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Why do people insist on viewing the Standards as inconsistent with teacher creativity and choice? I am baffled by such uncreative thinking. That's like saying the architect cannot be creative because every house has to meet ...
Ken Robinson: The education secretary's new national curriculum is a dead hand on the creative pulse of teachers and students alike. First, creativity, like learning in general, is a highly personal process. We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things. Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way.
A classroom for the 21st century: where are the best places for learning?
Since compulsory primary education was introduced nearly 140 years ago, what children learn and the way they learn has changed dramatically. Yet the environment in which most children learn remains the same: a building, divided into classrooms and linked by corridors. Classrooms consist of tables and chairs, usually arranged so that children face a teacher and an interactive whiteboard – the technological equivalent of the Victorian blackboard.
"Write! Writing, to knowledge, is a certified check."
The quest for intellectual growth and self-improvement through education has occupied yesteryear’s luminaries like Bertrand Russelland modern-day thinkers like Sir Ken Robinsonand Noam Chomsky. In 1936, at the zenith of the Great Depression, the prolific self-help guru and famous eccentric James T. Manganpublished You Can Do Anything! (public library) — an enthusiastic and exclamation-heavy pep-manual for the art of living.
Any system that cannot be put together from a simple formula is computationally irreducible. That means, computation of the final configuration requires the same effort as the system has gone through to create itself — there is no computational reduction or shortcut possible. This situation corresponds to what physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram has defined as “computational irreducibility” (see his book A New Kind of Science, 2002).
music, technology, design. Using motion and technology to explore how to create music interesting to the audience and the musician.
Back in the 1990s, blogger, photographer, music producer and all round tech wizard Andrew C. Bulhak created a revolutionary computer program known as the Dada Engine. By combining some elementary grammatical rules with randomly generated bundles of text, the Dada Engine can spew out what sound like entirely plausible sentences of prose at will, sentences that sound so plausible in fact that they can easily be confused for those written by the human hand.
What I find far neater about Dada Engine variants, however, is that they can produce some pretty epic prose, not just bureaucratic drivel.
Consider what we can learn about the mind by examining how we view figurative art. This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience.
Ebooks alone may not require a traditional publisher, but simple ebooks only scratch the surface of the potential of this new realm. Whether we call it transmedia storytelling, interactive fiction, or any other semi-depressing buzzword, we are beginning to see the exciting possibilities: Serialization. Collaboration. Interactivity. Communal reading experiences. Location-aware storytelling. New narrative structures, serving classic storytelling values.
"Perhaps we need a paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to see technology and the humanities not as a binary but as two sides of a necessarily interdependent, conjoined and mutually consitutive set of intellectual, educational, social, poilitical, and economic practices.More to the point, we need to acknowledge how much the massive computational abilities that have transfomed the sciences have also changed our field in ways large and small and hold possibilities for far greater transformation..."
Tuesday is Arts Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill. With so many complex challenges facing America — in education, public health and the economy — should Americans care?
Harvard researchers took six years interviewing thousands of executives to find out “what makes innovators different.” They learned it’s all about making connections. Innovation expert Debra Kaye agrees: “Great innovators make connections between seemingly unrelated observations to uncover unique insights.”
Arts, like innovation, are all about making connections.
To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.” In the summer of 1983, Muppet Magazine invited science fiction icon Isaac Asimov — sage of science, champion of creativity in education, visionary of the future, lover of libraries — to “a meeting of the minds,” wherein Dr. Julius Strangepork would interview Asimov. Despite the silly tone of German-inspired Strangepork-speak, the wide-ranging conversation touches on a number of timeless and surprisingly timely issues.
We Think in Linear Terms, but Technology Moves at an Exponential Pace.
While there is no lack of discussion about the digital age, I’m not sure that we’ve fully accepted the consequences of the transition from atoms to bits. It’s not just that technology is moving faster, the rate of change is actually accelerating and that alters the logic by which we need to operate. Our intuition and experience lead us to assume a much slower pace.
