Category — Teaching

Sacrificing the joy of learning:
A couple of days later, I came across this article by Roger Schank; blaming the laziness of college professors for the focus on arcane subjects:

Universities dictate curricula to high schools to make professor’s lives easier. If everyone takes physics and calculus and most never use it, well, professors claim it was good for the students anyway when in fact it was only good for making sure professors didn’t have to teach it in college. As long as professors don’t have to teach the basics it is okay that high school students are forced to study stuff they will never use in their whole lives. We have ruined an entire generation of high school students who don’t like learning and think the subject matter is irrelevant because professors only want to teach the good stuff.

We sacrifice the joy of learning for an entire generation so professors can have an easier time teaching incoming students.

I have 18 years of formal education, 25 years of work experience, have never used exponential equations outside of school, and don’t remember how to do them today. What are we teaching, and why?
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I don’t buy this argument. The idea that mathematics is irrelevant at the level of exponential analysis is just silly. How is one supposed to understand the compound interest of checking and loans if you cannot do the math? Are you willing to say that people should be left to the will of the bankers and related businesses to do their calculations?

On another level, we aren’t really talking about teaching irrelevancies for the sake of them, we are actually talking about the teachers inability to choose textbooks that are meaningful to the students and parents… Frequently they choose textbooks that are too abstract, that lack real world word problems, and are very hard to relate to. It is not that the concepts can’t be constructed to be otherwise, it is that people have grown accustomed to seeing the ideas in a very 1950’s timeless formalism. If the materials are actually presented as parts of real life then you’d not have the issues of the professors at all, because perhaps… students would actually remember and use their learning instead of forgetting it before college…
I could go on and on about this… but I’m not going to.

ok.. yes… i’m teaching it… Internet Resources for the Information Professional is a course that will cover social software and Library 2.0 applications and their use in libraries (surprise!) and the larger informational arena.

But wait… there’s more…. This course… and my digital archives course are both based in the mediawiki…. oh my… The whole course is a wiki…. yes… the whole course and every future version of this course will be in a wiki…. The knowledge will be passed from one generation to the other, we invite participants from the larger community to discuss things on the wiki at the discretion of the instructor(that’s me).

OpenAcademic :: bringing education to all:
OpenAcademic — supporting learners, teachers, and institutions.
Create an intranet. Blog. Podcast. Manage the school website, and all
the club websites. Create a private workspace. Share files. Give
students the tools to build portfolios that cross academic years and
curricular disciplines. Support teacher professional development.
Communicate with parents. Build a safe social networking environment
within your school community. Manage a class.
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hmmm this could be cool, but it will likely be a bit complex as each of these tools, as all second gen and third gen webtools do, toward the baroque.

Futurelab – Research – Publications – opening education:
This series of publications aims to open up areas for debate – to provoke and stimulate new visions for education – as well as literally ‘opening up’ education, not only bringing together ideas from educational practice and research but also drawing on the fields of creative arts, media and technical innovation. In the ideas we present we also hope to ‘open up’ the walls of the educational institution – to present models of learning that show how we can create connections between learners in different settings, how we can enable collaboration between different organisations and institutions, how we can make links between different approaches to and forms of learning.

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Future lab has two papers that are worth reading. one on open source and education and one on social software and learning. Of course… the production of these papers seems more ‘brochure’ than ‘research’ at first, but there are some ideas in there that are worth considering.

Fortnightly Mailing: Personal Learning Environments make a step forward. Guest Contribution from Mark van Harmelen.:
The UK is increasingly focusing on the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) after a slow start that began with client systems such as Colloquia (2000) and the Manchester PLE/VLE Framework (2004). This week saw a two-day meeting (on 6 and 7 June) organised by CETIS and held in Manchester. The meeting comprised an initial ‘experts’ only day, and a second public day.

What became apparent at the workshop is that the name PLE now encompasses two major flavours of architecture:

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Personal Learning Environments? I think they are a wave of the present. Every person is actually a learning ecology, their environmental ecology, their social ecology and their mental ecology all rely on the processes of learning through the life of the individual in question. so perhaps a better word would be individualized learning environments….

