Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com The title of this post appears to be a cryptic message, perhaps an arcane relationship from a long-forgotten physics textbook. In reality, it summarizes one of the most important ideas about learning to be articulated in the last 10 years or so. The relationship makes perfect sense to many teachers Read More
A colleague and I sat together to see if we could agree on a collection of statements about learning. This is what he and I beleive to be true about learning: Learning happens in the brains of individuals; Learning extends into the social and technological environments; Learning is a multi-dimensional process involving perception, recollection, analyzing, Read More
Just what are educators supposed to teach? Better yet, what are students supposed to learn? These are questions that educators must consider at a much deeper level than my teachers did when I was college student in the 1980’s, and even when I was a graduate student 10 then again 20 years later. For generations, Read More
Theory, of course, permeates everything we do. -Stephen Jay Gould Many educators would disagree with Gould’s observation. For these teachers, “theory” is conflated with “silly ideas for which I have no time, I need to cover the material.” I understand this approach, much that we do in education can be done without directly indicating the Read More
Many varieties of web 2.0 tools have been available since the late 1990’s; these tools are all designed to make it easy for users to publish information to the web and to interact with others via posts and responses. Many of these are built into LMS, so can easily be incorporated into virtual classrooms. The Read More
Over the decades I have been working with digital technologies, teachers, and learners; electronic portfolios have been a recurring topic. The story usually plays out like this: I arrive in a school (maybe k-12, maybe college) and there are groups (often departments in colleges) in which there is interest in adopting electronic portfolios. I hear, Read More
In courses organized around the instructionist recitation script, the ability of students to comply with the presented knowledge and provide expected answers is the valued outcome. In deeper, active, and authentic learning environments, students who show the greatest ability to apply multidimensional capacities to propose reasonable and fact-based solutions are the most competent learners. Mehlenbacher Read More
Late in the 20th century, a diverse group of scholars (medical researchers, psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, and others) started applying amazing new tools to the human brain. These tools include philosophical and epistemological tools (ideas to help us think about human learning), clinical and therapeutic tools (methods for studying patients in hospitals and similar setting), Read More
Deep learning is an alternative to the version of curriculum that supports instructionism. Among the assumptions in which deep learning are grounded are: appropriate curriculum depends on individual’s existing knowledge as well as social context schools give students experiences within which they develop and refine skills for on-going learning through reflection, learners understand themselves as Read More
Fundamentally, human communication includes: (a) encoding, (b) storage, (c) transportation, and (d) decoding. Responding to the limits of human communication that result when we rely exclusively on our bodies and motivated by the necessity of communication for our social species, humans have developed a long series of both hard technologies and soft technologies for extending Read More