This book is a detailed illustration of the broader socio-historical and educational milieu of the Greek ethnic schools in Australia in the late 1990s. It presents ethnic schools’ efforts to maintain and develop the Greek language and cultural heritage as well as to support Greek-Australian identity amongst second and third generation Greek-Australians. The detailed school profiles (case studies) presented in this book constitute part of a Ph.D. thesis (Arvanitis 2000) and provide a pedagogical framework of practice in dealing with diverse learning environments and diverse learner populations.
The need to refocus on the profile of ethnic schools has become apparent due to the profound impact of globalisation on education and, in particular, on ethnic schooling, which has forced educational agencies to reposition themselves. The new complexities of knowledge economy demand new thinking and contemporary skills and attributes as well as the capacity to deal with cultural diversity. Greek part-time ethnic schools, a remarkable marker of ethnicity in themselves, have played a pivotal role in the transmission and promotion of Greek culture and language. They have, at the same time, enhanced learners’ global/diasporic consciousness and sense of identity by urging them to reflect on bicultural learning communities of meaning, memory and belonging. Finally, they have recognised the diversity of voices, narratives and aspirations both within their own cultural group as well as that of their host community and Greece thus engaging in a powerful context of triangular relationships.
Overall Greek ethnic schools have promoted multicultural community building by strengthening different senses of belonging and consciousness in the context of Australian multicultural society. They act as dynamic learning organisations and agents of socio-cultural change, thus helping us reflect upon the complexities of contemporary societies and offering new conceptual frameworks to interpret culture and identity.
According to a Child Rights Information Network report, an estimated eight million children aged between six and Fourneen do not currently attend school in India. And these children are the ones the Right to Education (RTE) Act now promises to reach out and provide education to.
To enforce this, a huge amount—to the tune of Rs 55,000 crore, according to an estimate by the Ministry of Human Resource Development—is needed. This is the primary hurdle for the Government of India is making this law become reality.
Michigan schools are getting a $318 million boost from the federal government this year, but is that really a helping hand?
Experts speaking at an Education Commission of the States conference suggested schools used the time to start planning for when the cash by sharing services and combining their purchasing power — ideas discussed this week in orMichigan 10.0 series.
Alyson Klein of Education Week reports that school finance expert Michael Griffith told the recent gathering that states are becoming more and more dependent on the federal government, and that might not be a good thing, unless they don’t mind giving up bigger chunks of their authority.
The International Journal of Learningsets out to foster inquiry, invite dialogue and build a body of knowledge on the nature and future of learning. In do doing, the journal provides a forum for any person with an interest in, and concern for, education at any of its levels and in any of its forms, from early childhood, to schools, to higher education and lifelong learning — and in any of its sites, from home to school to university to workplace.
The journal is relevant for academics, researchers, teachers, higher degree students, educators and educational managers and administrators.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
What’s the best relationship between teachers and students? Love? Admiration? Respect?
What would you do if your class were deeply involved in a creative project, like a movie or a newspaper or a play, and the principal came along and said you had to get back to basics because standardized test time was coming up?
Those were the kinds of questions that teachers in Riverview Gardens faced over the summer when they wanted to get rehired for their jobs, after the district was taken over by a state-appointed board. For years, teachers around the country have been tested in the same way by the Haberman Star Teacher program, which tries to determine who is most likely to succeed in a school environment that seems to get tougher every year.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Learning Conference in Hong Kong, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Learning Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing your photos with Flickr, please read more here.
In the midst of an epochal shift in the communications environment, rapid cultural change and transformations in knowledge, there is an urgent need for bold educational responses. While responsibility for educational resourcing belongs to the broader community, the extent and quality of pedagogical change ultimately rests with teachers. Student learning is dependent on teachers developing knowledge and pedagogical practices. Central to our educational response to the changed environment is teacher professional learning.
This scholarly book draws on research which investigated the impact on teachers of their engagement with the New London Group’s multiliteracies theory. Four Australian teachers of primary school students committed themselves to exploring multiliteracies theory and to putting their learning into practice in diverse classroom settings.
Anne Cloonan, then a literacy policy and project officer at a state Education Department, explores the context, processes and impact of film-driven participatory action research action learning, in which the teachers researched their learning and practice over a period of eight months. She describes new ways of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers to develop resources and policy advice while deepening their professionalism. She offers contextualised examples of teachers extending their print-based literacy pedagogies to incorporate multimodal literacy practices.
This book will be of interest to teachers, educational consultants, policy makers, and researchers concerned with: agentive collaborative teacher learning; innovative policy and resource development; enhancing teachers’ professionalism; and the operationalisation of multiliteracies theory.
Washington - The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion package of aid to states and school districts, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she would summon members from their summer recess to grant final approval to the bill.