NECC 2006 Attendees | Program – Webcasting:
We are pleased to announce that several of this year’s Keynote, Spotlight, and Concurrent Sessions will be archived for video-on-demand viewing through a partnership with KZO Webcasting. In addition, we’re providing a number of live interviews with Ed Tech leaders that will also be archived for video-on-demand.

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Webcasts from NECC

http://www.prattsenate.org/nytimes_07_02_06.htm
http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.htm
http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/003837.php

to the NYT articles and letters above…. I respond thusly:

I tend to agree more with the Letters, than with the nyt article and even less so with the report.

I think we have to be very careful about accounting for the cultural institutionalization of learning in China and the U.S. We need to be much more careful than the 29 page report. The report does not do that very well at all, it basically assumes a ‘most similar systems’ model of society and culture to make its comparison. This model is not justified in my mind. The U.S. and China are involved in fundamentally different projects in their educational systems though they have similar goals. Time on task type training, which is ‘efficient’ in China, might not be ‘efficient’ in the U.S. where we likely focus on a different sense of freedom, creativity and progress in learning.

I think it would be far more productive, policy-wise, to actually address the issues within the u.s. in regards to graduation and retention rates. Achievement measurement is grossly affected when there are an overwhelming percentage of people who are being ‘left behind’ or ‘unaddressed’ by the school systems in the u.s. In fact, i think we can probably fairly easily show that the single norm distribution basis for ’science and math education measurements’ is actually multi-modal and the arguments based on the covering norm are actually hiding very serious social and educational issues. If the needs of the people represented in the lower achieving modes of the population were addressed and they were taught and graduated, I think you would see the measured norm of science and math education change dramatically in the u.s.

What then is the real politics and policy behind the report? It seeks to legitimize national standards and national testing, taking away a power that has been relegated to local democracies and replacing it with national bureaucracies. It seeks to remove teacher control of the curriculum. It seems better teaching of teachers (ok, i agree with this one, give us educated and inspired teachers). It seeks to replace the open system of education and admissions with examination based access to education, (given what we know about cultural biases in the sat and act … ), etc. etc. In short, I think what we have is just a document that seeks to expand the currently promoted educational regime, which in the last 7 years or so has demonstrated significant problems addressing the needs of all students in the U.S.

A Wikipedia Warning [2]:
In May Katherine Tredwell, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, nabbed 16 students who plagiarized sections of their final papers for a history of science course. Nine of those students, the professor found, had copied entries on Wikipedia virtually verbatim.

Since then, Ms. Tredwell has made it her mission to convince her colleagues that they must teach students how to use—and, in many cases, how not to use—the popular open-source encyclopedia. Devoting a class session to the dangers of Internet research is a good start, the professor told Oklahoma Daily. But she also recommends that professors give students small class assignments that ask them to use Wikipedia—and, hopefully, to see how easily information on the site can be altered or edited.

Should professors hold crash courses in Wikipedia at the start of every semester? Or is that a job best left to librarians speaking at campus-orientation sessions? —Brock Read

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before wikipedia they were just using the web before using the web they were using paper encyclopedias and books. i don’t think that a ‘crash course’ in wikipedia will change anything. I do think that teaching students a bit of wisdom in general might be in order.

Tutorcasts | Bringing together the ‘nets resources for the community.:
Tutorcasts is meant to be a repository (and directory) of screencasts available for educational purposes. If you would like to become a part of this group, please sign up and post your screencast information.
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this sounds like a great idea.

Teaching and Developing Online:
Teaching is Dead, Long live learning is a similar iconoclastic statement aimed at the traditions of modernist education. It uses the sociological and economic impact of media technology, in particular the Internet and its strengthening of informal and networked learning, and calls the foreseeable end of the traditional roles of teachers and ultimately the school system. It is in this day and age that the ideas of Ivan Illich become more realistic…
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I think illich is becoming more and more important in our own day. the focus on learning notwithstanding.