in wide use outside the academic world

delegitimated as “scribbling.”

according to Peggy Orenstein who noticed these, and a lot of other troubling trends when she interviewed 70 college-age girls about their personal lives. She wrote a book about it called "Girls & Sex," and talked to us this week about some of the things she learned.

Among students with high ACT scores, those in the laptop-friendly sections performed significantly worse than their counterparts in the no-technology sections. In contrast, there wasn’t much of a difference between students with low ACT scores — those who were allowed to use laptops did just as well as those who couldn’t. (The same pattern held true when researchers looked at students with high and low GPAs.) These results are a bit strange. We might have expected the smartest students to have used their laptops prudently. Instead, they became technology’s biggest victims. Perhaps hubris played a role. The smarter students may have overestimated their ability to multitask. Or the top students might have had the most to gain by paying attention in class.

The West Point study has lessons even for those whose baccalaureate days are far behind them. This is yet more evidence that multitasking doesn’t work. Beware of people who take laptops into meetings — even “just to take notes.” They’re probably not listening to you.

Why do we suddenly pretend that the twenty-first century never happened when a child enters an examination room?

rather than having an education system which has been industrialised around content and testing, why not have one that’s based around solving problems, working together, collaborating?

the nature of the stream is it pushes you away from comprehension and into rhetoric. Rather than seeking to understand, the denizen of the modern Twitter or Weibo feed seeks to sort incoming information as right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful, worth retweeting or not retweeting, worth getting into a righteous rage about or not

Impatience characterizes the technology sector’s approach to education.

Small Blog On Networked Learning

Teacher DIY Professional Development

The Personal in Indie

There is a human story behind every data point and as educators and innovators we have to shine a light on it.

Networked, open, transparent

The challenges and opportunities confronting higher education pedagogy will not be adequately addressed by platforms designed to provide answers.

How not to promote technology in teaching: An open letter

It reminds me of the New Math of the 1960s, which fashioned mathematics in a dramatically more abstract, more analytic way than before. And if Johnny Can’t Add with the new math, maybe Jenny Won’t Code with an overly abstract presentation of computing. Papert points us in the opposite direction

One striking comment follows a couple of pages later, where the phrase “computer-aided instruction” evokes in Papert the unappealing idea that “the computer is being used to program the child” — his vision, of course, is that the child must program the computer.

In 1980, Seymour Papert published the book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” [2]. Papert was co-director, under Marvin Minsky, of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1967 to 1981. Previously, he had worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva. Piaget was a developmental psychologist best known for pioneering the learning theory known as constructivism: simply put, that learners construct new knowledge (in their minds) from the interaction of their experiences with previous knowledge. Papert, in turn, developed the theory of constructionism, adding the notion that learning is enhanced when the learner is engaged in “constructing a meaningful product.”

I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit. I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two–those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.

Consider letting them choose: seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats? work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own. intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option. output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing. timing: If students don’t absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?

Isn’t that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it’s much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren’t constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.

We need more diverse books, voices, attitudes, journals, and styles.

It is long past time for us to put an end to the miniscule and irrelevant plagiarism wars and begin a more significant reconsideration of what we mean by research, citations, and the respectful integration and communication of information old and new, original and borrowed, tweeted, blogged and podcast, online and oral, read and viewed. It’s time to bury APA, MLA, op. cit., Ibid, et al. — along with the other dead horses they came in on.

Technology can help students fill in the vast blank spaces on their mental maps. But it cannot, on its own, create a safe space that encourages kids to ask tough questions.

Teachers work hard.

nearly $8 billion prekindergarten through 12th-grade education technology software market

it is safe to say that technology has gradually wiggled its way into the sphere of education and changed it for the better

Sixty percent of faculty members agree they are concerned about recent attacks on scholars for comments they made on social media. Most say this has not influenced how they communicate on social media.•Tech administrators do not view the Yik Yak app, which allows geo-targeted comments about people, as having caused controversy on their campus, and do not think colleges should regulate access to this app. Faculty members are a bit more likely to say the app has caused controversy and to say it should be regulated, but those are still the minority views among professors.

The 10 Ed-Tech Companies That Are Raising the Most Money

While the thinkers are arguing, textbook publishers are acting. With their traditional business models under pressure, they’ve begun to reinvent themselves as educational technology companies. They’re selling schools and colleges on a new generation of digital courseware—ALEKS is just one example—that takes on much of the work that teachers used to do. The software isn’t meant to replace teachers, they insist. Rather, it’s meant to free them to focus on the sort of high-level, conceptual instruction that only a human can provide.

Justin Reich argues in a blog post for Education Week, computers “are good at assessing the kinds of things—quantitative things, computational things—that computers are good at doing. Which is to say that they are good at assessing things that we no longer need humans to do anymore.” The implication is that adaptive software might prove effective at training children to pass standardized tests. But it won’t teach them the underlying skills that they’ll need to tackle complex, real-world problems. And it won’t prepare them for a future in which rote jobs are increasingly automated.

But the collaboration between university and for-profit startup raised some troubling questions about just who owned all the data that flowed from students’ use of the software—and what they might ultimately do with it. Knewton’s Ferreira says he envisions a future in which students’ educational records added up to much more than a series of letter grades that make up traditional transcripts. By tracking everything they read, every problem they solve, every concept they master, Knewton could compile a “psychometric profile” on each student that includes not only what she learned but how readily she learned it, and at what sorts of problem-solving she struggled and exceled. That sort of data could be of great interest to admission committees and employers. It could also, in theory, erode the privacy that has traditionally surrounded young people’s schoolwork.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

The compromise here is easy.  Faculty accept the expertise of the educational experts and instructional designers, and welcome them into their course design process as a resource rather than competitors.  At the same time, educational experts and instructional designers should accept the expertise of the faculty.  Stop trying to tell them what education is.

Educational Technology on Trial | From the Bell Tower

The impact of technology on education delivery remains sub-optimal, because

Students who use computers moderately at school, such as once or twice a week, have "somewhat better learning outcomes" than students who use computers rarely

Your response has signaled that you think anyone can step into education and immediately make an impact.