I'm a Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology & Technology at the University of Luxembourg. I call myself a TechnoSage, i.e. somebody who loves to explore the use of "new" technologies to support, enhance, enrich and transform learning & teaching.
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I’ve been thinking about the issue of motivation and lack-of-motivation and discussing it with bachelor in educational sciences students over the last years… and I’ve always had the impression that we tend to assume that kids who don’t learn (to do) certain things at school don’t *want* to learn. Maybe they don’t want to learn these things and would want (and do want) to learn other things (those that school is notoriously not very keen of)… I do think that no kid is unwilling to learn anything… they all want to learn (to do) some things… and today, by chance, I found a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that nicely illustrates this tendency to be willing to learn certain things that adults would not even recognize as learning or as interesting-to-learn skills.
Calvin, in the comic below, says that the only skills he has the patience to learn are those that are basically “useless”… Somehow he’s not so far off compared to many things we are taught at school… 🙂 where the usefulness is sometimes very hidden… we just learn about facts that do not connect with “real life” and learn to master certain skills and procedures that we cannot see how to use in order to solve “real problems”…
In today’s issue (04.11.2009, p.22) of L’esssentiel, a free daily newspaper in Luxembourg, I read an article about the fictive city Argleton… A city that apparently only exists in cyberspace and could be found on Google Maps, somewhere close to Liverpool, UK, Europe.
The newspaper article proposes a number of “explanations” for such an error. I particularly like the one explaining that companies providing (paid) acces to their online map services voluntarily insert such errors to track illegal uses of their intellectual property. I wonder if that’s really true…
It even relates that somebody from the University of Ormskirk went to the real place to check whether Argleton existed or not. I’ve never heard of such a University, by the way… 🙂 Another thing I’ll have to verify!
I did, of course, immediately check on Google Maps whether this phantom city could really be found via the iPhone’s Google Maps app… And the result is: No! No results for such a query.
Now I’m wondering, whether this is an example of bad journalism (telling a faked story) or has Google (or the map provider behind) updated their maps so fast that I could no longer find this entry… Hard to know…
How could I try to find an answer to this question? Any ideas?
I suspect that other “errors” in this article, if their are any to be found, would seriously reduce its credibility…
I think that this teacher’s PERFORMANCE was great! And many of you may think that this was a great lesson… It was funny, well orchestrated, etc.
However, I do think that it’s ultimately also an example of “bad teaching”… because it’s ENTERTAINMENT instead of LEARNING. Students will remember this “lesson”, but they will certainly not remember anything of the math content “explained”… math, here, is not essential, it’s the background of the “theater play”. Moreover only the teacher was active here… and wow, what a well prepared “lesson”… students were merely laughing and being entertained… students were passive… the teacher probably learned a lot about video-projections and the like while he was preparing this SHOW… but all that students probably learned was that they have a cool teacher, who thinks that they deserve such a nicely prepared show for Halloween… Students certainly deserve teachers who like to work, but, hey, they certainly deserve teachers who make them learn themselves, who encourage them to be creaCtive producers instead of passive consumers…
Thanks to Kristina Höppner for pointing out this video to me.
The “LSF Lexique” is an online video database with signs for specialty concepts (for instance terms in medical sciences) in the French Signs Language.
The idea is to build up (and make available) a reference database for FSL signs to represent concepts for which there are no “official” signs, because these concepts come from a very narrowly-defined domain and are thus not part of the “normal”, every-day FSL vocabulary.
This is an interesting example of how ICT tools can be used to foster learning in people with special needs.
The International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT) is an e-journal that provides free and open access to all of its content.
I do agree with Ragexiii, that ICT are merely tools and that they can be used for education just like other older technologies (like whiteboards and books) have been used for teaching and learning purposes.
However, I do think that digital technologies (Personal Computers and the Internet) have so fundamentally changed our every-where and every-time *rapport au savoir*, our relationship to knowledge that we cannot ignore them in educational contexts. For me, it’s not about ICT tools for teaching, it’s about the very transformative effects of access to knowledge as well as its mass-generation, mass-spreading and mass-sharing via digital technologies.
Just like printed books, in their time, fundamentally changed the way knowledge was “available to the masses”, mobile digital devices connected to the global Internet completely changed and are still changing our *rapport au savoir*.
In this sense, I do think that “ICT in Education” is different from “Whiteboards in Education” and it’s not merely a question of tools for teaching…
I’ve been commenting on a blog post by Dean Shareski who is a Digital Learning Consultant with the Prairie South School Division in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada.
