It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value. We're early in the use of tags, so we don't yet have large, long-lived data sets to look at, but they are being built up quickly, and we're just figuring out how to extract novel value from whole collections of tags.
We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?
If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system.
It's all dependent on human context.
by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
______________________________________________
howard rheingold
mind maps
hrheingold #mindamp Live session recording from 3-18-11 now available: http://bit.ly/mindamp_3-18-11
tuning... paying attention to who i'm paying attention to
the engaging part is where infotension turned into personal network - you are in an active relationship
Peg Boyles: Engage+inquire+respond=converse. I love the etymology of the word converse: "to turn around, about together
Peter Rothman: engagement is a key idea thing
Peter Rothman: then
Cole Tucker: i've certainly found howard's point out that sharing enough to personalize yourself to the network very helpful
Ken 1: Good insight on "stop following some" under 'Tuning'
Peg Boyles: That was me, Laurie. Impt aspect of Ellen Langer's mindfulness theory.
30 years of research at harvard, 1st tenured female of pych
research ?: could how we learn matter as much and possibly even more than what we learn.
mindfulness
the power of mindful learning
counterclockwise
she considers all the conventional methods of learning as basically context free (mindless) absolute, typcially delivered by experts, not supposed to question but "learn"
mindful = making distinctions, asking questions, every concept has a context, and you need to explore that context
revolutionary theory of decision making, not making pre-mature cognitive statements
there's a lot more randomness in learning, chaos
we make patterns out of the chaos - bill miller - quantum change
wake up one morning and you don't know how, but something difficult yesterday is easier
she has a lot to say about attention as well
Christopher Neal: Connectivism: by George Siemens - The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.
µichael Rose: Another tactic: I feel it's good for me to learn to balance (and practice both) divergent and convergent thinking, spending time listening to many voices and then focus on what *we* think given all that. Then diverge again, rinse and repeat
Charles Cameron (hipbone): in gterms of mind maps, mind maps are divergent unless you work to make them converge
sock puppets, creating a face identity to agree with you
Peg Boyles: Twitter curation is evolving to create a culture of trust.
Peg Boyles: I've been thinking about a whole phenomenlogy of trust online.
who constitutes an expert... Howard - if someone consistently is the first one to share something in a particular field - flow of info that turn out to be accurate
if someone is proclaiming (as opposed to displaying it) their expertise, cause for a little suspect
Cole Tucker: and group interactions often bring out tacit expertise
lisa piazza: it has been amazing to what @acravin from NPR do live fact checking via Twitter while reporting on Eqypt, Libya, Bahrain, etc.
Peg Boyles: I don't think there's a right level, Howard. I just wish there were some way to bank it all for future checking, even when the discussion goes cold and the course is over.
is this Peg?
µichael Rose: Are we shying away from 'chemical augmentation' questions?
Peg Boyles: Yes. Move towards herbs.
Peg Boyles: Encorphins.
Peg Boyles: I mean, endorphins.
Laurie Williams: most librarians i know love beer...coincidence?
Peg Boyles: Yes. Beer and bread, which makes grains digestible.
Peter Rothman: some of the most messed up tweakers I've ever met were doing so called "smart drugs" caveat emptor
Moderator: Pandora's Seed
Cole Tucker: i'm a big fan of the '*cetams
µichael Rose: Terence McKenna argues (quite persuasivelty) that mushrooms kicked society off
lisa piazza: Yesterday my next door neighbor gave me a catalog from the MAPS - multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
lisa piazza: had never heard of the group before
µichael Rose: MAPS are great. Rick Doblin is fantastic.
µichael Rose: 'unprovable' for sure. Like most of his work
Moderator: Munn
Moderator: Mushrooms of Language
Charles Cameron (hipbone): superb essay
Cole Tucker: michael, mckenna's cattle grazing mushroom theory fits very well with the theory in Saharasia
Joshua Madara: see also Bill Hicks
Christopher Neal: Will we discuss information flow and connectivism in future infosessions. I really enjoyed the readings on these topics?
Peter Rothman: also in the software inductry
Cole Tucker: about development of agriculture and rise of patriarchy
Peter Rothman: industry
Peter Rothman: what the dor mouse said
µichael Rose: "it's just a ride"
Peter Rothman: Also rushkoff's Cyberia but arguably his worst book, full of inaccuracies, I sent him corrections
µichael Rose: I'm fascinated by animal consciousness (rather than machine consciousness) and LSD etc. seem to be the best tools for exploring the mind.
