Author Archives:
Upward mobility?
Part of the bedrock of “American exceptionalism” is the belief that America is the land of opportunity. Whether you’re pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps (and defying the laws of physics!) or picking yourself up from the ditch, you can accomplish anything you want in America. You’re only limited by your levels of effort […]
America’s Education Politics: A Crass and Explicit Example
As if we didn’t have enough examples of the highly politicized nature of American educational reform, along comes another illustration that reaches new lows for crassness and audacity. Jonah Edelman is a leader of Stand for Children, a well-known and influential educational reform movement based in Oregon. The “grassroots child advocacy organization” is said to […]
Aspects of Effective Teaching
I recently read an analysis of education practice entitled Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? from the American Fordham Institute. In Chapter 5, Professor Mark C. Shug discusses the qualities of a good teacher. It’s an interesting analysis because Shug points out something that I have observed since the days of my own teacher training: […]
Summary notes on “Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work…”
As I noted in my previous entry, there is considerable disagreement over the efficacy of “student centered learning”, despite its popularity with the Twitterati. For example, in a 2006 article* from the journal Educational Psychologist, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark argue that student centered learning – which includes constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching – […]
Exploring Direct Instruction
One of the deepest tensions in modern education is between “student centered learning” and “teacher centered learning”. I’m interested in exploring more about this topic, and today I will set the framework for my exploration. The student centered or “minimally guided” approach is characterized as self-paced and interactive, and aims to replace “lectures with active […]
Wisdom at the Movies
I watch too many movies. There… I’ve admitted it. While others are reading books or debating the great issues of life at sophisticated dinner parties – or so I imagine – I’m enraptured by the latest Hollywood epic playing on my Blu-Ray and magnified through a large-screen projector and 5.1 surround sound system. As guilty […]
Converting PowerPoint to Flash
As more people try to downsize their business paraphernalia, lugging around a laptop from meeting to meeting is becoming less desirable. However, how do you deliver your PowerPoint presentation with something less than a fully-enabled laptop? One solution is to turn your PowerPoint into an online and interactive Flash video. Online Flash presentations will allow […]
Proliferation?
Though I’m certainly not equating Canada with North Korea, there is more than a slight odour coming from Canada when – on the same day that a major study ranks Canada as the world’s 12th largest arms exporter – the country decides to boycott the U.N. Conference on Disarmament because it is chaired by North […]
Ramping up the Rage: You know it’s contract time when
… BC’s corporate media sector starts ramping up the rage against teachers. Yesterday, the two BC dailies – both owned by the PostMedia group – headlined two separate anti-teacher stories. The Province featured an article about certain BCTF bargaining demands, based upon the employer’s utterly compromised interpretation. The Sun then offered a College of Teachers […]
More ruminations on 21st century learning and the concept of change
As usual in the distributed learning (DL) world, the month of June is absurdly hectic. Students who’ve enjoyed the right to create their own learning schedules realize, at the end, that no right exists without a corresponding responsibility. And now – as their asynchronous bliss meets the realities of graduation, post-secondary timetables and the rigours […]