The digital devices we carry in our pockets and that we keep on our desks and in students’ backpacks hold amazing capacity to access and manage and create information. We can download many repetitive cognitive tasks to these devices and they complete in fractions of seconds what took me many minutes to do as a Read More
Month: January 2019
Wisdom
In his 2010 book Wisdom, Stephen Hall who is an award-winning writer about science and society, posed the question, “How do we make complex, complicated decisions and life choices, and what makes some of these choices so clearly wise that we all intuitively recognize them as a moment, however brief, of human wisdom?” (p. 6). Read More
Liberal Arts Education and IT
A liberal arts education, the primary purpose of higher education for many generations, was originally intended to prepare young people to be able to understand complex problems and apply their skills to solving problems in diverse fields. The value of liberal arts education is lost on many stakeholders, including many who advocate for coding, STEM, Read More
Timeline of Updating Teachers’ Practice
With the growing complexity of the domain of teaching and learning, it is reasonable to conclude that educators will be engaged in increasingly dynamic learning in all aspects of their domain: the content they teach, the natural phenomena surrounding human learning, and the application of technology to curriculum and instruction design. Compared to 20th century Read More
Seven Principles of Good Instruction
Arthur Chickering and Stephen Ehrman (1996) concluded that while ICT-rich learning cannot occur by either technologists or educators working in isolation, the technology selected and used in learning environments can promote seven principles of good practice. Technology can encourage contact between educators and students encourage reciprocity and cooperation among students facilitate active learning and performance Read More
The Coming Revolution in Education
If you knew me, you would not be surprised to hear that I have a book on my “to read” pile named The Revolution in the Schools. The edited volume begins in a promising manner; the second paragraph of the Introduction states: Revolution always look impossible before the fact, inevitable afterward. So it is with the Read More
What Small and Vorgan Wrote About Brains and Technology
Among the studies summarized by Gary Small, a cognitive scientist who works at the University of California Los Angeles, and his co-author Gigi Vorgan in the 2008 book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Modification of the Modern Mind, were several documenting the effects of technologies on human brains. They described research in which scientists measured a Read More
What Mark Deuze Wrote About Navigating a World Dominated by Digital Media
The dominant information technology has been print for so long that it has been natural for generations of students and teachers to conclude skills using text should be the focus of what we do in schools. Many of today’s educators were adolescents when print still dominated culture, but print is being replaced by digital electronic Read More
How Writing Changed Society
Once writing is introduced to a culture, there are recognizable changes in the culture that are attributed to the changed information technology systems, and especially the ability to store information indefinitely. Scholars find evidence of similar changes as writing was introduced to cultures on different continents and in different centuries. Historians Michael Hobart and Zachary Read More
What Steven Johnson Wrote About Popular Culture
Steven Johnson, a well-known writer about popular culture and the influences of information technology on popular cultures argues that television and other media (including video games) are becoming more complex with richer narrative, more characters, and more complex plot twists. Compared to 20th century media, Johnson (2006) observed the modern media landscape is comprised of Read More