Technology is a relatively new word to the lexicon. The term was first used in print in 1831 by Jacob Bigelow, a New England botanist and doctor who published a series of his lectures as a textbook. Evidence of technology use by humans, however, extends far into pre-history. Wherever archaeologists find evidence of ancient humans, Read More
Category: Learning
iGen: Read This Book!
A different review is available here: http://hackscience.net/blog/?p=269 Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGEN: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy– and completely unprepared for adulthood and (what this means for the rest of us). New York: Atria Books. For several years, educators have been hearing about (and teaching) Millennials. This term Read More
The Capacity to Learn
This post concludes the theme begun in The (Overturned) Model of Standard Education and continued in Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education A dominant theme in the literature on the future of work is that workers—all workers, white collar, blue collar, in the services, information field, and trades, and yet to be discovered fields—will have Read More
Skills Inversion
For much of the 20th century, educators were adults who had earned an undergraduate degree which typically requires four years of study in higher education. As undergraduate students, these adults had become skilled users of print which was the dominant information technology in both society and school. As a result, educators were the most skilled Read More
Media and Attention
The emerging sophistication of digital media and the accompanying sophistication of media skills are captured in the observation of Seels, Fullerton, Berry, and Horn (2004) that interest in and attention to media is characterized by a bell-shaped curve. Media that are familiar, simple, redundant, and expected are associated with low interest and attention because they Read More
Humans’ Social Brains
Beginning in the early 1970’s, cognitive scientists began studying two opposing hypotheses to explain of the anatomical differences between the brains of humans and the brains of other primates: the social brain hypothesis, which posited social factors are the primary force driving the development of the human brain and the ecological brain hypothesis, which posited Read More
The Lens of Cognitive Load
This idea is also the subject of the post Cognitive Load Theory Educators avoid theory whenever they can, and that is an unfortunate stance as a good theory is very useful when we want to understand what we do and why we do it. Cognitive load theory is an excellent example of a theory that Read More
Educational Adjectives
Perhaps it is the many advertisements that have found there way through my spam filter recently. Perhaps it is that I have been reading (actually browsing) equal amounts of vendor-created content in trade magazines and peer-reviewed book chapters and articles from academic authors. Regardless of the origins, it is coming clear to me that there Read More
Thoughts on Born Digital #borndigital
Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age In 2008, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser wrote the first edition of Born Digital. It was one of several books to appear at the time that focused on the nature of “digital generations.” The timing of those books was reasonable as the generations who had never Read More