How People Learn (National Research council, 2000) has been an important resource for scholars and educational practitioners for almost two decades. Google Scholar indexes more than 24,000 items that have cited the book. In 2018, a second version of the book was published. I am preparing a review of the book to be posted here Read More
Educators appear to have an incomplete and inconsistence awareness of autonomy as a factor that affects learning. Blumenfeld, Kempler, and Krajik (2006) define autonomy to include the “perception of a sense of agency, which occurs when students have the opportunity for choices and for playing a significant role in directing their own activity” (p. 477). Read More
My grandfather graduated from the University of Vermont in 1939 and I have some of his textbooks on my bookshelves along with the textbooks I used while an undergraduate student at the same institution 49 years later. The content of the textbooks (we both studied biology) is vastly different, but the literacy skills useful for Read More
Sherry Turkle, a sociologist from MIT studied computer users’ sense of identity early in the days of Internet-mediated communication. She observed that many users at the time were creating multiple online identities and that many users were exploring different senses of identity through those online spaces, and Turkel (1995) began her book Life on the Read More
Interestingly, in the digital world, it has become possible to maintain many different identities as well; these identities can be imaginative and even contrary to any physical identity. There are thousands of online communities that focus on just about any topic imaginable. Joining those communities (usually) requires only an email address which can be obtained Read More
Among the studies summarized by Gary Small, a cognitive scientist who works at the University of California Los Angeles, and his coauthor Gigi Vorgan in the 2008 book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Modification of the Modern Mind, were several documenting the effects of technologies on human brains. They described research in which scientists measured a Read More
Larry Rosen (2010), a psychologist from California State University, Dominguez Hills, applied the acronym WMD to describe wireless mobile devices which he observed have become the ICT device of choice for the first digital generation, and that choice was driven by the social interactions available via the devices. With these devices individuals are always connected Read More
For some decades, I advocated for “technology-rich” schools. My work was supporting IT infrastructure and teaching teachers to use technology. At the time, we were all concerned with the “digital divide,” the fact that schools in affluent communities had plenty of devices and connections compared to the scant digital resources in schools located in poor Read More
We know humans are learners… students sometimes do not learn in the way teachers want them to learn, but that is a problem with the structure of school, not with students as learners. “How do humans learn in informal or ‘real-world’ settings?“ is an interesting phenomenon to study. Scholars are actively studying it, but it Read More
Paulo Freire, an educator who worked in Brazil in the 1960s, is well-known for several essays including “Education as the Practice of Freedom” and “Extension and Communication” (Freire 1974). In these works, Freire argues that meaningful learning occurs when the learner reaches critical consciousness which enables the learner to reflect on and understand not only Read More