Peter Rothman: can you enhance animals? why or why not? see the recent experiments with dolphin/human communication based on a visual language
connectivism and info flow
interesting mix going on here. but of course.. i've not read any of their forums, etc..
thank you for sharing this with us Howard..
________________________________________
hrheingold #mindamp Live session recording from 3-18-11 now available: http://bit.ly/mindamp_3-18-11
tuning... paying attention to who i'm paying attention to
the engaging part is where infotension turned into personal network - you are in an active relationship
Peg Boyles: Engage+inquire+respond=converse. I love the etymology of the word converse: "to turn around, about together
Peter Rothman: engagement is a key idea thing
Peter Rothman: then
Cole Tucker: i've certainly found howard's point out that sharing enough to personalize yourself to the network very helpful
Ken 1: Good insight on "stop following some" under 'Tuning'
Peg Boyles: That was me, Laurie. Impt aspect of Ellen Langer's mindfulness theory.
30 years of research at harvard, 1st tenured female of pych
research ?: could how we learn matter as much and possibly even more than what we learn.
mindfulness
the power of mindful learning
counterclockwise
she considers all the conventional methods of learning as basically context free (mindless) absolute, typcially delivered by experts, not supposed to question but "learn"
mindful = making distinctions, asking questions, every concept has a context, and you need to explore that context
revolutionary theory of decision making, not making pre-mature cognitive statements
there's a lot more randomness in learning, chaos
we make patterns out of the chaos - bill miller - quantum change
wake up one morning and you don't know how, but something difficult yesterday is easier
she has a lot to say about attention as well
Christopher Neal: Connectivism: by George Siemens - The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.
µichael Rose: Another tactic: I feel it's good for me to learn to balance (and practice both) divergent and convergent thinking, spending time listening to many voices and then focus on what *we* think given all that. Then diverge again, rinse and repeat
Charles Cameron (hipbone): in gterms of mind maps, mind maps are divergent unless you work to make them converge
sock puppets, creating a face identity to agree with you
Peg Boyles: Twitter curation is evolving to create a culture of trust.
Peg Boyles: I've been thinking about a whole phenomenlogy of trust online.
who constitutes an expert... Howard - if someone consistently is the first one to share something in a particular field - flow of info that turn out to be accurate
if someone is proclaiming (as opposed to displaying it) their expertise, cause for a little suspect
Cole Tucker: and group interactions often bring out tacit expertise
lisa piazza: it has been amazing to what @acravin from NPR do live fact checking via Twitter while reporting on Eqypt, Libya, Bahrain, etc.
Peg Boyles: I don't think there's a right level, Howard. I just wish there were some way to bank it all for future checking, even when the discussion goes cold and the course is over.
is this Peg?
µichael Rose: Are we shying away from 'chemical augmentation' questions?
Peg Boyles: Yes. Move towards herbs.
Peg Boyles: Encorphins.
Peg Boyles: I mean, endorphins.
Laurie Williams: most librarians i know love beer...coincidence?
Peg Boyles: Yes. Beer and bread, which makes grains digestible.
Peter Rothman: some of the most messed up tweakers I've ever met were doing so called "smart drugs" caveat emptor
Moderator: Pandora's Seed
Cole Tucker: i'm a big fan of the '*cetams
µichael Rose: Terence McKenna argues (quite persuasivelty) that mushrooms kicked society off
lisa piazza: Yesterday my next door neighbor gave me a catalog from the MAPS - multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
lisa piazza: had never heard of the group before
µichael Rose: MAPS are great. Rick Doblin is fantastic.
µichael Rose: 'unprovable' for sure. Like most of his work
Moderator: Munn
Moderator: Mushrooms of Language
Charles Cameron (hipbone): superb essay
Cole Tucker: michael, mckenna's cattle grazing mushroom theory fits very well with the theory in Saharasia
Joshua Madara: see also Bill Hicks
Christopher Neal: Will we discuss information flow and connectivism in future infosessions. I really enjoyed the readings on these topics?
Peter Rothman: also in the software inductry
Cole Tucker: about development of agriculture and rise of patriarchy
Peter Rothman: industry
Peter Rothman: what the dor mouse said
µichael Rose: "it's just a ride"
Peter Rothman: Also rushkoff's Cyberia but arguably his worst book, full of inaccuracies, I sent him corrections
µichael Rose: I'm fascinated by animal consciousness (rather than machine consciousness) and LSD etc. seem to be the best tools for exploring the mind.
