[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation

This is an amazing piece by the prolific edtech blogger Audrey Watters. She does an amazing job talking about the past-lessness (my word) that goes with so much writing and (non-)research about educational technology.
I will make this required reading in my Emerging Technologies course.

[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation: "Because there are other stories about the past and the future of education — ones where building human capacity trumps adding tablet capacity; ones where agency matter more than algorithms; ones where innovation comes from students, from professors, from librarians, from researchers; ones where new ideas are not driven by commercialism but by care; stories and initiatives that are local and will not scale but need not scale; and yes, stories and expertise that are Canadian."

'via Blog this'

Arduino Blog » Blog Archive » Turning drawings into a music game

This is a really cool project which uses conductive ink and an Arduino based device to turn children's drawings into musical instruments.
And for me the next step would be making the device itself transferrable and hackable for the children themselves.
Arduino Blog » Blog Archive » Turning drawings into a music game: 'via Blog this'

New Pew Study - What does it mean?

By the Numbers: Teachers, Tech, and the Digital Divide | MindShift

This study seems to have provided fairly predictable results.

The bigger questions for me are:
1. How can we capture the richness of technology usage by teachers and learners?
2. How can these technologies be used to powerfully close a digital divide?
3. In a true community of learners, what does it matter who knows more or less?

I desperately want us to move beyond this level of discussion, into something more transformational.

Hope Springs?

Call me crazy, but this article from MindShift got me feeling hopeful about what could be possible.
Could teachers actually matter?
What do you think?

Bots, anyone

This is a just a quick post as a placeholder for a longer discussion.

I am about to start teaching a high school computer programming course, really an introduction to Python, for the first time. So I have been thinking a great deal about the advantages of having adolescents developing programming skills and problem solving, etc..

Then, I came across this blog piece by Audrey Watters, which then referred me to one by Dave Lester about software bots.

I think their points are well taken and I am now trying to figure out how to incorporate these into my new course.

More as it happens.

"What models of education?"

I was just reading this great piece by Audrey Watters in her great blog, Hack Education.

She is discussing the wrongness of the predictions she made for Educational Technology for 2012, and blames her failure on having used inaccurate models for education. We seem to have, she argues, better models for things like weather patterns or political polling.

I loved this quote:

What models are we building for education (and why)?  Who are the experts we trust in ed-tech and why? What are their interests in making predictions or even -- and I am implicated here too -- in identifying trends? 

What models, indeed.