I’d love to know what you think about my ideas and speculations… So please leave me a comment below…
Hi Dean,
I’m a lecturer in Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Europe and I want to share my humble and preliminary thoughts about “imposed changes”. We are having a major reform of our school law (the last real update was in 1912!) partially due to what has been called the PISA-Shock in Germany (one of our neighbor countries), partially due to the fact that finally somebody got the balls and wisdom to see that our school system and it’s laws and regulations were actually well suited for a society of the beginning of the 20th century but did no longer fit with our changed demographics and the major changes in our economy and cultures (from an agricultural/industrial society to a knowledge/information society). We have namely had major immigration waves to Luxembourg from mainly Italy and Portugal during the last decades, so that the proportion of “foreigners” now takes 40% of the people living in Luxembourg. And we do have a lot of transnational commuters coming to work in Luxembourg everyday (about the size of 30% of our resident population).
Let me be clear at this point: I do think that the changes in laws and regulations were needed and would have been needed earlier.
However, I do feel, like you describe you do, that all the new requirements that teachers in K-12 schools have to handle everyday may be too much for them. I still hope that the new legal framework (away from an input-oriented/teacher-centered/instruction-based teaching system towards an output-oriented/learner-centered/competencies-oriented system) will allow teachers to free themselves from all the time-pressures they had to cope with before and allow them to creatively adapt their teaching practices. We’ve heard all the time from teachers that, given the strict and highly-demanding instruction programs they had to deliver, they never had time to do things at a pace suited to ALL children, that some kids were necessarily left behind, but that they didn’t really have the choice, because they had to rush through the school manuals and the instruction program as fast as possible to be sure that parents (mainly of the “good-grades” kids) wouldn’t come knocking on their doors and ask them why the neighboring classes were ahead of them in terms of this linear, progressive and predefined input program. That has certainly been quite a drain on their mental and physical resources over the last decades.
However, the reform we are living through now may put them under even more pressure, partially because they are not necessarily well prepared for the new requirements and challenges: working in teams, creating enriched learning environments for kids, doing on-going portfolio evaluation, giving each child the chances to learn at their pace, etc.
I hope to do my small and humble contributions to this enterprise by trying to empower my future teacher students to be better prepared for changes in the future by helping them to develop life-long-learning attitudes and behaviors.
However, there are considerable risks that the multiple new pressures that teachers have to cope with will make some of them even more conservative and rigid in their attitudes and believes… “I’ll stick to what I’ve been good at for decades.”
Structural changes need to be supported and scaffolded by those responsible for the change, when it comes from the top to the bottom… changes from the bottom are always more self-supporting, but sometimes changes in laws and regulations become inevitable to allow these bottom-up changes to happen and to be legal and acceptable…
First, everything we do as educators needs a larger goal (the big picture as it were). Too often we get lost in the minutia of of the project and forget the broader, overarching frame. The structure of our lessons, our semester, our mini-activities needs to have a larger narrative thrust, a dramatic flow. A beginning, a middle and an end. A good science activity can have them all. So can a well designed social studies activity.
Second, every thing we do as educators needs to be subservient to meeting that larger goal. The Blue Man group movie works because each frame (and musical note) is part of a larger story being played out in front of us. Not a frame is wasted. In contrast, you could take away a chunk of the second and I doubt anybody would even notice. This is design for anticipation. This is design for postdiction. As educators this means that we can’t give them stupid-work (like most seat work at school) but rather every assignment needs to inform the larger picture and in turn be informed by it.
Don’t you think that as educators need to pay more attention to building anticipation and suspense in our students?
Yes I do think that as educators we need to care more about building anticipation and suspense in our students… I feel that too often we try to fill them (and we are expected to do so) with nicely structured and pre-processed knowledge that hardly would correspond to real authentic problems… thus, instead of entertaining their curiosity and sense of inquiry, we entertain them, like TV does (in the best case), or we bore them to death, like a non-believing preacher would (in the worst case). In both cases, students don’t have to think too much, because they can do their part of the “job” by simply absorbing the pre-processed knowledge and will pass the exams (or what ever evaluation we have) by simply recalling what they have temporarily stored somewhere in their no-so-long-term-memory.
“We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.”
Oscar Wilde – Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 – 1900)
Supporting people in their own grow is certainly also a wicked problem, but at least it defines and serves a larger goal for education.