The measure had been hung up by partisan wrangling between Democrats, who said it was necessary to avert layoffs of teachers and cutbacks in services by strapped states, and Republicans, who objected to another round of government spending and characterized it as a political payoff to unions.
NEW LEARNING. The Learner publishes cutting edge ideas on teaching and learning—ideas which point to the emerging shape of a new world of learning. These are some of the things of interest and concern for The Learner:
the blurred institutional boundaries between the family, work and formal education
early childhood learning, once the domain of the family, and now a site of formal learning
literacy, literacies, multiliteracies
learning in and out of school: what children learn at home, from their peers, from the media
new educational workplaces: self-governing schools, customised curricula, knowledge and teaching markets
just-in-time and just-enough learning—learning what you need to know when and where you need to know it
lifelong and lifewide learning
work integrated learning
new learning technologies
global and multicultural education
new pedagogies that demand as well as grant greater value to the volition and subjectivity of the learner
… and this is only the beginning of the new world of learning unfolding before us, all of which is of critical concern to the authors and readers of The Learner.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Learning all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Learning, please email journals@thelearner.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
“My ideas evolved from long hours in local bars, talking, talking, talking, always about morality. People were always asking ‘Who do you think you are, Socrates?’ They said it with contempt, but I would smile and say, ‘Thank you.’” – Tim Cooney
The television show Sesame Street recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion there have been a host of events, including the publication of several books. A review of one of them, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis, caught my eye when I saw a mention in it of the late Timothy J. Cooney, ex-husband of Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Sesame Street. Tim was a fascinating person in his own right, and I immediately bought the book to see what it had to say about him, for I had gotten to know Tim in the last decade of his life, well after his marriage had ended.
A first-grade teacher in Vallejo, Calif., works with students. Schools across the country are struggling with deep budget cuts.
For more than 40 years, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the third-ranking member of the House, has been a fiery and highly effective legislator. Any history of how the country avoided another depression must include Obey, who shepherded the $787 billion Recovery Act through Congress last year with great skill (and no earmarks). He has been an inspiring antiwar liberal dating back to Vietnam and a rare man of conscience in Washington.
Education Secretary Michael Gove tells Channel 4 News why he is scrapping a major school building project put in motion by Labour, as a separate row is sparked over civil service pay.
Mr. Gove has called time on the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which he said had failed to meet its own targets. He described it as “massively flawed” and “over-bureaucratic”.
Announcing a review of capital investment in Britain’s schools, Mr. Gove said work on 715 of the schools due to be rebuilt or refurbished through BSF would be halted.
He told the Commons that the programme, which represents one third of departmental capital spending, was characterised by overspend, delays and botched construction projects.
The 2011 Learning Conference will take place at the University of Mauritius, Mauritius from 5-8 July. For more information please visit www.LearningConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2011 Learning Conference, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2011/register/.
For those of you who are joining us in Hong Kong for the 2010 International Conference on Learning, please note that there is more detailed information available for download on the locations page of the conference website here.
We know that you will continue to have questions as the conference draws near. Please feel free to contact us at support@thelearner.com with any inquiries or concerns that you may have.
By Diane Ravitch, in Education Week’s Blog Bridging Differences
Dear Deborah,
The evidence continues to accumulate that our “accountability” policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.
Over the past several years, efforts to “hold teachers accountable” and “hold schools accountable” have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.
A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
Modern day conceptions of ubiquitous learning build on an influential vision of ubiquitous computing published two decades earlier by Mark Weiser (1991) of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His article depicted a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts based on ubiquitous computing, a different way of conceptualizing the interface between computers, networks, and people. In Weiser’s vision, tiny computers are embedded into nearly every artifact and setting, networked so that they intercommunicate. For example, a tree could be tagged with information about its botanical characteristics; the tree might also offer to show an historic image of its context about the time it was planted or to describe the contribution it makes to reducing local pollution and greenhouse gases. People who wandered by could access this information on a wireless mobile device; based on a person’s response, the building adjacent to the tree might then offer some information. Current images of smart objects and intelligent contexts for learning include affordances not available twenty years earlier, such as Web 2.0 tools embedded in cyberinfrastructure (Dede, 2007) and augmented reality games (Klopfer, 2008).
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”
Michael Mulgrew is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Pelham, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.
Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.
Picture Courtesy of Benjamin F. Carlson, in The Atlantic Wire
By Karoli, in Crooks and Liars
On May 19th, the Texas Board of Education will meet to approve the final Social Studies curriculum and textbook changes that caused such a stir back in March.
Since that meeting, even more changes have been proposed which, if adopted, promise to rewrite history for Texas schoolchildren to the conservative narrative. Uber-winger Don McLeroy’s proposals:
Undermine the doctrine of separation of church and state. McLeroy wants to substitute an unintelligible standard asking students to “contrast the Founders’ intent relative to the wording of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, with the popular term ‘Separation of church and state.’”
