Personal vs. Social; Learning

This slideshow and podcast of Stephen Downes presentation called “Pedagogical Foundations For Personal Learning” is worth watching and listening to.  His ideas about what learning is vs. what we do in schools currently is quite interesting.  This presentation is an example of new, cutting edge ideas that aren’t flowing out of K-12 professional organizations like [...]

What I learned today

Here is an amazing article that could just as easily be applied to any educational profession (silo) not just school libraries. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6699357.html My two big takeaways from this amazing article. “changing our mind-set from adopting best practices as defined by our own professional organization to adopting a “customer service/support” orientation by crafting goals that support [...]

R & D in Education

If this blog wasn’t on the Chronicle’s site, one would have thought they were speaking of K-12 rather than higher education.   Great blog post by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon on R&D for Teaching With Technology. The major points are just as true in K-12; 1.  “throw out old assumptions about diffusion of innovation, early adopters, and mainstream [...]

The Rest of the Story

This blog post reminded me that last week a pioneer in the radio field left us; Paul Harvey.  For anyone who enjoyed talk radio, his voice and message where a familiar sound.  During the “80′s, I can remember coming home from school and listening to the political debates raging on talk radio.  Living in New Jersey, [...]

The Lessons of Vista

Windows 7 is coming soon from Microsoft and they have decided to scrape Vista.  The study of how Vista failed has lessons for all of us as educators. The first lesson is to always support people’s old stuff.  Many people who bought Vista found that their printer wouldn’t print b/c it lacked a driver.  The [...]

Review; The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad

Will Richardson wrote a reaction to Jay Mathews’ article in the Washington Post called The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills. Rather than post my own reaction (Will’s prose is no doubt more convincing than my own), I will review the original article in the hope of deconstructing Mathews’ argument. As I began the article, [...]

Review; Footprints in the Digital Age

Just read easily the most concise and actionable article on the power of the connected learner.  The article by Will Richardson is from the November 2008 issue of Educational Leadership entitiled Footprints in the Digital Age. The article’s strength is its breath of scope (it covers everything from blogs to WOW) and explains exactly why [...]