Social Media Classroom

A PSA in Scandinavia. #PeopleNowadays http://pic.twitter.com/79SjhIXOjt 

Why do traditional paper books remain so popular, especially for deep, immersive reading? Are some people simply too stubborn and nostalgic to adapt to new technologies? Perhaps it's because paper books are themselves a highly sophisticated technology, one that's uniquely good at stimulating focus and concentration.

What do rap shows, barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common? As Christopher Emdin says, they all hold the secret magic to enthrall and teach at the same time — and it’s a skill we often don't teach to educators. The science advocate (and cofounder of Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. with the GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan) offers a vision to make the classroom come alive.

Authorities believe that Pia Farrenkopf died in 2009. She kept paying her bills until last year.

"Are you too busy? You should be, and you should let people know in a proud but exasperated tone."  

All day, I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t that busy. The way I did this was by silently repeating, “You’re not that busy.” Doing this did actually stop the tape in my head of what had to get done that day. I just calmly did one thing after another. I believe that means I was being mindful, or maybe living in the moment or being present but I’m not sure. And I am not going to check because if I give it a name, then it will be just one more thing you feel obligated to do. Instead just take one thing off your to-do list, which is telling everyone how busy you are.

"Saying that it has always been this way, doesn’t count as a legitimate justification to why it should stay that way. Teacher and administrators all over the world are doing amazing things, but some of the things we are still doing, despite all the new solutions, research and ideas out there is, to put it mildly, incredible.I’m not saying we should just make the current system better… we should change it into something else."

"In some of the schools and districts I work with now, it’s really pretty depressing how many teachers just want to be told what to do. It’s not that they don’t care–it’s just a human defense mechanism kicking in. An insecurity of their own that’s tired of reaching and having their hand slapped, so they don’t.

They’ve learned to do what they’re told–they start with “district expectations” and work backwards from there. We toss around fun phrases like “team-player” to normalize this hurtful fascination education has with alignment and standardization. But by the time teachers turn policy and expectation and standards and curriculum maps into units, lessons and activities that actually reach the students, the zest for teaching and learning is barely recognizable.

I do realize that, on paper, there’s no reason a teacher can’t do what they’re told and be amazing, but think for a moment about the best teachers you know. Do they do what they’re told, or do they simply do what needs to be done and navigate any fallout better than everyone else?"

Can we learn to reconnect without using our digital devices?

At weddings, guests tweet real-time of the festivities to friends far away. At sporting events, fans follow scores of games in other cities. In classrooms, students text with friends in other classes and parents out in the world. At funerals, mourners to pals in other places.

Everyone, it seems, is interacting more with people who are elsewhere — and less with the people around them. As technology seeps through society, dampening every dry aspect of our lives, something is happening to: the idea of being present; the desire to be in the moment; the notion of living right here and right now.

When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding. Here, 10 venues where you can learn coding.

Students Don't Ask for PD. http://pic.twitter.com/ltnDMfnoN2 

A new kind of education shows why four years of high school isn’t enough

The fate of Carole Vance and Kim Hopper should worry everyone who wants academics to play a larger role in public debates.

"Thinking is troublesome.  For one, it is an intimate act splicing time and space. It is done right here, but it spans moments in the pasts and reaches out uncertainly towards moments in the future. Put another way, you think in a singular, precise space about plural, imprecise times.

It also resists uniformity (and education loves uniformity). Thought hinges on schema (familiar forms and patterns we then impose unfamiliar data to make sense of it), and emotion (in part, our internal response to the former). It is as diverse as character, experience, and affection. It’s like defining art, establishing criteria for beauty, or causing love.  And whether it knows it or not, education has a thinking problem."

Where should you post that joke you came up with?

A new study shows that high school grades are a better predictor of how students will do in college.

How to give B.A.'s in arts and humanities more career options without abandoning the life of the mind.

Too many career-services offices seem to still see the primary objective of arts and humanities majors as graduate school, and do not give enough thought to their other options. Those offices focus their energies on students with degrees that are more easily marketed to potential employers. Professors want to help, of course, but most do not have recent experience outside of academe, and, just as important, they generally do not have nonacademic networks that can help undergraduates get job interviews. Some faculty members have experiences or political convictions that cause them to talk about the "corporate world" in negative terms.

And, of course, many arts and humanities departments rate their success on the basis of graduate-school placements, not on their ability to help B.A. students find good positions immediately after graduation. We celebrate the graduates who seem most like ourselves—the ones who set out to become academics—and we don't talk much about what happens to those graduates after they've earned their Ph.D.'s. Without that conversation, we ill serve many of our students, and we undercut the impact that our fields could have beyond academe.