Education Evolutions:
Select Readings on Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age
Here are four curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.
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How to Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable (According to a Green Beret) – Inc. – Chris Dessi (3 minute read)
I am generally very dubious when drawing comparisons between the business and education worlds but that is not really what this article is about. Yes, this is written by an entrepreneur in a major business periodical but it captures something almost every modern educator must address. I have often remarked that we educators need to actually get a lot more comfortable with a certain degree of chaos, especially in 1:1 computing environments. These are seven pretty sound tips on how to do just that. Even better, they are the kinds tips that would benefit students too.
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North Dakota teacher talks technology in the classroom at Twitter headquarters – The Bismark Tribune – Angie Wieck (6 minute read)
This is a short, almost superficial piece about a local teacher that reached a pretty big stage. Yet, the real gems in this piece are some of the profiled teacher Kayla Delzer’s insights below the more obvious pro-tech tropes. Her core message highlights a fundamental shift in what is now required of teachers. Providing the platform for students, affording them choices that develop and amplify their voices, and even helping them build genuine audiences for their work has become an increasing part of every teaching gig now, like it or not. Plus, if students are already doing these kinds of things in the third grade what kinds of expectations will they have by the time they reach high school?
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My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice – actualham – Robin DeRosa (16 minute read)
This is not exactly a new idea, having a class create a textbook, but what this professor does so brilliantly in her blogpost is narrate the work involved. It is not just a show-and-tell enterprise but a sharing of methodology, lessons learned, impact on pedagogy, as well as a host of incisive and insightful reflective questions about the experience. DeRosa seriously interrogates what this project means for both her as the instructor and her co-creating students. There are so many good things in this single post. I especially love that she presents two project models, immediately addressing the that’s-easy-for-you-because-you-teach… crowd. If I were still in a classroom every day, I would already have begun planning on doing something like this to start as soon as possible.
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How a Grad Student Found Spyware that Could Control Anybody’s iPhone Anywhere in the World – Vanity Fair – Bryan Burrough (30 minute read)
This is a long piece but a riveting look at the dark side of the technology arms race in which we now all find ourselves living. This a kind of by-the-time-you-read-about-it-is-too-late article. In fact, the events chronicled here occurred in August of this year.Despite being old news, the writer does an excellent job of keeping some highly technical fair readable and understandable for the everyman. Plus, it reads a bit like a thriller. I suppose what is more chilling what kinds of hacking tools exist which we have absolutely no idea about.
Haas | Learning 