The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
- Google Apps (Education Edition) vs. Microsoft Live@Edu
- Things I Learned This Week – #30
- Weeknote #11
- One week until #GTAUK
- 3 things I need to maintain my productivity.
- Motivation comes from within.
- Intention vs. Effect
- You are what you habitually do.
- Is it time to get rid of secondary schools?
- Productivity: value your time
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Weekly Roundup (23 July 2006)
68 CommentsI’m not only braindead from a week’s Research Methods up at Durham University for my Ed.D. but I’m physically exhausted after playing for my church at the National Christian Football Festival this weekend. And I’m sunburned. Anyway, on with the show! This week I have been mostly looking at a diverse range of blog posts including teacher development, the use of wikis and… hoovering. ;)
Here’s what I’ll be looking at:
- Dave Warlick – Information is a Science
- Teaching in the Digital Age – Emerging Teachers
- Christopher D. Sessums – Blogging as Teacher “Personalizedâ€Â? Development
- pebbleRoad – Using Wikis on the Intranet: The British Council Case Study
- Creating Passionate Users – Hooverin’ and the space between notes
- if:book – Introducing MediaCommons
- Artichoke – “He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?â€Â?
- Miles Berry – “Why minimally guided instruction does not work”
I’ll start with the wonderful Kathy Sierra and her post on Hooverin’ and the space between notes. I love the way she links between a wide range of things showing how the human-made pigeon-holes of knowledge and experience are actually artificial. In the post I mention above Kathy talks about Fran Healy’s (lead singer of Travis) comment that Neil Young and his band don’t seem in a hurry to ‘fill up the spaces’ between the notes – ‘they’re just hooverin’ (vacuuming for our US friends).
As Kathy says, ‘he was explaining that for these musicians, playing this amazing music appeared that easy. Relaxed. Not frantic. There was no desperate need to fill all the space.‘ All well and good, but how is this relevant to educators?
Newbie teachers/trainers often make the same mistake. We fill in every available space, just like those first-time desktop publishers who “abhor a vacuum” and cram words and clip-art into every square millimeter of a flyer.
But real learning takes place between exposures to content! Long-term memory from learning happens after the training. The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent. If we don’t leave that space, new content keeps rushing in to overwrite the previous content, before the learner’s brain has a chance to pause, reflect, and synthesize the proteins needed for long-term memory storage.
As teachers we have to be the best learners we can be. And that means professional development – or, as Christopher D. Sessums (in Blogging as Teacher “Personalizedâ€Â? Development) would prefer to put the emphasis on, personalized development. He quotes somebody by the name of Courtney Shannon who blogged as a result of attending a workshop he ran:
First in order to make the notion of including weblogs (that may appear to be more of a hinderance than a help to some of my colleagues) as a part of professional development more friendly, I would like to call it “PERSONAL(IZED) DEVELOPMENT” instead of “PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT.” As seen in Jeff Scofer’s Thinking Stick Blog, if “personal development” can be individually mapped and completed in planning time or free time it is much more likely to be beneficial and carried out in practice. When teachers are forced to attend a “generic” professional development seminar there will be undoubtedly a point in time where information that is being presented will not apply to some content area teachers.
She makes it clear that this personalized development should not supplant but complement current arrangements for one-size-fits-all INSETs. It would sound strange to give teachers an afternoon off every so often to read blog posts but I can see few better ways of doing professional development which are relevant, stimulating and ‘doable’. :)
Opposition to such a change is likely to come from those who have to be pretty much forced to use technology – the generation above the ‘digital immigrants’ if you want to use the jargon. Us ‘digital natives’ coming through in the teaching profession are equally at home in both real and virtual worlds, making online professional development through personalized blog-post reading, etc. easy, stimulating and rewarding. In her short blog post Emerging Teachers, Louise Starkey looks at the mental models of those currently undergoing teacher training. She references Peter Senge, the name of whom some of you may recognize from his famous book The Fifth Discipline where he talks of ‘learning organizations’:
The challenge for these emerging teachers is to embrace mental models (Senge) of pedagogy that are aligned with effective teaching of digital age students, or more simply; move from a transmission ideology that is the basis of their own experience of learning to a connectivist or at least constructivist model of teaching.
As Dave Warlick continues to argue in his 2 Cents Worth blog, education – and especially ‘literacy’ as a construct – is and has to change for the 21st century. In Information is a Science… he serves up the following:
…during the past 10 to 15 years, the information that we use to accomplish our goals has become increasingly
* Networked,
* Digital, and
* OverwhelmingThese three emerging characteristics of information have, I believe, changed what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Reading, arithmetic, and writing continue to be at the core of literacy. However, there are other skills today that are as critical to a democratic and economically viable society as the ability to read text on a piece of paper. This development, I believe, should affect our notions of the basic skills as they are integrated into what and how we teach.
This idea that knowledge isn’t something static and transmissible, but instead is socially constructed and changeable is something I’ll be exploring in my Ed.D. thesis. I’d argue that many, if not most, in positions of power in western education have a 1950s (or even earlier) conception of knowledge as it relates to education.
Well… I’m going to stop there. I haven’t discussed the whole debate surrounding an article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark entitled Why minimally guided instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching (PDF) which I was going to access via Miles Berry’s interesting post on the subject. I also haven’t gone into the pebbleRoad post on the ways the British Council use wikis on their Intranet. And I’m afraid Artichoke’s writing style puts me off his/her content enough to always put it last on my list, unfortunately. Finally, there’s a whole other blog post about if:book’s Introduction of MediaCommons which aims to streamline and enhance the academic peer-review process familiar to readers and contributors to journals via an online process.
Published on July 23, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
68 Responses to “Weekly Roundup (23 July 2006)”
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