Early in the 1940’s, biology was a science being revolutionized by the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). English biologist D’Arcy Thompson commented, “We have come to the edge of a world of which we have no experience, and where all of our preconceptions must be recast” (cited in Gould 1998, 404). In many ways, Thompson’s Read More
In the 1992 book The Work of Nations, Robert Reich suggested the basic work skills necessary for future workers would include: abstraction which includes the ability to make meaning of complicated and unfamiliar situations system thinking which includes the ability to deconstruct the abstractions, and make logical predicts and develop rational strategies experimentation which includes Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com The title of this post appears to be a cryptic message, perhaps an arcane relationship from a long-forgotten physics textbook. In reality, it summarizes one of the most important ideas about learning to be articulated in the last 10 years or so. The relationship makes perfect sense to many teachers Read More
Just what are educators supposed to teach? Better yet, what are students supposed to learn? These are questions that educators must consider at a much deeper level than my teachers did when I was college student in the 1980’s, and even when I was a graduate student 10 then again 20 years later. For generations, Read More
Many varieties of web 2.0 tools have been available since the late 1990’s; these tools are all designed to make it easy for users to publish information to the web and to interact with others via posts and responses. Many of these are built into LMS, so can easily be incorporated into virtual classrooms. The Read More
71 The Three Agogos The Greek word agogos means leader. We still encounter the work today when we refer to the work done by teachers. Traditionally, the craft of teaching is called pedagogy, a word that combines “ped” for children and “agogos” for leader, so (loosely) one’s pedagogy is what one does to be a Read More
The central feature of every portfolio are the artifacts which are those examples and fragments of work that illustrate the learners’ skills, knowledge, and habits. It is important to note that with some exceptions, artifacts are fragments of work. Rather than including the entire paper, one will include only the abstract or the conclusion, or Read More
Mark Deuze (2006), a scholar from Indiana University, Bloomington, identified participation, remediation, and bricolage as skills needed for the 21st century media landscape. Social networking sites and media sharing sites are examples of technologies that encourage this participation. The Internet provides access to vast information from sources of dubious reliability; this necessitates individuals take a Read More
This is the first is a series of posts I intend to share in which I describe some ideas, concepts, and research about teaching and learning in digital landscapes that educators have not given sufficient attention, in my opinion. In many cases, these are ideas that held educators’ attention for a short time, but they Read More
Over the decades I have been working with digital technologies, teachers, and learners; electronic portfolios have been a recurring topic. The story usually plays out like this: I arrive in a school (maybe k-12, maybe college) and there are groups (often departments in colleges) in which there is interest in adopting electronic portfolios. I hear, Read More