The Learning Revolution Blog: highlighting disruptive and challenging ideas about teaching and learning.
...people who have had children know that there is truly a different right way to parent for each child. People truly are different. This lesson is essential, and our modern testing system forgets about it.
http://oliverdemille.com/2015/04/college-in-the-way-education/
Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost, and even protection against dementia. Now new research shows that they can also view the world in different ways depending on the language they are operating in.
In the past 15 years there has been an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.
When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational, economic decisions in a second language
Related: 12 untranslatable words (and their translations) | David Shariatmadari
Continue reading...Here’s an unusual case where scholarly research is producing a clear conclusion: online instruction at community colleges isn’t working. Yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them. The latest salvo […]
The post Five studies find online courses are not working well at community colleges appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
There is a shift away from teaching classic literature in the schools, according to a report by the Brown Center.
Parents and other interested parties in New Jersey skirmished with state education officials in March over the Pearson testing company monitoring students’ social media posts regarding Common Core-aligned PARCC testing. Pearson contacted the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) over a Twitter post the company found objectionable. NJDOE then contacted the school district of the student who posted the tweet, and the student removed the post. Parents came forward to say they have concerns over student privacy and free speech rights of students regarding educational testing companies such as Pearson.
https://chooseprivacyweek.org/whos-reading-the-reader-choose-privacy-week-2015/
During Choose Privacy Week the American Library Association invites librarians and library users to engage in a conversation about protecting and defending reader privacy rights and how to acquire the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to address the widespread surveillance and data mining that collects information about users’ communications, reading and web surfing habits.
https://chooseprivacyweek.org/ala-says-no-to-section-215-reauthorization-gambit/
In a statement released this morning, American Library Association (ALA) President Courtney Young said unequivocally of S.1035:
“Nothing is more basic to democracy and librarianship than intellectual freedom. And, nothing is more hostile to that freedom than the knowledge that the government can compel a library—without a traditional judicial search warrant—to report on the reading and Internet records of library patrons, students, researchers and entrepreneurs. That is what Section 215 did in 2001 and what it still does today.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-19/student-debt-accounts-nearly-half-us-government-assets
More from Bloomberg:
Student debt now comprises 45 percent of federally owned financial assets. Of course, that doesn’t include assets owned by the Federal Reserve, and it doesn’t include real assets like land. Still, it’s a startling figure.
This trend worries me. Why? Because when the government owns student loans, it has every incentive not to fix the country’s student-debt problem.
Consider the sheer size of the revenue that the government earns from student-loan interest payments. In 2013, it was $51 billion -- almost 2 percent of total federal revenue for that year. That’s more than two-thirds of the lifetime cost of the entire F-22 fighter jet program!
http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/libguides-pedagogy-to-oppress/
.... Furthermore, in listing the authorized knowledge that, as Freire puts it, students must consume, memorize or bank in order to be successful, it privileges the librarian’s carefully built up “expert” researcher model over the student’s tentative meaning making process, even though it’s through reflection and self-experience that we become what we are.
.... A better solution, however, would be to look to the inspirational work of Buffy Hamilton, who helps students create their own LibGuides. This focus on developing personal learning environments engages students in today’s rich information landscapes, as well as situating them as active participants in broader conversations about research and inquiry. Of course, LibGuides are not the only tool that can help accomplish this, with the social bookmarking tool Diigo, a wiki or even class blogs forming alternative options. As Rosen and Smale point out, the use of open digital platforms such as these explicitly work against the banking model of education.
http://hechingerreport.org/will-college-survive-for-many-it-never-existed/
"The failure to account for our most needy students should be of grave concern to all who desire equality from our education system, and indeed from our society. The “end of college” futurists presuppose that all students will equally benefit from increased access to online learning nodes and the self-paced credentialing they promise. I suspect the opposite will occur: if this world comes to be, those conditions will end up exacerbating rather than mitigating inequality, as the most well-off and the most advantaged students — the ones who have had years of encouragement and support, years of positive reinforcement to buffer their motivation, and yes, the interested hand of a parent to help work through that online module — distance themselves further from those who need the most support. To date, we don’t have any reason to believe that the kind of attentive teaching that correlates with student achievement gains can be replicated in a virtual setting, to say nothing of the gaping disparities in Internet access observable along lines of race and class.
"If we have learned anything from the decades of research in both K-12 and higher education, it’s that student success depends above all else on the support of great educators and mentors. We know, for example, that it is not course-taking, class size, or a particular curriculum that has the biggest impact on student achievement, but rather one’s exposure to an effective teacher....
"The fact is that the vast majority of our nation’s would-be college graduates are funneled into under-resourced technical schools, community colleges, and lower-tier public universities where they languish, unsupported and unlikely to graduate. Depending on the institution, up to 60 percent of these students entering for the first time do not graduate within six years. Will a freer, more open marketplace for digital credentials change those odds? Will it dissolve the cruel fate of geography and its stratifying effects on those born into impoverished zip codes, where too many public schools, despite their efforts, can only offer a slippery ladder with which to clamber into the middle class?"
http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/13/linkedin-lyndacom/
"I explored both this framing of school as “skills” and the push towards new forms of certification in my year-end series on the top ed-tech trends of 2014; the acquisition of Lynda.com by LinkedIn bolsters both of these. Even before this deal, the company had been inching towards this vision, making it easier for people to add certifications from MOOCs to their profiles for example."