Global Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Migration, Security and Wellbeing of International Students, edited by Peter Kell and Gillian Vogl
Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy.
Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries.
With a constant call for accountability, classroom facilitators are obligated to provide transparent assessment procedures and report results in a professional manner. Improving Teaching and Learning Through Assessment: A Problem-Based Learning Approach seeks to convey to the reader exactly what it says; a holistic approach to continuous assessment in order to improve learning.
This book seeks to present readers with a solid background about the various kinds of assessments available. Readers are taught to design a number of fit-for-purpose assessment instruments. Throughout the text, the primary methodology used is Problem-Based Learning (PBL) that seeks to hone in students several skills like creativity, critical thinking and innovativeness.
About the Hong Kong Institute of Education, the host of our 2010 Learning Conference:
Established in 1994 and with a heritage of 70 years of teacher training dating to the former colleges of education, the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is the only University Grants Committee-funded institution dedicated solely to professional teacher education in Hong Kong. The HKIEd was formally established by statute in April 1994 - upon recommendation by the Education Commission in 1992 - by uniting the former Northcote College of Education, Grantham College of Education, Sir Robert Black College of Education, the Hong Kong Technical Teachers’ College and the Institute of Language in Education.
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
“Teacher effectiveness” has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children’s education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
“There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure,” says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. “Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective.”
Milpitas, Calif. — When Kevin Jenkins wanted to teach his fourth-grade students at Spangler Elementary here how to use the Internet, he created a site where they could post photographs, drawings and surveys.
And they did. But to his dismay, some of his students posted surveys like “Who’s the most popular classmate?” and “Who’s the best-liked?”
Mr. Jenkins’s students “liked being able to express themselves in a place where they’re basically by themselves at a computer,” he said. “They’re not thinking that everyone’s going to see it.”
The ancient Egyptians thought so little of brain matter they made a practice of scooping it out through the nose of a dead leader before packing the skull with cloth before burial. They believed consciousness resided in the heart, a view shared by Aristotle and a legacy of medieval thinkers. Even when consensus for the locus of thought moved northward into the head, it was not the brain that was believed to be the sine qua non, but the empty spaces within it, called ventricles, where ephemeral spirits swirled about. As late as 1662, philosopher Henry More scoffed that the brain showed “no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet, or a bowl of curds.”
Around the same time, French philosopher René Descartes codified the separation of conscious thought from the physical flesh of the brain. Cartesian “dualism” exerted a powerful influence over Western science for centuries, and while dismissed by most neuroscientists today, still feeds the popular belief in mind as a magical, transcendent quality.
Elementary and middle school students in Indiana will have an online alternative beginning in the 2010-2011 school year.
Rural Community Academy, in partnership with Connections Academy, is launching a statewide virtual public school that will serve students in grades 1 through 8. Dubbed Indiana Connections Academy Virtual Pilot School (INCA-VPS), the online school will provide a tuition-free education to Indiana students, providing teachers, support staff, and learning coaches for students.
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
From Lesli A. Maxwell and Michele McNeil, in Education Week
By selecting just two states as first-round Race to the Top winners, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is leaving $3.4 billion on the table for the remaining states to vie for in round two.
Delaware and Tennessee beat out 14 other finalists last week to win the first grants awarded in the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund competition.
Mr. Duncan praised the two states, which edged out front-runners Florida and Louisiana, for mustering strong district and teachers’-union support for their plans, for having superior data systems, and for submitting comprehensive proposals that touched “every single child” statewide.
Are there evidence-based answers to the broad question “What explicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way”? Distinguished by its global perspective, its currency, and its comprehensiveness, Beyond the Grammar Wars:
provides an historical overview of the debates around grammar and English/literacy teaching in four settings: the US, England, Scotland and Australia
offers an up-to-date account of what the research is telling (and not telling) us about the effectiveness of certain kinds of grammar-based pedagogies in English/literacy classrooms
takes readers into English/literacy classrooms through a range of examples of language/grammar-based pedagogies which have proven to be successful
addresses metalinguistic issues related to changes in textual practices in a digital and multimodal age, and explores the challenges for educators who are committed to finding a “usable grammar” to contribute to teaching and learning in relation to these practices.
All of the contributors are acknowledged experts in their field. Activities designed for use in language and literacy education courses actively engage students in reflecting on and applying the content in their own teaching contexts.
From Three-Toed Sloth: Slow Takes from the Canopy (My Very Own Internet Tradition)
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a “statistical myth” before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone’s mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.
To summarize what follows below (”shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.
You’ve probably heard it at one time or another: Most of us use only 10 percent of our brains. More factoid than fact, a claim of unknown provenance and dubious accuracy, the idea sticks around because of the enduring appeal of its underlying premise. We’d all love to think that we’re in possession of tremendous untapped potential, of latent mental powers just waiting to be activated. It seems so convenient, like falling in love with the person you’re already married to, or whipping up dinner from what’s already in your kitchen. You don’t have to leave home, or even change out of your pajamas.
