Archive for the 'News' Category

Page 2 of 15

“The Power of Habit,” by Charles Duhigg (Book Review)

Published on March 31, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Timothy D. Wilson | New York Times Sunday Book Review | Original Article

Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player). “If practice did not make perfect,” William James said, “nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he” (we, that is) “would therefore be in a sorry plight.”

But of course there is a dark side to habits, namely that we acquire bad ones, like smoking or overeating. I imagine that most people — save, perhaps, for a friend of mine who said, in reaction to a news story about the dangers of hyper­tension, “I’ve given up all of my vices; please don’t take away my salt!” — would love to find an easy way of breaking a bad habit or two.

Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, has written an entertaining book to help us do just that, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg has read hundreds of scientific papers and interviewed many of the scientists who wrote them, and relays interesting findings on habit formation and change from the fields of social psychology, clinical psychology and neuroscience. This is not a self-help book conveying one author’s homespun remedies, but a serious look at the science of habit formation and change. More…

Image: Luc Melanson via The New York Times

Q and A: John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play

Published on March 27, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

John Seely Brown. Photo by Joi Ito.

Heather Chaplin | Spotlight Homepage | Original Article

As the leading thinkers and do-ers meet this week at the third annual Digital Media and Learning conference, Spotlight talked with DML2012’s keynote presenter John Seely Brown, self-proclaimed “chief of confusion,” and one of the most enlightening thinkers on nearly any topic.

Seely Brown is renowned for his pioneering work at Xerox PARC and work on interplay between organizations, technology and people. He is currently the co-chair of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation and a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at University of Southern California. His latest book (with Douglas Thomas) is “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.” Spotlight spoke with him about how to better engage kids and transform education.

Spotlight: Why is “play” such a buzz word when people talk about 21st-century learning?

John Seely Brown: The key to an arc-of-life learning is figuring out how to honor the fact that when we first come into this world, we are mammoth learning engines. How do we honor what it was that made us able in our first two or three years to master one of the most complicated structures we ever have to face in our lives—natural language?

Somehow we were pulled into making sense of the world and making sense of the world continuously. And we did this through play. It was part and parcel to being.

Spotlight: Is play particularly critical for learning right now, at this moment in history, or has it always been crucial but now we just like to talk about it?

JSB: I would say both. It’s through play that we’re given permission to fail again and again in our first few years of life as we try to make sense of the world. It’s our job as youngsters to build a frame of reference through which we will understand the world. I would argue that building that initial frame actually comes from constant experimenting.

 

British Museum Tour Now Available!

Published on March 24, 2012 in Conference, Headline, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Enlightenment Tour – 13:00, 13 August 2012 (Before the first day of the conference)

Discover the remarkable collection at the British Museum with a private tour, created especially for the delegates of the International Learning Conference!

Meet fellow Conference participants as a tour guide takes us through galleries and collections, “discovering the way the world was understood by Europeans in the 18th century, tracing the beginning of the British Museum and its collection.”

Before or after the tour, feel free to explore the museum and all its wonderful collections, visit the gift shop, or relax over coffee in the café.

Originally built in 1759, the British Museum houses a collection of nearly eight million works, including world-famous pieces like the Elgin Marbles (or Parthenon Marbles) and the Rosetta Stone. The original British Library, now referred to as the Round Reading Room, is housed within the walls of the museum, and was once the library of choice for figures such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and many more.

The tour will last one hour.

Cost for the Enlightenment Tour, created specifically for delegates of the International Learning Conference, and an experienced tour guide: $20

Very limited space available – be sure to book today!

To book, email us at support@thelearner.com

Image: Andrew Dunn via Creative Commons

Schools We Can Envy

Published on March 20, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Diane Ravitch, The New York Review of Books

The Kirkkojärvi School in Espoo, Finland, which accommodates about 770 students aged seven to sixteen and also includes a preschool for six-year-olds; from the Museum of Finnish Architecture’s exhibition ‘The Best School in the World: Seven Finnish Examples from the 21st Century,’ which will be on view at the American Institute of Architects’ Center for Architecture in New York City this fall

In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Joel Klein in New York City, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be “no excuses” for schools with low test scores. The “no excuses” reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not. That someone is invariably their teachers.