https://tultican.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/illusion-motivates-education-reform/
"‘Education entrepreneurs’, because they have no respect for education professionals, are doomed to reinventing the wheel. The truth is that even with the tremendous financial and political support their movement secured; the results have been mixed at best and as far as improving education practices they are abysmal failures."
https://tultican.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/education-cast-system/
Concurrent with my entering the class room the bi-partisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was adopted. It soon became clear that education for working and middle class students was becoming more skills oriented with lessened creativity and minimal independent thought. The new education reform was based on standards and accountability for standardized testing results. This new theory of good pedagogy ignored the advice educators like Dewey and Herbart and adopted what Alfie Kohn mockingly dubbed the “longer stronger meaner” theory of education. This kind of pedagogy diminishes thought and creativity. It implies that thinking is for the children of wealthy people in private schools who are the natural leaders of society. The other students have utilitarian purposes but thinking undermines that value. It is all driven by an ancient and evil ideology that posits it is OK to use lesser human beings for the purposes of social elites.
El Puente founder, Frances Lucerna, has a similar observation:
“In the public schools now it’s basically all about standardized testing, and mechanical literacy. This is resulting in dumbing down, watering down, the experience that young people have in school. It is equivalent to telling students that they are not to go deep within themselves and think in complex ways about things, but that they need to go back to memorizing and stuffing their heads with knowledge that has nothing to do with their experience and their world. This is not by accident: there is a reason that this is happening, why it’s happening in public schools and not in private schools and other places. This is an education for followers, not for leaders. And that’s why I think a movement for change has to arise, and the arts are fundamental in this.” (Muses Go to School, Page 58)
In 1973 David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission produced “The Crisis of Democracy” a report in which they indicate that too much education for common people is a threat to democracy. On page 115 on the report they conclude, “The vulnerability of democratic government in the United States thus comes not primarily from external threats, though such threats are real, nor from internal subversion from the left or the right, although both possibilities could exist, but rather from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society.” In other words, don’t teach common people to think, to have philosophy, or develop their own ideas – the elites of society will take care of that. It is not in the interest of the upper class to have too much education – too much democracy.
...
“…the devilish nature of authority fears the awakening of the people. To those in power who forget to serve the people and instead exploit them, wielding authority for self-serving ends, the presence of individuals who discern their true insidious nature and are determined to take a stand against them is a hindrance and inconvenience. That’s why the powerful do everything they can to crush them.” (July 2014, Living Buddhism)
Another struggle for rights that shines eternally in history is the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson penned these famous lines:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”
...
In our country, over the past more than two centuries there have been many advances in human rights, but the ugly side of human nature that wants to use others for personal purposes has not been conquered. It has merely transformed to forms which use less obvious and possibly more insidious methodology.
...
In the 1930’s the philosopher historian Arnold Toynbee observed in his masterpiece, A Study of History, “The bread of universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children’s bread under the educator’s very eyes.” In his deep study of more than three-thousand years of human history, Toynbee saw this pattern repeat.
Toynbee also saw a pattern that gave him pause about the future of our civilization. He wrote:
“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.” (A study of History page 555)
As I read the words of great men of character and think about my own observations, I am convinced this is a time of opportunity and peril. We must fight against the arrogance of elitism which looks down on common people as mere pawns and considers their own good fortune a matter of birth right or superiority....
A witch’s brew of arrogance, greed and elitism is poisoning public education in America.
“Little by little, the subversive features of the computer were eroded away. Instead of cutting across and challenging the very idea of subject boundaries, the computer now defined a new subject; instead of changing the emphasis from impersonal curriculum to excited live exploration by students, the computer was now used to reinforce School’s ways. What had started as a subversive instrument of change was neutralized by the system and converted into an instrument of consolidation.” – Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine
April 8, 2015
There’s a wonderful line in Michel Foucault’s 1975 masterwork, Discipline and Punish, in which the author asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
https://ellenlivingston.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/educating-children-or-training-circus-animals/
Posted on April 9, 2015 by Bernard Bull
While this is far too simplistic, amid my visits to various current and emerging models of schooling, I’ve come to loosely categorize types of schools. One factor that seems to be among the more telling has to do with the role of questions in the schools. Are they encouraged? Are they celebrated? Who asks the most questions? How do the questions shape and inform everything else that happens? What types of questions do people ask? Do questions evoke excitement or anxiety? As I look at learning organizations from the perspective of questions, I’ve consistently noticed four traits that tend to have a huge impact on the extent to which learners are deeply engaged in inquiry, even getting lost in the explorations, and taking ownership for much of their learner. I’ll frame those four traits in the form of four questions
Dear Jayne, I am glad to hear that you were able to avoid the problems with Common Core testing experienced by other Florida schools. Testing is stressful enough without technology glitches. New York will begin its third year of 3-8 Common Core testing next week. Last spring, the parents of 60,000 New York students refused […]
The post As testing begins, parental opposition to Common Core ramps up appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
And yet the dominant narrative – the gospel, if you will – about education and, increasingly education technology, is that it absolutely is “the fix.”
Education technology will close the achievement gap; education technology will close the opportunity gap. Education technology will revolutionize; education technology will democratize. Or so we are told. That's the big message at this week's ASU-GSV Summit, where education technology investors and entrepreneurs and politicians have gathered (registration: $2995) to talk about "equity." (Equity and civil rights, that is; not equity as investing in exchange for stock options and a seat on the Board of Directors, I should be clear. Although I'm guessing most of the conversations there were actually about the latter.)
Findings suggest many teachers enroll, learner intentions matter, and cost boosts completion rates
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-harvard-study-moocs-0401
