NewEngland

Titles in APA References Sections

Is is fast approaching that time in the semester when students are asking questions about providing references in APA format and they are confused by the capitalization rules. I have made this set of flow charts available to my students for a few years… perhaps others can use them as well. You can see there Read More

NewEngland

Areopagitica

In 1644, John Milton composed a pamphlet in which he argues for freedom of expression; areopagitica has been adopted as a term to describe the capacity for individual to compose and distribute any ideas they see fit. Digital tools, especially those called Web 2.0 tools have been interpreted as the realization of areopagetica and students Read More

NewEngland

Data versus Evidence

“Data” has been widely, but imprecisely, used in education for most of the 21st century. Data-driven educators make decisions based on information they have gathered about their students’ performance. Ostensibly, this is done in an attempt to adopt the position of a researcher and to ground decisions in objective research, thus give more support for Read More

NewEngland

Natural Impulses of the Child

This is an initial draft… as time allows, I will continue to develop this post. John Dewey identified four natural impulses of children: to inquiry to communicate to construct to express For experiences to be educative, he reasoned, they must allow students to follow these impulses. If we hold these to be true, and there Read More

NewEngland

Reflexivity in Technology-Rich Teaching and Learning

Appropriate Proper Reasonable Reflexivity was originally used to describe the effects of social science researchers on the situations they were studying; the presence of researchers affects the behavior of subjects, thus the observations made. More recently, the term has been used to describe the influence of ICT on how people use information and how they Read More

NewEngland

“Activation Energy” and Instructional Technology

Appropriate Proper Reasonable Computers and information technologies have an interesting characteristic: We can use it to be more efficient in our work, but getting to that point requires a temporary decrease in efficiency. We can illustrate this with this picture: When we are using a “primitive” technology, we must exert a certain (and familiar) level Read More

NewEngland

More Thoughts on iGen

For several years, educators and other who care about your people have been hearing about “the Millennials,” which is the name given to the young people who were in school around the turn of the century. My children (who were born in 1990 and 1994) are firmly in the Millennial generation. Jean Twenge, a psychologist Read More

NewEngland

Information Ecologies

Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day (1999), two information technology researchers and scholars, developed the concept of the information ecology to describe the technology-rich systems that were emerging at the turn of the century.  (1999) used the term information ecology to capture the complex and evolving nature of these systems. Nardi and O’Day observed, “Information ecologies Read More