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How to disagree
March 29th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Paul Graham is almost always brilliant and I highly recommend his book Hackers and Painters.
Here’s a great essay (and taxonomy!) on how to disagree. The web enables a global conversation, and disagreement will be an important part of that conversation. Of all the forum threads I’ve participated in, I’ve learned the most from the threads that were intense debates, and Graham’s essay shows how to make those debates as productive as possible.
This would also be a nice resource for intermediate to advanced classes.
ELT and gaming
March 27th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Very interesting and richly sourced article on language teaching and gaming by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer in TESL-EJ. The use of “walkthroughs” is explained and examples outlined. Good stuff.
English for science, engineering: elementary and pre-int
March 26th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Here’s Einstein’s theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less.
It’s brilliant. If I had any lower level English for technology students, I’d be all over this. Of course, short words are don’t necessarily mean that they are learned earlier, but still…if you look at the lexis it does look graded.
Not sure how I’d exploit it, but it’s rich with opportunity.
Hat tip to Signal vs Noise.
“They are ready to dump our schools.”
March 24th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Interesting post by Robert Cringely on the challenges facing educators. (One of many) money quote:
…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn’t hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.
Teacher training vids
March 17th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Via the always-useful blog by Nik Peachey, here’s a link to a site with an extensive collection of teacher training videos, many about using web 2.0 tools.
Education blogs compendium
March 11th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Guy Kawasaki’s latest project, the blog portal Alltop, just added an education section. You can get the headlines / post titles and mousing over the title gives you the first several paragraphs, so you can decide if it’s worth a read. Not sure how or why this is better than a feed reader, but I do seem to go to Alltop every morning….
And, as a teaching tool, Alltop would be a good resource helping students find content they are interested in.
Change Gap
March 10th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
From Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed News, an all-too-familiar description of an education conference. Money quote:
First, am I a snob? Out to lunch? I mean it. I feel like it sometimes when I go to an education conference with 6,000 attendees and virtually no Internet access where almost no one who is presenting is modeling anything close to great pedagogy with technology. (That doesn’t mean, btw, that they are not great teachers or thinkers.) Where just about the only technologies represented on the vendor floor deal with assessment or classroom displays. I mean, I know I’m a one-trick pony in terms of what my frame of reference is (so no need to remind me again), but shouldn’t I be at least getting some sense that the people who are making the decisions understand on some level what we here are jammering about every day, the transformation that’s occurring, the amazing potentials of this? I feel like I have to be missing something here, that it must be me.
It’s not just you Will: we’ve all had that sensation, and it’s scary.
What we’re starting to see now is a new type of “wealth gap”, but where wealth is defined as “ability to adapt to change”. Today* it’s technology that’s driving this change, and as a whole the teaching community is woefully behind.
And the folks we’re behind are the ones we are supposed to be teaching. We’re about to slip into perceived irrelevance.
And since the rate of change is accelerating, a small gap now will only get bigger unless something dramatic happens. William Gibson points out that “The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed”…so how do we teach young people who are in that future, when we’re living in the past?
I don’t have much hope for teachers enmeshed in the government-run, bureaucratic, union-led morass that passes for public education these days. I feel woefully behind and I’m an independent free market freelancer guy designing web-based learning software, so how can teachers shackled within the public system manage? They are trying to keep their head above water with a big lead ball chained to their ankle.
(Yeah, I know, this sounds a little apocalyptic…to balance things out, later this week I’ll post some possible solutions.)
* or…as always?
We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed
March 7th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
German author Stefan Klien, in the New York Times:
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
Extremely cool “education board game”
March 3rd, 2008
by Cleve Miller
From the TED blog:
Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform.
They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but “we didn’t know what it would be”. They set up a studio in the conference’s venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen (”OverThere” — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game “of social awareness” collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.
Check out the Kluster site.
“Can technology help us improve the way we do any of these things?”
March 3rd, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Interesting discussion at Ken Carrol’s blog. Money quote in the comments:
So what does it take to learn language? Among other things: learner buy-in and commitment; daily, meaningful written and spoken target-language communication in real-life situations; access to target language media for authentic consumption. Can technology help us improve the way we do any of these things?