The 2010 Learning Conference will take place at the Hong Kong Institute of Education in Hong Kong from July 6-9, 2010. For more information please visit www.LearningConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Learning Conference, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2010/register/.
Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way. - Ted Sizer
As individuals with decades of experience in improving public education at all levels, the Conveners of The Forum for Education and Democracy view the upcoming debates over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as offering the opportunity to finally get it right. After a decade of tinkering around the edges and avoiding the hard questions, the so-called No Child Left Behind version of ESEA has done little to improve schools. In fact, our schools look much like they did when the act was passed – and many think that NCLB hindered school improvement efforts that were going on prior to its passage.
Today the International Conference on Learning Newsletter will be re-launched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Learning Community. The Learning Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Learning Community.
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From a letter to Thomas Jefferson written by John Adams, January 23, 1825:
“Books that cannot bear examination certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws…. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.”
Perhaps the powers that be in Texas consider Thomas Jefferson an extraneous ingredient and will seek to extract our third president and other major figures in American history from their school’s textbooks. It seems that there will be a bit of revision in Texas, and I fear it will be big—as things often are in the Lone Star State.
Abstract: The dynamic progress of globalisation has been reshaping the culture, politics and economy of countries. This knowledge-based and post-Fordist work environment requires the formation of new curriculum and pedagogical practices. In order for a country to survive economically in this environment, it is necessary to restructure its education policies and practices. At the political level, the government has to put in place national education policies that are able to create a workforce who can meet the global demands. At the national level, the education ministry has to ensure that these policies are well translated in schools. Basically, the on-going educational setting has to fulfil the economic objectives of a country.
This paper examines Singapore’s present education landscape and its pedagogical practices. It reviews the Singapore government’s interpretation of globalisation and examines its responses to the world globalised economy. Specifically, it looks at the strategies adopted by the government and its education ministry in the refining of its Ability-driven Education framework. It discusses Singapore’s 2008 education strategy FutureSchools@Singapore, which stresses the use of the most up-to-date information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning in Singapore schools.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.
By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.
When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because - as I realize in hindsight - he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys - in her opinion - were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.
I don’t think you can really blame them for making such inferences, although there is an obvious problem with such behavior: It is a problem of self-perpetuating stereotypes in which teachers think girls are worse at math, girls get away with lesser effort in their math classes, which reduces average math scores for girls, which makes teachers think that girls are worse in math, and so on…
Sometimes, poor science, or even pseudo-scientific data add to the anecdotal observations, such as when George Roman announced in 1887 “that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics attributable to brain size” (not quite the statistician, he seemed to have neglected the fact that brain size correlates with women’s average smaller body size and lesser weight…), or when Eleanor Maccoby concluded in 1974 that “gender differences in mathematics performance were scientifically well established” when she showed data that “boys and girls acquire early number concelts similarly in the preschool years, [...] and that their performance throughout elementary school was similar, (thus apparently indicating similar early math socialization) but that then “boys’ skills in mathematics increased faster than girls’ beginning around 12 or 13 years of age, creating a significant gender gap in performance by high school”.
David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today’s popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it’s profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn’t caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they’re discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.
On a winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California’s Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he’s become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.
Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
…
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
Better schools prepare better learners! Can anyone dispute this? Hence, innovative strategies in education are presented in this book with the primary purpose of developing better schools. Key areas covered in this book are:
Organisational effectiveness
Emotional intelligence
Collegial leadership
Fear of failure in education: Tobephobia
Media-based learning
Gifted learners
High risk learners
Self-regulated learning.
Novel strategies are presented that educators can employ to focus on and to improve practice. The issues discussed in this book are therefore typical issues that educators are faced with daily in their schools. It equips them with useful information to cope with the challenges of being teachers. Also, Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools gives educators the opportunity to introspect critically their professional integrity and status. Ultimately, no matter how much we do in our schools, our learners must be the beneficiaries of quality educational outcomes.
Cathryn Teasley is Adjunct Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña, Spain. Her work is focused on cross-cultural justice through education, and is reflected in publications such as Transnational perspectives in culture, policy, and education (Peter Lang, 2008), which she co-edited with Cameron McCarthy.
Abstract: By critically examining four broad dimensions of learning through the postcolonial lens, the aim with this study is to promote alternatives to today’s neoliberal variant on the technical-rational imaginary for learning. Such alternatives are meant to help learners of all ages, origins, and conditions, but especially those belonging to identity groups who regularly experience one or more forms of discrimination, inequality, and injustice, to identify neocolonial cultural and economic dynamics so that they might create a cross-cultural common ground from which to resist such oppression, as a means of empowering and perhaps even emancipating themselves from its damaging effects.