Peter Rothman: can you enhance animals? why or why not? see the recent experiments with dolphin/human communication based on a visual language
connectivism and info flow
interesting mix going on here. but of course.. i've not read any of their forums, etc..
thank you for sharing this with us Howard..
________________________________________
Friday, March 18, 2011
poke the box sxsw
http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/03/free-ebook-sxsw-pokes.html
free ebook, it's great, inspirational..
________________________
free ebook, it's great, inspirational..
________________________
aj leon
love this story..
A Brief Moment of Audacity http://t.co/nNPFbsU via @ajleon - Emmanual's TED: http://t.co/sz62vo9 - love it
______________________________
A Brief Moment of Audacity http://t.co/nNPFbsU via @ajleon - Emmanual's TED: http://t.co/sz62vo9 - love it
______________________________
katie makkai
ianchia @monk51295 @MaryAnnReilly I love her ANGER. Anger in the most appropriate ways is so empowering.
_______________________________
Thursday, March 17, 2011
mark pesce
what ever happened to the book:
hypertexts capability of nonlinearity
a link is pregnant with meaning, to pass one by means you're occurring an opportunity cost
attention has been monetized, so links are kept to a minimum
even in Kelly's case, where money means nothing, links are missing
on the other hand, consider an article in wikipedia
many do point back, but plenty that face out
this is a doc that has embraced the nature of the medium
wikipedia does not monetize attention
it's the pure expression of the tension between the momentum of the text of the centrifugal force of the hypertext
the newspaper has been shreaded, from the nature of hypertext
tl;dr = too long, didn't read
attention spans are not shortening, kids will still read mega pages
we've entered an era of hyper competitive development
in truth, we do more reading today than we did 10 years ago.
the shorter the text, the less invested you are in it
discriminate between electronic book and publishing in light
ebook - it's not a one for one translation
if we want to avoid turning living typeset texts into dead text in light, we would end up with less than what we had before
purposefully stripped of their utility to be placed in a new medium
hypertext is intrinsically alluring
what is the bene of the ebook? is it ubiquity? mobility? - those are nice features, but not in themselves overwhelmingly alluring
an ebook offers a qualitatively different experience in the text (ie: britanica vs wikipedia)
does the electronic book differ from the hyper docs?
we won't know what the electronic book looks like until we've had time to play with it
we come to a book with a commitment - we want to finish it, but why
it will become a gradient rather than a boundary
as texts become electronic, as the melt together, meaning multiplies exponentially
every sentence and every word in every sentence can send you flying in almost any direction (like ed)
the tension there will just be one text. and there will only be one text. the reading will be exciting, exhilarating, dizzying,
as our texts become one.. as they become one hyperconnected mass of human connection, it will become synonymous with culture...all the texts strung together.. and that's what happened to the book
_______________________________________
what's so electronic about an electronic book
hypertexts capability of nonlinearity
a link is pregnant with meaning, to pass one by means you're occurring an opportunity cost
attention has been monetized, so links are kept to a minimum
even in Kelly's case, where money means nothing, links are missing
on the other hand, consider an article in wikipedia
many do point back, but plenty that face out
this is a doc that has embraced the nature of the medium
wikipedia does not monetize attention
it's the pure expression of the tension between the momentum of the text of the centrifugal force of the hypertext
the newspaper has been shreaded, from the nature of hypertext
tl;dr = too long, didn't read
attention spans are not shortening, kids will still read mega pages
we've entered an era of hyper competitive development
in truth, we do more reading today than we did 10 years ago.
the shorter the text, the less invested you are in it
discriminate between electronic book and publishing in light
ebook - it's not a one for one translation
if we want to avoid turning living typeset texts into dead text in light, we would end up with less than what we had before
purposefully stripped of their utility to be placed in a new medium
hypertext is intrinsically alluring
what is the bene of the ebook? is it ubiquity? mobility? - those are nice features, but not in themselves overwhelmingly alluring
an ebook offers a qualitatively different experience in the text (ie: britanica vs wikipedia)
does the electronic book differ from the hyper docs?
we won't know what the electronic book looks like until we've had time to play with it
we come to a book with a commitment - we want to finish it, but why
it will become a gradient rather than a boundary
as texts become electronic, as the melt together, meaning multiplies exponentially
every sentence and every word in every sentence can send you flying in almost any direction (like ed)
the tension there will just be one text. and there will only be one text. the reading will be exciting, exhilarating, dizzying,
as our texts become one.. as they become one hyperconnected mass of human connection, it will become synonymous with culture...all the texts strung together.. and that's what happened to the book
_______________________________________
what's so electronic about an electronic book
roger schank
the future of training - his talk in Madrid
how we learn - how does learning work? from experience
somehow when we do school, we don't provide experiences.. instead we provide algebra, physics, etc, and very little affect memory.