Further, as the informational content of products and services increases, the economics change. While material and energy costs become less important, the information component is becoming more exponentially more efficient. We’ve seen this in computer hardware and software, but now we’re seeing it in life sciences and even manufacturing.
Everywhere you look, efficiency is being automated. From robots in factoriesto pattern recognition software that automates analytical tasks, machine capabilities are replacing human ones in every area except one: our ability to interact with each other. That’s the essence of the new passion economy.
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There are many books on the topic “learning in the 21st century,” and I think I have read most of them. The authors are educators and educational experts I know and admire. Many write about what students want and how students learn. What occurred to me was that there are no books about this topic written by students. Who are more important in students’ learning than the students themselves? Yet what I discovered was that teachers seldom ask their students important questions about pedagogy and learning. Most often teachers assume that they know what the students want — and that in most cases it’s what the teacher wants.
Via Julie Lindsay
Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.”
While young people are often adept at navigating networked spaces for social purposes in their everyday lives, it is less clear what role schools and teachers should play in that process.
Via Gust MEES
KAWC
VIDEO: The Future Of Wearable Technology
NPR (blog)
Off Book, a Web video series from PBS, explorers the future of wearable technology — from devices that help you figure out why you can't sleep to "smart" fabrics.
How do we choose the 10 technologies? We want them to reflect the full range of our interests, which uniquely amongst technology media companies encompass every domain: information technology, communications, energy, biomedicine, materials, and so on. But, even more, we are interested (like our owner, MIT) in how technologies can solve really hard problems. We look first for difficulty: we select problems whose intractability is a source of frustration, grief, or comedy and whose solution will expand human possibilities. The breakthroughs are variously mature. Although we insist that every technology possess some plausible path to widespread use, some are still in the lab, some are in commercial development, and others are being sold by companies.
Earlier this month, I wrote 5 Low-Tech Innovations That Make A Difference where you can creative problem-solving at its finest, in my view.
Perhaps it is the collaborative nature of the web that has allowed people to think bigger, to think in new ways. We see someone do a cool project over at Instructables and not only do they show their work, but they give you detailed instructions on how to do it in your shop or at your kitchen table. That’s the beauty of that popular project-sharing online community that provides publishing tools to help passionate, creative people share their most innovative projects, recipes, skills and ideas.
New York Times
Building a Better Tech School
New York Times
She invites important innovators in the field to poke holes in conventional wisdom and get the students thinking about questions that go far beyond the curriculum. Information technology is the common thread through the eight degrees the school plans to offer. Three will be dual master’s degrees from Cornell and the Technion, based on three “hubs” rather than traditional departments. One hub program, “connective media,” has largely been mapped out — though professors warn that it is subject to change as technology changes — and will deal with designing the mobile, fragmented and endlessly malleable technology that makes everyone a media creator as well as consumer. The other hubs, still under development, are being called “healthier life” (systems to improve health care delivery as well as personal technology) and “built environment” (computing applied to the physical world around us, from robotic devices to smart building design to real-time traffic information).
E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages How the design of books, paper vs. e-books, affects reading, remembering, and building knowledge. Are e-books a new medium that should be used and analyzed differently?
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Dorothy Parker Many people believe the nature of the average formal education can have the effect of shutting down imagination in favor of standardized learning. Albert Einstein famously said, “It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Teacher educator Peter Skillen reflects on the role of passion in learning, highlighting the research and reminding us that emotion energizes the brain. Mesmerize!
The following take on 21st century learning developed by TeachThought is notable here because of the absence of technology. There is very little about iPads, social media, 1:10 laptops, or other tech-implementation. In that way, it is closer to the “classic” approach to “good learning” than it is the full-on digital fare we often explore.
Via Miguel Zapata-Ros
Finding a job is so 20th century. That is why young people today need to be more “innovation ready” than “college ready.” “Teachers,” says Tom Friedman, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate.
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