In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges. He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker’s income that must go towards repaying students loans. He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
The game isn’t exactly Halo or Assassin’s Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. “The graphics stink,” admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes.
Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities.
Dr. Denise Newfield’s paper, Pippa’s Song: Multimodality and Pedagogic Praxis, commemorates the contribution of Pippa Stein, professor of language education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 1981 to 2008.
Professor Stein was a much beloved and respected teacher, academic and researcher, a founder member of the Africa Research Network, a member of the international advisory committee of the Learning Conference, and of the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Her untimely death in August 2008 is mourned by the international academic community.
It is my purpose today to pay tribute to her work in multimodal pedagogies and in democratic education by providing a critical assessment of it.
From Josh Karp in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
Digital media can extend the goals of National Lab Day and help the United States rebuild its lead in science and math.
And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”
During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.
It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.
On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.
Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system. The prescription is a complete overhaul.
In accordance with a traditional understanding that continues to be widely followed in our region by many educationists, the process of learning in Southasia today is still largely by rote. As such, there is little or no understanding on the part of most students of what exactly they are studying, nor why. It is critical to realise, however, that education in the 21st century is far more demanding and competitive than it was in the past, due to the vast and growing knowledge base, developments in technology and an increasingly globalised perspective. It is imperative, then, to make students into active rather than passive learners to deal with this changing context – but this is a lesson that many in Southasia, and particularly in Pakistan, have yet to appreciate.
Around the world, the idea of ‘quality’ education has itself been forced to evolve in recent years, in three particular ways. First, in terms of the education process itself, students must be taught how to relate their learning to their day-to-day lives, with a focus on how to learn rather than depending solely on teachers and textbooks. Second, the goal of quality education has also changed, with an eye to enabling students to perform well academically and socially, and to become thinking, caring and tolerant global citizens. The third aspect is facilitating learners not only to perform well academically, but also to groom them to think for themselves. In short, we hope that they will be adaptive, mature and tolerant; and to respect ideological, cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, such skills – quite removed from the central tenets of the traditional curricula in this region’s countries – have become important for a student’s very survival in the globalised world. Quality education assumes the pivotal role of trained teachers who have a solid knowledge base, and have control over what to teach and how to teach it. The teachers themselves, therefore, need to be allowed to develop the expertise and self-confidence to show students the path to independent thinking and learning – and without feeling threatened themselves.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
“I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening For the full post…of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.”For the full post…
If the author of those words is correct in his belief, then the entire thrust of American educational policy of the past few decades, since the release of A Nation At Risk in the Reagan administration, is doomed to failure.
If the words sound like those of a contemporary critic of the sanctions No Child Left Behind or of the big stick approach of current Secretary Arne Duncan, then perhaps the author was more prescient than many realize. The words appeared in print on this day in 1897 in School Journal. The piece is titled My Pedagogic Creed and was written by the great American philosopher and Educator John Dewey
During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.
“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”
And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.
On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.
Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?
In several higher-performing nations, a single set of national academic standards guides all or most of those decisions. Yet in this country, the obstacles to establishing national standards have proved numerous and persistent, even amid concerns about the United States’ international standing in education.
Despite years of practice in reading, many learners find difficulty in making sense of texts they want to read. A number of reasons have been given for this difficulty in comprehension experienced by foreign learners of English. Ranging from failure to interpret the writer’s cohesive signals as intended; lack of practice in applying “grammatical” knowledge when reading; lack of practice with texts containing a variety of cohesive features; to the tradition of teaching such features as part of the grammatical system and practicing them in isolation and at single sentence level in grammar/or writing lessons. Hence, this book presents the results of a comparative analysis of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in selected British newspaper reports and short stories, identifying the cohesive devices that tend to occur more frequently in these texts. The findings indicate that students’ in reading and writing classes can benefit from the rich lexical contents of short stories as well as the formal style and specialist lexis in newspaper reports. Therefore, EFL teachers will benefit their students by using a combination of these types of texts in reading and writing classes. Additionally, they buttress the view that insights from discourse analysis can help teachers refine their decision-making processes of text selection and the teaching of vocabulary, reading and writing skills. It also offers some possible classroom activities that might be useful in developing students’ reading and writing skills at the intermediate to advanced level of study, based on the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices attested in the study.
From Mac Montadon in Spotlight On Digital Media and Learning
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.
Collier should know. She is the co-chair, along with MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, a taskforce formed in the wake of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. The working group is charged with gathering information on both public and parental tools along with approaches to educating kids to be safe and responsible digital citizens. It will deliver its findings to Congress in June.
“What does that do?” Collier, a journalist and the executive director of NetFamilyNews, Inc., asks during a recent phone conversation. “It gives teachers the excuse not to use social networking in classrooms, and that’s a 21st century tool for learning.”