he asked - how many learned the quad equation, how many can balance a chemical equation, nobody
that's not learning, that's school
we don't forget our experiences. we forget info that is drilled into us.
memory guides comprehension, the mind is an expectation device
learning occurs in the context of failed expectations
failure is critical to learning, Dewey, etc, which failures matter?
memory isn't functioning the way school thinks it is.
teaching is good advice delivered just in time, not lessons
Pele - everything is practice
temporarily memorizing is not learning
what should people be practicing at?
math - i don't use it
listen to lectures - no, but it does take practice
what should you be practicing?
experimentation
try things
learn how to experiment ought to be what school is about
we all conduct experiments on a daily basis. we just don't notice
planning
predicting
negotiation
talking
we all have the same goals.. everyone has their set of plans to fulfill goals
only reason teaching doesn't work, teaching teaches the conscious
unconscious drives us
factual knowledge is totally unimportant
we have this idea that it matters
1990 encyclopedia britanica going to be dead, they thought i was a nut
curiosity drives learning, if you're not curious, you're not going to learn
very few people are curious about algebra, but some are, i was, but soon found out a lot of it wasn't useful
we learn by watching
really good teachers are not so important, nice to have
just in time instruction,
we are really good at story telling, we remind each other of stories, we have been telling stories to each other in every culture, we are set up to remember stories
his dragon story... learning things that you don't use, so that when they need skills, they don't remember them, never learned them
why aren't we teaching people how to think for themselves
story centered curriculum - live a fictional life - the one you are planning to do
barcelona - experiential mba program
what should they know: 7 courses, but also the cognitive processes that are going on during them
ie: diagnosis, something we do constantly all the time..
modeling and judgment
online course all about production, not about memorizing anything
reading books is not the point, what's most important is to try to do things and have experts available to help you
1905 - stanford - school should be factories, make factory workers
1889 - commissioner of ed - in dark, airless places, power to withdraw from physical event
school and training were designed so that people would not think for themselves
1) liberal arts ed
2) manual training
someone will decide to provide global experiential learning that is neither academic nor mindless training that teaches people to think in the context of employable skills, there should be 100's of them
software engineering program..
film is huge - they are stories... we will always tell stories
develop the best stuff in a learn it by doing style.
I have been named one of the world's top ten movers and shakers in e-Learning. The nomination was in part due to my collaboration with La Salle's Business Engineering School to build a learning-by-doing virtual MBA program.
edge - scroll down to Roger's suggested dangerous idea
kevin kelly on page 4
clay shirky on page 2
douglas rushkoff on page 6
don't worry - he will go to college - post
__________________________________________-
how we learn - how does learning work? from experience
somehow when we do school, we don't provide experiences.. instead we provide algebra, physics, etc, and very little affect memory.
he asked - how many learned the quad equation, how many can balance a chemical equation, nobody
that's not learning, that's school
we don't forget our experiences. we forget info that is drilled into us.
memory guides comprehension, the mind is an expectation device
learning occurs in the context of failed expectations
failure is critical to learning, Dewey, etc, which failures matter?
memory isn't functioning the way school thinks it is.
teaching is good advice delivered just in time, not lessons
Pele - everything is practice
temporarily memorizing is not learning
what should people be practicing at?
math - i don't use it
listen to lectures - no, but it does take practice
what should you be practicing?
experimentation
try things
learn how to experiment ought to be what school is about
we all conduct experiments on a daily basis. we just don't notice
planning
predicting
negotiation
talking
we all have the same goals.. everyone has their set of plans to fulfill goals
only reason teaching doesn't work, teaching teaches the conscious
unconscious drives us
factual knowledge is totally unimportant
we have this idea that it matters
1990 encyclopedia britanica going to be dead, they thought i was a nut
curiosity drives learning, if you're not curious, you're not going to learn
very few people are curious about algebra, but some are, i was, but soon found out a lot of it wasn't useful
we learn by watching
really good teachers are not so important, nice to have
just in time instruction,
we are really good at story telling, we remind each other of stories, we have been telling stories to each other in every culture, we are set up to remember stories
his dragon story... learning things that you don't use, so that when they need skills, they don't remember them, never learned them
why aren't we teaching people how to think for themselves
story centered curriculum - live a fictional life - the one you are planning to do
barcelona - experiential mba program
what should they know: 7 courses, but also the cognitive processes that are going on during them
ie: diagnosis, something we do constantly all the time..
