Posted on 2nd September 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have
networks, unbundle
Network laws are causing schooling to unbundle, just as they have been doing to other sectors: music, journalism, merchandising and more. The image above mashes a traditional school that is breaking into little pieces as it engages the Map of Science which reflects online networking of academic subjects.
The force behind school unbundling is the network out there which the Map of Science depicts. The map of academics subjects is not an illustration; it is the plotting of real data and relationships among the nodes of the network that emerges from the data.
Unbundling of schooling allows the individual student to connect directly to individual knowledge nodes. In spite of years of standing back, and then of pushing hard against it by established education, schooling is being broken apart and reconfigured to individual students by the spontaneous online academic knowledge network.
Brick and mortar of buildings or of curriculum cannot for much longer systematically keep the student from connecting directly. A mobile internet browser is all it takes for a student to be able to become a node who links and learns individually to the global commons of what is known by humankind.
Posted on 9th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles
reader, textbook
Mobiles come in many sizes and with a wide variety of features, ranging from small smart phones to iPads, to laptops, and now two-screen devices. What defines a “mobile” for education is that it is an individual device which a student can keep with her as she moves from location to location. A Wired Campus article last week describes two new mobiles, the Know and the Edge, that are being introduced this fall to enhance mobile textbook use by having two screens.
While the Kindle has largely failed with students as a replacement for printed textbooks, some colleges plan to test new e-reader devices whose promoters argue that two screens are better than one. . . . Like the Kno, the Edge primarily serves as a textbook reader, although it also offers applications, because it relies on Google’s open-source Android platform. Both devices feature Web browsing, e-mail access, and audio recording.
Note in the excerpts above that both of the two-screen mobiles being introduced include Web browsing, which is the second of the two keys that allow a student to take schooling into his own hands. The first key is having his own mobile device which cuts his learning loose from computers that are wired down to a physical location. The second key is the ability to use that device to connect with the unlimited knowledge resources that lie within the open internet cloud beyond the downloaded learning applications and content on his mobile.
Posted on 5th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
Hunter, New_York_City, public_schools
In a very revealing New York Times article today, a multiracial boy graduating from Elena Kagan’s elite Hunter public high school said this in his graduation speech:
“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city,” he said, “then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that.”
The article describes the throes of guilt the school is dealing with because its admission test has created these statistics: “This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.” The Hunter admissions test, reports the article, “has remained essentially unchanged for decades” and was presumably taken by sixth-grader Elena Kagan to gain her own admission into Hunter.
Judson Hudson, age 18, refuses to accept the “demographics of intelligence” Hunter represents. If Judson is correct, what then is going on here? Surely there is something more to be done about this disparity than to use Hunter as a whipping boy on the front page of the New York Times.
The problem is not that Hunter is a great school. The real problem is that most primarily black and Hispanic New York City public schools are often just awful. Sixth-graders from awful schools score poorly on Hunter’s test.
How can the true demographics of intelligence of New York City be reflected in the level of educational achievement of the next generation of New York City youngsters? A powerful new tool is coming into prominence: individual access to online knowledge. There is today a seven-year-old in a Bedford-Stuyvesant project practicing her vocabulary outside of school, on her mobile. By taking schooling into her own hands, she has a real chance to sit one day on the United States Supreme Court.
That chance is virtually nonexistent for children whose only education is obtained in awful NYC public schools. Shoving a few kids from the projects into Hunter simply applies another bandaid to crumbling public [socialized] education and to our collective guilt.
Posted on 3rd August 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Schools we now have
online_courses, universities
A sign of the decline of established education is this response to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s call for cost-savings recommendations: students should go off-campus to complete at least ten percent of their degree requirements. An article in Wired Campus describes how online courses could be used to compensate for the inability of universities to deliver in the old analog way.
This quotation from the article contains a revealing nugget about what is happening spontaneously in the growth of online learning:
Richard Garrett, managing director at the consulting firm Eduventures, said requiring online education “would seem unnecessary” because it’s already “increasingly difficult to graduate from a mainstream higher-education institution and not have taken something that is more or less an online course.”
“It might create more negative feeling and go against what’s a pretty organic trend already,” he said. “In many ways, online is most successful where it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down.”
Here is the nugget — a clue that individual students, not pedagogical planners, are choosing online opportunities to meet their own goals: it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down. This fact demonstrates, among other things, the reality of students taking their schooling into their own hands.
Posted on 13th July 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Nurture | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
education_debacles, mobile
Education is a deeply entrenched sector of liberal, government, progressive, public — whatever word you like — control and management. Federal control of this sector is increasing, and that is doubling down on debacles in the sector. The preceding statement is not speculation. An article in today’s Political gives background and details: The Democrats’ education debacle. It begins:
Education for Democrats these days is an education itself — a lesson in how dysfunctional this White House and Congress can be on domestic policy. [Lots of details follow.]
So if you are a kid now school age, what do you do as schooling debacles bring chaos to your education? Increasingly, there is a really good answer to that question. What you do is take your schooling into your own hands. Get what you can from the school you are in, but do not expect a good education to be forced on you. Learn to be a consumer of the useful debris instead of folding your arms and demanding an entitlement from the dysfunctional folks in government.
In your hands schooling
If you are in preschool or the early grades, learn the 3Rs on your own from computer toys and children’s mobile computers. Get yourself a reading device into which you can download books — and read, read, read!
Once you are into learning subjects like history, sciences, arts, and the rest, get your own mobile browser for the internet. You can learn anything you want to online, either by connecting directly to knowledge itself, or working with subject tutorials.
Education powered by government will fizzle during your school years. Take schooling into your own hands where you can double down on true learning.
Posted on 24th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Findability | Mobiles | Obamaschool
assessment, diploma, pedagogy, success
The picture of the girl reading American Negro Poetry is from the Gates Foundation website. Getting the analog book into her hands undoubtedly cost the foundation quite a bit of money. She could, instead, use her smartphone to read comprehensively in the Negro poetry genre for free.
If you will go to the page where the girl is reading and click the picture, you will be cycled through some other classroom projects funded by Gates grants. The starfish dissection (one of the pictures) provides a strong illustration about how much more can be learned through subject websites than in a small classroom module. Sure, actually cutting up a dead starfish has dimensions the virtual experience may not, but wow: a student can learn a very great deal about starfish on a website like this one where there is even a video of a starfish dissection.
In what follows, I am committing the highest level of pedagogical heresy:
I do not understand why the Gates folks pour their support into this bottom line (from the page where the picture of the girl above appears):
“We believe that all students should graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.”
My italics in the sentence above capture the new trend: Do what it takes for all students to graduate from high school and then college. How long will this take! Obama has set the goal for 2020 — ten years from now.
Why not first get a smart phone to every student so they each can read the world’s poetry and virtually dissect starfish? Some of the students equipped and trained do that may miss the assessment credits pedagogues think they need to receive high school and college diplomas. But if youngsters now in school can learn online — not waiting for the halcyon days when all kids succeed in school — far more of them will be prepared to succeed in career and life.