It was enough to make Anne Collier cringe. At last month’s Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., this statistic was bandied about: In a recent survey, 65 percent of teachers polled agreed with the idea that predators are out there, lurking in social networking sites to prey on unwitting children.
Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork write in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 105-119,
Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately.
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about corporate innovation; how to define it, how to inspire ideation and how companies can move forward in their implementation of ideas. And the more I read and think about innovation, the more I realize that something far greater is at stake here than just the ability of US companies to create new product lines and services during a recession. I want to make the case that there is a fundamental, philosophical problem with the US education system, and that if the current educational trends for most of the children in the US aren’t addressed, then the ability for this country to generate innovative scientists, politicians and business leaders out of future generations will be drastically undermined. The extent to which this is a valid concern was highlighted in the recent Newsweek-Intel Global Innovation Survey and its companion article.
Some of my basic premises are drawn from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both of which I thoroughly recommend. My premises are as follows:
A combination of technological advances and globalization have increased outsourcing and automation of tasks to the point where soon, any rule-based, linear thinking business activity that can be outsourced to a computer process or to another country will be. Countries, like China and India, have highly educated populations who are increasingly able and willing to perform the white-collar jobs of Americans and Europeans at a fraction of the cost, and these are only the most recently successful recipients of outsourcing, other countries are quickly catching up. Technological advances have meant that the outsourcing of this work can often be seamless and transparent to the end-user. In addition, time-differences enable companies to have a 24-hour workforce without paying anyone overtime to work a night shift.
Chinese schools are thought to have begun in the Western Zhou (11th century to 770 B.C.), and continued through Confucius’ time (551-479 B.C., and far beyond), emphasizing the “six arts”-ritual, music, archery, charioteering, history (including calligraphy), and mathematics.
Extrapolating, adapting, and charting these Confucian ideals through several historic eras, the authors use a systems theory-based web model to demonstrate these cultural influences on Chinese higher education. The authors also argue that this “Confucian” web deeply influenced Deng Xiaoping’s “long march” towards China’s global development. Political, financial, technological, social and cultural imperatives of China’s entrance into the global mainstream have, in turn, further affected the escalating evolution of education in China’s universities.
The authors-professors in both the American and the Chinese higher education systems-also develop an argument for delving deeply into culture, utilizing historical-critical methodology, buttressed by a conceptual understanding useful in analyzing the development of similar systems throughout the world. In addition, they present an historic, multi-faceted view of China’s many incursions into the global world system, to build a truly astonishing higher education system in 2009. This rapid response further illustrates the strong foundation and societal and governmental support-upon which the current Chinese educational system continues to build.
The New York Times for 14 November 2009 carried an article by Winnie Hu discussing the increasing trend of teachers offering lesson plans and other classroom material for sale on the World Wide Web.
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
Reviewing the books The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose in the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco says,
In short, the more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes. The most reliable data, lucidly presented by Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard, in his book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, do disclose some noteworthy trends. Especially in mathematics, student achievement has lately improved at the elementary school level, but the gains have not been maintained through middle school and high school. Test scores of African-American students in reading as well as in math continue to lag behind those of white students, though the gap has been narrowing. Hispanic students also score lower than non-Hispanic whites, although, as Koretz points out, the meaning of these data is complicated by the fact that “the Hispanic population is constantly refreshed” by new immigrants who, at first, may have difficulty understanding and reading English.[4]
Yet despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence—an idea that Rothstein dismissed as a “fable.” It was a well-chosen word, since “fable” is the name we give to a tale whose claims cannot be empirically verified but that may nevertheless contain some admonitory or normative truth.
Science for 23 October 2009 prints an editorial entitled Europe Rethinks Education by Pierre Léna discussing the importance of strengthening science education. Among the topics discussed is the Rocard Report on Science Education and efforts now underway to respond to it.
For societies to understand the consequences of vital issues such as climate change, education—especially science education—will play a critical role. Improving the quality of science education in primary and secondary schools is a challenge faced by nearly all countries. Europe has finally recongnized for a trans-European effort to rejuvenate the scientific education of all students, promising efforts are now under way.
This week in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning renowned media scholar James Gee talks with Heather Chaplin, author of Smartbomb, about how games influence learning.
Q: I know you always say you’re not advocating the use of games for learning in particular, but rather that games offer a model for effective learning. Why are games such an important model for us to be looking at? Why are they a good model for understanding learning?
A: First of all, it’s a good model because games are about problem solving, and they’re not about just learning facts. You learn the facts as tools to solve the problems. And we know if you teach people just facts, you have no guarantee they can solve problems, but if you teach them to solve problems, we do know they have to learn the facts to solve the problem. That’s all games are: sets of problems in an interesting environment.