modeling and judgment
online course all about production, not about memorizing anything
reading books is not the point, what's most important is to try to do things and have experts available to help you
1905 - stanford - school should be factories, make factory workers
1889 - commissioner of ed - in dark, airless places, power to withdraw from physical event
school and training were designed so that people would not think for themselves
1) liberal arts ed
2) manual training
someone will decide to provide global experiential learning that is neither academic nor mindless training that teaches people to think in the context of employable skills, there should be 100's of them
software engineering program..
film is huge - they are stories... we will always tell stories
develop the best stuff in a learn it by doing style.
I have been named one of the world's top ten movers and shakers in e-Learning. The nomination was in part due to my collaboration with La Salle's Business Engineering School to build a learning-by-doing virtual MBA program.
edge - scroll down to Roger's suggested dangerous idea
kevin kelly on page 4
clay shirky on page 2
douglas rushkoff on page 6
don't worry - he will go to college - post
__________________________________________-
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
howard rheingold
hrheingold If U think social media started w/ Facebook, check this 11 min WELL party video frm 1989 http://bit.ly/hmS8ks
____________________________
david brooks
social skill, until you slip into the policy mode
school reform, redone the political boxes
people learn from the people they love...so if you're not talking about relationships,..
that reality is expunged from out policy making process
why are the most socially attuned people on earth, completely dehumanized when they think about policy
for centuries we've based on the notion that we are divided selves. that reason is separated from emotion
led to ways of seeing the world, where we use assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is
it's produced a great amputation, a shallow view of human nature
good at talking about material things, skills, safety, health, bad at about talking about emotions, character
we have the concepts of virtues, but no longer have a system to connect them
elementary school 3pm. 80lb backpacks, cars
kids are raised in certain ways, jumping through achievement hoops of things we can measure; sat prep, soccer, college
and sometimes they make successes of themselves in a superficial manner
over the past few years, deeper view of human nature, a revolutionary consciousness
a new humanism
3 key insights
1) while conscious mind writes autobiography, the unconscious does most of the work
2) emotions are at the center of our thinking
people with strokes are quite helpless
emotions are not separate from reason, they are the foundation of reason because they tell you what to value
so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom
3) we're not primarily contained individuals, we are deeply interpenetrated one with another, we are social
this revolution in who we are -gives us a different way in seeing human capital
we believe reason is the highest faculties, however
reason is often week, sentiments are often strong and trustworthy
it gives us a deeper sense for what it takes to thrive
what it takes, are things that are deeper, things we don't even have words for
gifts
1) mindsight - ability to dip into another person's mind, to interpenetrate into other's minds, babies do this with moms, and download that info
minnesota study:
77% accuracy , at 18 mos who would graduate, per their good attachment w/mom
20% avoidingly attached - wanting to get close to people but not having the models of how to
one skill how to hoover up knowledge, one from another
2) equal poise - ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own minds
we are overconfidence machines, 95% profs say above avg, 96% students above avg soc skills, 19% of americans in the top 1% of earners
some have apistomological modesty - they are open minded in the face of ambiguity, able to adjust strengths of the conclusions to the strengths of their evidence, they are curious, these traits are often unrelated to iq
3) medis, street smarts, sensitivity to the physical environment, to pick out patterns, (tacit?)
sympathy - ability to work within groups - that becomes tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals, esp face to face groups, 90% of communication is nonverbal
the effectiveness of a group isn't by the iq of the group, but by how well they communicate, how often they take terms and conversations
4) blending - taking concepts and blend them together, a source of innovation, including the moral systems entailed, can't count and measure these
5) limmerance - not an ability, a drive and a motivation, lost in a craft, the unconscious mind hungers for this
how minds interpenetrate, douglass huffsteader, univ of indiana, i'm a strange loop,
i felt i was behind her eyes, that's me, the fusion of our souls, one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, after she died, that core piece of her had not died at all, it lived on very determinedly in my brain
through policy failures of last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge how shallow our view of human nature has been
through our failure to get to the depths of who we really are... comes
revolution of consciousness, exploring the depth of our nature
freud had a vast affect
we are discovering a more accurate vision than freud, it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing affect on our culture
deb roy
countless moments of natural, unsolicited time
trying to understand social on the influence of language acquisition
there must be amazing feedback loops, the environment is learning from the child/baby as well - speech context
this is getpivot come to life..
like a microscope to look at our behaviors around communication
________________________
born to learn
risk taking the essential element of adolescence.
born to learn
adolescence is not a problem, it's an opportunity
_______________________________________
born to learn
adolescence is not a problem, it's an opportunity
_______________________________________
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
jim groom
post on unschooling - with this great video
thank you Jim..
i esp like that both you and Emi hit on the biggest issue. it's about taking a step back, finding yourself, asking, what is learning, and what is this thing we call school..
and then Kate's post as well, she writes:
huge Kate.
thank you.
