I’ve just added another cool plugin, ShareThis, which automatically adds a button to each and every post (and page) of my wordpress site that allows my readers to share my blog entries which their friends on other communication and exchange plateforms.
Does anybody have an idea (or two) on how I could import all my posterous posts into my newly installed wordpress cms? I really like to have thinks in one place, even though they come from different tools… like automatically linking in my twitter.com tweets or embedding my delicious.com bookmarks. Posterous is a cool service for simple (yet powerful) blogging… but since I’ve got the webspace and server technology at hand (here on simple.lu) I do not really need such a third-party service anymore…
Or if you have any idea on how to better and seamlessly integrate posterous.com posts into wordpress, please let me know…
Check out this episode of TEDTalks (video) at Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering – Gever Tulley (2009) – LINK
Welcome to my all new webpage. I’m starting to use a wordpress blog system as a hub for all my digital thoughts, impressions, writtings, bookmarks, bookreviews, paper recommendations and so on.
I’ve started to read “Everything Bad is Good For You” by Steven Johnson over a “Pizza chèvre”.
Johnson wants to argue, a bit in line with Wim Veen’s ideas on digital natives’ use of media, that popular culture does not make us dumber (as is re-iterated by so many scholars, cf. Manfred Spitzer) but that it is actually making us smarter. He argues, that contemporary pop culture poses new and highly complex cognitive challenges that contribute to the sharpening of minds.
I’m quite sympathetic with any position that tries to fight the old adage “früher war alles besser!”
The book is very easy to read, entertaining and it really changed my view on some of the pop culture stuff on TV (some TV series are really quite demanding in terms of filling-in certain pieces of information on behalf of the watcher, more than I would have thought before reading this book…), and computer games (I’ve even bought myself a computer game, and started to play it – Fable: the Lost Chapters – because I wanted to feel what it is like to play such problem-solving immersion-into-another-world games!)
So, I’ve you wanna change your perspective on contemporary pop culture, then buy this book, read it and then watch an old classic movie like “Singing in the Rain”… and you’ll realize that movies today are much more complex than you may have thought… at least compared to movies produced some decades ago…
An important point made by Steven Johnson, I’d like to stress here is that one should always compare apples with apples and not apples with oranges… so if you want to assess contemporary pop culture, than compare it to pop culture of the past epochs and not with high-flyer elite culture of that past epochs…
I’ve started to read “Lernen: Ein pädagogischer Grundbegriff” by Michael Göhlich & Jörg Zirfas a week ago. It has been recommanded to me by Pierre Fixmer (lecturer @ uni.lu) and will be one of the books we’ll use for our seminar in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences programme “Exploring Perspectives on Learning” next semester.
So far, I really like the authors’ idea that LEARNING has too long been a concept of psychology, and lately of neuroscience, while it should be a core concept of educational sciences. Personally, I think that educational sciences should indeed reclaim learning as their core research topic, but that they should also be very open to discoveries from all other scientific inquiries on learning. In this sense, I see educational sciences as an inter- and multidisciplinary research field (a crossroad) rather than as a separate and distinct scientific discipline (a bit like cognitive sciences).
I’ve just received and started to read A. Holzinger’s Book on Learning with Multimedia… and I’m really happy that I’ve bought this book… It’s simply exactly the book-of-reference we should have had right from the start for our “Learning with Media” seminar in the BScE. It covers every aspect of our seminars, from the way the brain organizes and constructs knowledge, to theories of learning, to learning with computers, to learning with software… Simply great!
I’ve just received this book on the “good teacher question” from Amazon. I’m trying to deepen my knowledge about this strain of research, because I want to provide my tutees (students of the bachelor in educational sciences) with better guidance on their own way to “becoming a teacher”.
I particularly like, in this book, the author’s approach to the question, namely that he’s analyzing what is said about the “good teacher question” by the general public, politicians, administrations, teacher training institutions, in-service teachers, pre-service teachers, students, researchers and teacher trainers. I hope this analysis will allow me to better understand how I, myself, think and speak about “the good teacher question”, what are my own personal representations of “the good teacher”, in how far they are deeply rooted in my own experiences of “good teachers” and “bad teachers”, in my conceptions of learning, in my representations of “good schools”, in my ideas about knowledge and competence, and in my believes about “the capacities of learners to learn for themselves, by themselves and with the help of others”.
Alex Moore has published several papers related to this topic:
Moore, A., Edwards, G., Halpin, D. & George, R. (2004). Compliance, Resistance and Pragmatism: the (re)construction of schoolteachers’ identities in a period of intensive educational reform. British Education Research Journal, vol 28 no 4; pp. 551-565.
Moore, A. & Atkinson, D. (1998). Charisma, Competence and Teacher Education. Discourse 19 (2) 171-182.
Moore, A. & Ash, A. (2002). Reflective practice in beginning teachers: helps, hindrances and the role of the critical other. Education-line. Retrieved 28th January 2009 from http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002531.htm
I’ve recently “discovered” the TPCK model, by browsing the iTunesU catalogue and falling over Dr. Ruben Puentedura’s video podcast called “As We May Teach” (see: http://www.hippasus.com/).
I was totally unaware of the theoretical and empirical work done in the field of TPCK, so far and so I was very happy to see that there are some websites, by various educational technology researchers and lecturers, on this very interesting topic. And there is THE handbook of TPCK, which I’ve recently ordered, received and started to read… I’d like to share some thoughts on this edited volume with you here… The book is a collection of articles from various scholar working in the domain of TPCK, including theoretical considerations, practical applications and use case, as well as recommendations for teacher education programs. I think, as far as I can see now, this book should be part of our reader for the “learning with new media” module.
Reference:
Technology, E., (2008). Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators. New York: Routledge for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
This is a picture of my new Toyota Aygo Music car, with multimode transmission. It’s really a joy driving with the automatic transmission and it’s really easy to park this vehicle.
For further details, see the www.aygo.lu page here: http://www.aygo.lu/index_5_details.html
It’s been rated 29/100 cars in an independent “what green car” test – http://www.whatgreencar.com/view-car/14124/toyota-aygo-1_0_VVT_i_3dr
There is currently only one other non-electric car (in this ranking) with lower CO2/km emissions… the SMART fortwo coupe (LPG)
Posted via email from the material mind