The second thing is games give situated meaning. That is, they tie words to images, actions, dialog, experience, not just other words. We know from research on the brain that humans learn better when words are associated with images and actions and experiences and not just definitions or other words.
“Like a steady drip from a leaky faucet, the experimental studies being released this school year by the federal Institute of Education Sciences are mostly producing the same results: ‘No effects,’ ‘No effects,’ ‘No effects.’ ” So began Education Week ’s description this past spring of findings reported in rigorous, more scientific evaluations from the 7-year-old research agency. ( “‘No Effects’ Studies Raising Eyebrows,” April 1, 2009.)
The reports evaluated the impact of a wide array of federally supported programs and practices, in areas such as professional development, after-school programs, mentoring of new teachers, and Title I instruction. Often—though not always—the results were “no effects.”
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
Professor Bob Lingard has been Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Education at The University of Queensland since June, 2008. He has also been Professor at the University of Edinburgh (2006-2008), where he held the Andrew Bell Chair of Education, and the University of Sheffield (2003-2006) in the UK. From 1989-2003, he worked in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, where he was professor and for a period, Head of School. Bob has an international research reputation in the areas of sociology of education and education policy. He is the author/editor of 15 books and about 100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Educating Boys: beyond structural reform (Palgrave, 2009), co-authored with Wayne Martino and Martin Mills. He has an in-press book co-authored with Fazal Rizvi, Globalizing Education Policy (Routledge, 2009). He is editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and editor of two books series, Studies in Education (Allen & Unwin, Australia) and Keys Ideas and Education with Greg Dimitriadis (Routledge, New York). He is also on the editorial boards of six international journals. More…
Professor Kerry Kennedy joined the Hong Kong Institute of Education in 2001. He came from the University of Canberra in Australia where he had been Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic). He has an MA and PhD from Stanford University, both in Education. He has an MEd degree from the University of New South Wales in Australia and a Master of Letters degree in History from the University of New England.
Prior to joining the Institute, Professor Kennedy had successively been Dean of Education at the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Canberra. He had also been Director of the Centre for Continuing Education at The Australian National University. While he has been at the Institute, he has been Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Dean of the Faculty of Professional and Early Childhood Education. He has won two Public Policy Research Grants, one Competitive Earmarked Research Grant and one Quality Education Fund Grant during his time at the Institute. More…
Yasmin B. Kafai Born in Germany, Dr. Kafai undertook her studies on learning theories and technologies in France, Germany, and the United States. She received her doctorate from Harvard University while working with Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Laboratory. From 1994 to 2008, she was on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
Her research on children’s learning as designers of games, simulations, and virtual worlds has received generous funding from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was one of the first educators to receive an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation in addition to a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education. More…
Dr. Bielaczyc is currently an Associate Professor in the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Kate was formerly an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in Technology in Education and Teacher Education; a Senior Scientist at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman; and Director of the Learning Communities Research Group at Boston College. Kate has worked as a cognitive researcher and systems designer at the Learning Research and Development Center in Pittsburgh and at universities in France and Italy. She has been a visiting scholar at the Open University, UK, and at the Ecole Normale Superior in Lyon, France. Kate was the Director of Research on a large-scale school reform effort through the NSF Vanguard for Learning project, and also worked with colleagues at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Secretary of Education in Bogota, Colombia, on the evaluation of an ICT project in the Bogota School District. Kate’s research centers on individual and collective metacognition, teacher and student learning and epistemic change within contexts of classroom innovation, and exploring new methodologies for classroom assessment.
Professor Samuel Leong joined the Hong Kong Institute of Education in early 2006 after completing the National Review of School Music Education (2004-5) for the Australian government as the project co-director. Over the past 30 years, he has had a multifarious career working in range of positions including at the Singapore Ministry of Education, Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, Centre for Life Enrichment, University of Michigan, Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia. He has authored and edited a number of publications including Using Music Technology in Music Education, Music in Schools and Teacher Education: a Global Perspective, and Musicianship in the 21st century and has given invited presentations in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. More…
www.LearningConference.com
Anna Frangoudaki is a professor at the University of Athens. Her fields of research include social inequalities in education, sociology of language, analysis of school textbooks, ethnocentrism in school, discrimination of minorities in education. She has collaborated with academics from Belgium, Israel, Italy, the Palestinian Authority, and Turkey on joint projects trying to adapt school knowledge to democratic ideas and values, by challenging prejudiced knowledge transmitted by schools, through which racism, social discrimination, nationalism and sexism are reproduced. Since 1997, she co-headed the Ministry of Greek Education - European Union Project on the educational reform of the Muslim Minority population in north-eastern Greece.
www.LearningConference.com
Thalia Dragonas is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Athens. She was for several terms Head of the Department of Early Childhood Education, she was a member of the board of the Greek Open University and the Center of Educational Research. Her research activity lies in the area of identities and the articulation of the social with the psychological. She has participated in and directed many Greek and international projects and has worked extensively for the educational reform of the Muslim Minority in Western Thrace. Specific areas of research interests are: psychosocial identity and intergroup relations, intercultural education and ethnocentrism in the educational system, prevention and promotion of early psychosocial health, transition to parenthood, construction of fatherhood and masculinity as well as research methodological issues such as the relationship of qualitative and quantitative techniques.Currently she is an MP with PASOK. She participates in Parliamentary Committees on Education, Culture, Equality and Human Rights.