_________________________________________
thank you Jim..
i esp like that both you and Emi hit on the biggest issue. it's about taking a step back, finding yourself, asking, what is learning, and what is this thing we call school..
and then Kate's post as well, she writes:
But the idea that learning is about people with degrees in things telling you about those things frustrates me. And the idea that the things that children are required to take classes on in school are the things that everyone should be learning is frustrating, too. As is the idea that the children who sit in those classes are always learning about whatever it is that they’re supposed to be learning.
huge Kate.
thank you.
_________________________________________
a little tech rant
seems odd that we use government money to supply adults with ipads.
some of those adults who then ban cells.
what if we used those ipads to really figure out what this whole connection thing is about. like, what's with the addiction to cells in the first place?
even just for the sake of financial literacy. the banning of the cells is probably costing us more than the supplying of the ipads... no?
i don't think tech wants to be a cute little briefcase to hold more policy.
i think tech wants to connect us.
just saying.
with all due respect.
______________________________
some of those adults who then ban cells.
what if we used those ipads to really figure out what this whole connection thing is about. like, what's with the addiction to cells in the first place?
even just for the sake of financial literacy. the banning of the cells is probably costing us more than the supplying of the ipads... no?
i don't think tech wants to be a cute little briefcase to hold more policy.
i think tech wants to connect us.
just saying.
with all due respect.
______________________________
Monday, March 14, 2011
shelly blake plock
a challenge to doubters, do something impossible
Yes, crazy stuff happens. And maybe if we deal with the poverty and crushed communities that are realities for our lowest income students and maybe if we allowed them to actually have voices and take part in the digital revolution that is galvanizing the spirit of low-income and oppressed people throughout the world into something empowering and reality-changing, and maybe if we got rid of the red tape and the fear that gives us excuses about why there has to be a digital divide, then maybe we’d actually be amazed at what our kids can do.
America doesn’t lack money. The money is there. What America seems to be lacking is the will to actually use its strength to empower the folks we’ve conveniently left behind.
Yes, crazy stuff happens. And maybe if we deal with the poverty and crushed communities that are realities for our lowest income students and maybe if we allowed them to actually have voices and take part in the digital revolution that is galvanizing the spirit of low-income and oppressed people throughout the world into something empowering and reality-changing, and maybe if we got rid of the red tape and the fear that gives us excuses about why there has to be a digital divide, then maybe we’d actually be amazed at what our kids can do.
America doesn’t lack money. The money is there. What America seems to be lacking is the will to actually use its strength to empower the folks we’ve conveniently left behind.
bill strickland
an overdo revisit
if you want to make a difference in the lives of people most have given up on.. you have to look like the solution more than the problem.
_________________________________________________
if you want to make a difference in the lives of people most have given up on.. you have to look like the solution more than the problem.
_________________________________________________
Sunday, March 13, 2011
sal khan
going to the next level with khan academy
the very first time you are trying to get your brain around something, the very least thing you need is someone saying.. do you understand this
use tech to humanize the classroom. one-size fits all goes home to be personalized
student to valuable teacher time - ratio, now 100% of their time is valuable.
global one world classroom
added game mechanics.. badges.. points...
can track through district
tight design loop with teachers
it's all been teacher driven
ready for prime time
million people on the site already
user interface, reputation, dashboards, can coach, can get study partners, mentor, etc
_____________________________________
the very first time you are trying to get your brain around something, the very least thing you need is someone saying.. do you understand this
use tech to humanize the classroom. one-size fits all goes home to be personalized
student to valuable teacher time - ratio, now 100% of their time is valuable.
global one world classroom
added game mechanics.. badges.. points...
can track through district
tight design loop with teachers
it's all been teacher driven
ready for prime time
million people on the site already
user interface, reputation, dashboards, can coach, can get study partners, mentor, etc
_____________________________________