Nothing is said about holding accountable the district leadership or the elected officials who determine such crucial issues as funding, class size, and resource allocation. The reformers say that our economy is in jeopardy, not because of growing poverty or income inequality or the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, but because of bad teachers. These bad teachers must be found out and thrown out. Any laws, regulations, or contracts that protect these pedagogical malefactors must be eliminated so that they can be quickly removed without regard to experience, seniority, or due process.

The belief that schools alone can overcome the effects of poverty may be traced back many decades but its most recent manifestation was a short book published in 2000 by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., titled No Excuses. In this book, Samuel Casey Carter identified twenty-one high-poverty schools with high test scores. Over the past decade, influential figures in public life have decreed that school reform is the key to fixing poverty. Bill Gates told the National Urban League, “Let’s end the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education. I say it’s more the other way around: improving education is the best way to solve poverty.” Gates never explains why a rich and powerful society like our own cannot address both poverty and school improvement at the same time. More…

Image: Tuomas Uusheimo via The New York Review of Books

The Art of Distraction

Published on March 16, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Hanif Kureishi, The New York Times

The other day it occurred to me that I needed more exercise and should take up skipping. I obtained a smart leather rope with weights in the handles and, waiting until it was almost dark, went out into the street. Making sure that no one was coming, I started bouncing on the pavement. I must have skipped a bit as a child, I guess, because I could remember how to do it. Being a determined if not bloody-minded fellow, I improved after a few days; I could go on longer. But that was that: I didn’t do more skips; my knees couldn’t take it, and I soon ran out of breath. Nor could I do the leaps, twirls, step-overs and girly hops I’d seen on the Internet. I repeated the same little leaden jumps over and over. Soon I had to conclude that I’d reached my level. The only way was down.

My 13-year-old son wandered into the street and said he’d like to have a go with the rope. I handed it over, and he began to fling himself in all directions at once, crisscrossing his arms, hopping and tripping from foot to foot while doing a Cossack impression; then he did the whole thing backward, singing a Beatles song. It was moving and educational to be so instructed by one’s son. I hoped an opportunity for retribution would soon present itself.

My son, who can skip and sing, found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished, for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labeled dyslexic and dyspraxic. More…

Image: Rutu Modan via The New York Times

Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids

Published on March 12, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Why teaching children at home violates progressive values.

Dana Goldstein, Slate.com

As a child growing up in Arizona and Georgia college towns during the 1980s and 1990s, the filmmaker Astra Taylor was “unschooled” by her lefty, countercultural parents. “My siblings and I slept late and never knew what day of the week it was,” Taylor writes in a new essay in the literary journal N+1. “We were never tested, graded, or told to memorize dates, facts, or figures. … Some days we read books, made music, painted, or drew. Other days we argued and fought over the computer. Endless hours were spent watching reruns of ‘The Simpsons’ on videotape, though we had every episode memorized. When we weren’t inspired—which was often—we simply did nothing at all.”

Over the past year, there has been a resurgence of interest in homeschooling—not just the religious fundamentalist variety practiced by Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum, but also in secular, liberal homeschooling like Taylor’s. Think no textbooks, history lessons about progressive social movements, and college-level math for precocious 13-year-olds. Some families implement this vision on their own, while others join cooperatives of like-minded, super-involved parents.

