Comments on: True Confessions

By: Dear Charles… « iThinkEducation.net!

Dear Charles… « iThinkEducation.net! — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:24:00 +0000

[...] too, perhaps to the point of recklessness in my critique of formal schooling as it is now. You’re not the only one dismayed. School has worked for some, especially for those who now work in schools. Makes [...]

By: Dear Charles… « (the new) bgblogging

Dear Charles… « (the new) bgblogging — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:58:29 +0000

By: In Honor of Ada Lovelace Day « iThinkEducation.net!

In Honor of Ada Lovelace Day « iThinkEducation.net! — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:30:29 +0000

[...] their deep humanity, their perseverance in a world that does not always see what they see, and their willingness to take me on when they think I’ve gone too far; Jennifer Jones for her great good sense, her ability to go [...]

By: Martha

Martha — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:35:38 +0000

@Laura Yeah. It’s that working from both ends that seems so important, but also seems to spark so much disagreement. I get that. At heart, I’ve got a lot of revolutionary and rabble rouser (:-) ) in me. I hate to come across as someone who thinks that the institutions we work in don’t have tremendous flaws (that’s my own anxiety — I’m not suggesting you’re saying that was what I was saying). I don’t know. I just feel like there is so much good thinking and good will on both sides of the fence. I hate when it gets sidetracked because of the bad thinking and bad will that also exists — particularly within our traditional institutions.

@Jenny Exactly. If we have to blow it up, let’s not lose the pieces that really are powerful and transformative just because they’re associated with all the stuff that sucks.

By: In Honor of Ada Lovelace Day « (the new) bgblogging

In Honor of Ada Lovelace Day « (the new) bgblogging — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:34:38 +0000

By: Jenny

Jenny — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:51:58 +0000

I’ve listened to a lot of people complaining about our schools. There are many valid points out there. However, I am always left wondering if there aren’t many wonderful aspects to our schools too.

I think you are right, the attitude seems to be that we need to blow up our current system. That may be what is needed in order to truly manage to meet the needs of our students. I just hope that if we do manage to blow it all up we also manage to put back in the things that have made school work for so many of us for so long.

By: Learning in Schools, Learning without Schools? | Emerging Technologies Consulting

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:19:58 +0000

[...] the second camp doesn’t want change, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Martha Burtis wrote a wonderful response to this discussion, on which I left the following comment: I like school, too. But I also learn [...]

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:58:03 +0000

I like school, too. But I also learn in other ways, ways that are sometimes dismissed in schools. What I’d like to see in these conversations and in the future of schools is a both/and approach instead of an either/or approach. That is, we can have both formal and informal learning. Lectures have a place right alongside small group discussion. But we need to be critical of practices and practitioners in a way that we’re not right now. I’ve had some great lecturers in my life, but I’ve had some devastatingly bad ones, some bad enough to drive me away from an entire field of study, and that should never happen. I’ve also had some student-centered approaches that in theory should have been fabulous, but instead, put way too much on the students in a way that we were unable to really learn anything. I think the difficulty we’re running into with education and learning more generally is that learning is a very personal process. Everyone needs different things to learn and sometimes different things for different topics. The system of education, it seems to me, attempts to most efficiently provide a learning environment. I think what’s happened, especially at the K-12 level, is that a kind of inertia has set in where easiest is substituted for most efficient. It’s easier to teach to the test by rote, for example, than to do project-based learning that may indeed teach the same skills, but is more time-consuming and riskier. And this didn’t happen through some grand conspiracy. It happened one teacher at a time, responding to requirements and incentives. What that means, and what I’m hopeful for, is that change can happen one teacher at a time. Because there are teachers and professors who provide a learning environment that’s successful. And what I’m hoping for is a kind of network effects situation where teachers and students collaborate on this project of learning, and show others how it’s done, so to speak. I somehow lost that attitude as I got more and more involved in the administration of things, in the desire for efficiency that became “whatever’s easiest” (which turned out to be Blackboard). Instead what I should have focused on, what we should all focus on, is working from both ends, convincing individuals to change who in turn help foster change among their colleagues and convincing those at the top that easiest isn’t most efficient all the time. It’s a challenge, but a good one. I love school, too, and I want to see the ideal school in my mind thrive, but to do that, as Gardner said in the SXSW panel, it will need to evolve, and evolution is not a top down process.