With an ever changing clientele there is urgent need to attempt unconventional, innovative strategies that positively influence what happens in educational institutions. Readers are provided with tried-and-tested models that can be adapted to suit their personal needs. The book aims to energize and catapult readers into a new dimension of innovation and encourages them to experiment in classrooms and reflect on their practices as they seek to improve themselves as professionals.
Kylie Radel, Lecturer in Marketing, Faculty of Business & Infomatics, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia
J. Félix Angulo Rasco, Director, Lab Analysis of Educational Change (LACE) Group, University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain
Cathryn Teasley, Adjunct Professor, Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization, University of A Coruña, Spain
Vicki Pascoe, Discipline Coordinator for marketing and Lecturer, Marketing and Tourism, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia
Kris Gutiérrez, Professor, Social Research Methodology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
David Istance, Senior Analyst, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), OECD, OECD, Paris, France
Mary Kalantzis, Dean, College of Education and Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois Urbana Campaign, USA
Denise Newfield, Teacher Educator, School of Literature and Language Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
This paper presents findings related to how the nature of class changes when asynchronous online courses are used rather than classrooms. The qualitative study involved interviews with 32 university professors who have taught both in–class and online courses. The findings provide insight into how when the medium of teaching changes, there is also significant change in the composition and indeed the very nature of class. Such change occurs as the students attracted have more work experience and groups such as those living in rural areas, older students with work experience or those living outside the province are more likely to be included in the composition of class. Also, the medium itself changed the dynamics of class interactions, not only those between students and professor, but also the interaction between students themselves.
We are now in final production for The International Journal of Learning, Volume 15, Number 12. This issue will be published shortly and will be available in the online bookstore.
Announcing Vicki Adele Pascoe and Kylie Radel of Central Queensland University, Queensland, Australia as winners of the 2008 International Journal of Learning Award for Excellence, for their paper “What are Nice Guys Like them doing in a Place Like that?”: Education Journeys from Australian Indigenous Students in Custody.
Indigenous Australians have been the subject of long-term disadvantage and discrimination. They are “nearly 16 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people” (Council of Social Service of New South Wales, 2006, p. 1). Just over one third of Indigenous prisoners have completed primary education as compared to just 16% of non-Indigenous prisoners (Rawnsley, 2003, p. 19). The majority of Indigenous people in custody have little opportunity to intervene in the offending cycle because they lack the education tools. Since 2000 our university has offered a Tertiary Entry Program (TEP) specifically designed for Australian Indigenous people who wish to gain the necessary skills for successful university study. More …
Kris Gutiérrez is a Professor of Social Research Methodology at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. Professor Gutierrez was the 2005 recipient of the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award and is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences 2006-07. She was also the Noted Scholar in Residence, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, July 23-August 10, 2006. She has a Ph.D., in English/Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Colorado at Boulder. More …
Toward the end of the 19th century, the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus concocted an experiment that countless children have unwittingly replicated ever since, over a morning bowl of Alpha-Bits. Ebbinghaus took consonants from the alphabet, slapped a random vowel between them, and, voila! some 2,300 nonsense syllables were born. For years, Ebbinghaus practiced these syllables at random, learning and re-learning until he had mastered the material. In 1885, he recorded his observations in Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology — a seminal work that countless psychologists have wittingly read ever since, over morning bowls of cereal or otherwise.
Near the end of his monograph, Ebbinghaus mentioned a “noteworthy” detail from his learning trials. He found that a particular 12-syllable series could be conquered in two ways: by cramming 68 repetitions into a single day before testing, or by spacing 38 repetitions across several days. The difference, he wrote, was significant. “It makes the assumption probable that with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.”1
Ebbinghaus’s tests had a sample size of one: himself. But time and again, using far more rigorous empirical settings, psychologists confirmed the potency of this “spacing effect.” The method would seem to lend itself to immediate real-world application; what teacher or student would not want to enhance learning while limiting study-time? More …
By Stephen Brill, in The New York Times
By Alan Greenblatt, on NPR
The latest issue of 
By Stephanie Clifford, in The New York Times
By James Shreeve in National Geographic
From Abby Goodnough, in The New York Times
Congratulations to 
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President 
When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because - as I realize in hindsight - he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys - in her opinion - were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.
David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
On a winter day
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
Last month, a week 
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.