Homeschooling is so unevenly regulated from state to state that it is impossible to know exactly how many homeschoolers there are. Estimates range from about 1 million to 2 million children, and the number is growing. It is unclear how many homeschooling families are secular, but the political scientist Rob Reich has written that there is little doubt the homeschooling population has diversified in recent years.* Yet whether liberal or conservative, “[o]ne article of faith unites all homeschoolers: that homeschooling should be unregulated,” Reich writes. “Homeschoolers of all stripes believe that they alone should decide how their children are educated.” More…

Image: Jacob Wackerhausen/iStockphoto via Slate.com

Educating Voters for Rebuilding America

Published on March 8, 2012 in News. 0 Comments
Educating Voters for Rebuilding America: National Goals and Balanced Budget, by Jack E. Bowsher
Ten years ago, our nation was on the right road to fiscal stability with four years of surpluses totaling $560 billion. Unfortunately, private and public sector senior executives made serious mistakes during the past decade, resulting in our federal government being on the road to a financial meltdown. This could lead to a long-term and deep economic depression like the 1930s. In Educating Voters for Rebuilding America, Jack Bowsher takes a deep, investigative look into how Americans can turn the country around. To avoid many tax increases being discussed in Washington, DC, Bowsher argues that there must be systemic changes in many areas of our government and in the free enterprise system. Only then will Americans enjoy economic prosperity, higher employment levels, affordable education systems, a balanced budget, a modern, nation-wide energy system, and much more. Bowsher describes how these national goals can be achieved in this decade by implementing the required systemic changes, and also shows how Social Security and Medicare benefits can be affordable in future years. Voters must be educated on the major issues and challenges facing our nation. Only they have the power to end the civil war between our two political parties by electing qualified candidates in the White House and Congress in 2012. Educate yourself today!

Why iPad Textbooks Are Still Too Expensive for Schools

Published on March 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Josh Catone, Mashable.com

When Apple announced its initiative to bring iPads into schools and provide textbooks in digital format, the reaction among many was enthusiastic. iPad textbooks are more interactive, they can be easily updated and they can’t be easily vandalized. The price Apple announced at their launch event — $14.99 per textbook — also sounded like a steal, certainly far cheaper than traditional textbooks. But when you dig into the fixed costs associated with digital textbooks vs. their paper counterparts, there are some major reasons to believe that iPad textbooks might not be coming to a school near you any time soon.

The biggest is that the textbooks themselves don’t turn out to be cheaper. A representative of textbook publisher McGraw-Hill made clear to Mashable shortly after Apple’s announcement that the functional cost of a digital textbook for a school will actually be the same as the paper version, despite the much lower sticker price. Because of the way iBooks will be linked to specific user accounts, reuse from year-to-year isn’t possible; a freshman algebra textbook purchased in 2012 will need to be repurchased for new incoming freshman in 2013. If you use the standard cost and lifespan estimates for paper textbooks of $75 and five years, the digital versions end up costing the same as the paper editions. More…

5 Essential Classroom Management Tools for Teachers

Published on February 29, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Amy Burke, Mashable.com

This site makes it easy for you to see what other schools are doing around the country to motivate their students, with everything from technology integration to project-based learning. While incorporating real-life video to inform and improve learning, the site offers its best practices for development in student achievement with commentary and blogs from experienced teachers and curriculum experts.

This is a one-stop shop for all the teaching resources you can imagine. With more than 22,000 examples of lesson plans, printable worksheets and teaching strategies, TeacherVision offers everything from guides on classroom management to ideas for games to enhance classroom interaction. Search by subject, grade or theme to build a comprehensive plan. While there is a yearly fee, new users can sign up for a free 7-day trial. More…

 

 

New Media Consortium Names 10 Top ‘Metatrends’ Shaping Educational Technology

Published on February 25, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Nick DeSantis, The Chronicle of Higher Education

A group of education leaders gathered last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach individual students—while free online tools will challenge the authority of traditional institutions.

The retreat celebrated the 10th anniversary of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, whose annual report provides a road map of the education-technology landscape. One hundred experts from higher education, K-12, and museum education identified 28 “metatrends” that will influence education in the future. The 10 most important, according to a New Media Consortium announcement about the retreat, include global adoption of mobile devices, the rise of cloud computing, and transparency movements that call into question traditional notions of content ownership concerning digital materials.

Larry Johnson, the consortium’s chief executive, said the meeting was important because it brought together groups from three different education sectors that don’t often collaborate. He said the retreat intended to “drive a conversation around how to think about the future.” More…

Image courtesy of Brett Jordan (Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo)  via The Chronicle