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
Category: Teaching & Learning
Managing Extraneous Cognitive Load
In authentic learner tasks, the cognitive load of the activities will likely be greater than the cognitive load in highly controlled instructional settings. By preserving the context in which the problems exist in the real world, educators increase the opportunities for intrinsic and germane cognitive load, but also the potential for extraneous cognitive load. There Read More
Effects of IT on Teachers and Learners: Speed and Innovation
Related to the digital generations’ interest in and desire to customize technologies is the rate at which the digital generations adopt new technologies. Members of these generations are willing to buy new devices as soon as they arrive on the market and they are enthusiastic consumers of innovative new devices. They both become users of Read More
How People Learn II
How People Learn (National Research council, 2000) has been an important resource for scholars and educational practitioners for almost two decades. Google Scholar indexes more than 24,000 items that have cited the book. In 2018, a second version of the book was published. I am preparing a review of the book to be posted here Read More
Autonomy and Education
Educators appear to have an incomplete and inconsistence awareness of autonomy as a factor that affects learning. Blumenfeld, Kempler, and Krajik (2006) define autonomy to include the “perception of a sense of agency, which occurs when students have the opportunity for choices and for playing a significant role in directing their own activity” (p. 477). Read More
My Grandfather’s Textbooks
My grandfather graduated from the University of Vermont in 1939 and I have some of his textbooks on my bookshelves along with the textbooks I used while an undergraduate student at the same institution 49 years later. The content of the textbooks (we both studied biology) is vastly different, but the literacy skills useful for Read More
Education: Science? Art? Technology?
In general, humans like to categorize using dichotomies; an object is placed in one group or another. As an undergraduate student preparing to be a science teacher, I classified plants using dichotomous keys for a particular botany class, hours examining specimens (usually alone and with coffee) to decide if each demonstrated a trait described in Read More
Guided Experience: Alternative to the Standard Model of Education
“The Standard Model” of education is a theme that has bee developed on this blog. See these posts: The (Overturned) Standard Mode of Education Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education This posts continues the theme with an excerpt addressing an another alternative: Research focusing on learning in informal situations (Lemke, Lecusay, Cole, & Michalchik, Read More
Which #edtech Tools Get Used?
Because new information technologies (including hardware, software, and new uses of both) emerge very quickly compared to the periodicity of schools (new technologies appear several times during a typical school year), teachers must adopt and adapt to them constantly. When deciding which technologies to use, teachers are more likely to use technologies that: Are easier Read More
Pedagogical Nihilism: An Idea Worth Exploring
One of the first steps I took as an undergraduate student to become in independent intellectual—which I define as taking an active role in defining the course of one’s own learning—was to begin reading essays by scientists. At the time, there were Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould who were regular contributors. It was a Read More