Digital Environments, Emergent Knowledge & Citizenship Learning

EDCI 335 Challenge 10: What are the strengths/affordances of the technology or learning environment you have chosen for your learning design that will promote or facilitate learning? In preparing the TALONS socials units this semester, I have sought to align aspects of technology, assessment and unit planning within larger values of emergent epistemology and citizenship learning. By bringing these […]

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On Open Learning Environments

When looking to explore the panoply of 21st century incarnations of education, I am often compelled to seek out a tangible unifying force at work which might correspond within a larger context of society as it is being influenced by the digital technology revolution. As the web has increased in its capacity for open sharing […]

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Attention!

In discussing whether or not technology is harming students’ capacity for attention”(as those of us embarking upon EDCI 335 this week have been asked to do), each of these terms inhabits a range of contextual definitions that make first attempting to determine a common understanding necessary if any meaningful discourse is to emerge.  Many of […]

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“…not a class that teaches guitar, but one where you can learn guitar.”

I’m forever indebted to Alan Levine’s description of #IntroGuitar sometime last spring, where he included Gleneagle‘s Introduction to Guitar 11 in a list of experiments in Open Courses You Won’t Find in the New York Times, A Cheesy Edudemic Infographic, or Among Davos Champagne Sippers:   In a basic hosted WordPress web site, he has […]

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On 21st Century Schools

As I’ve explored at some length here, I think of schools today as guided by our mission statements and legal mandates to pursue an ageless ideal of education along the lines of how John Dewey characterized schooling as the act of “preparing students for the adult vocations needed for society to continue to exist.” The question […]

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Design Thinking as Critical Literacy

“Design thinking asks students to become investigators in their world, attempt to solve problems, bridge gaps of knowledge independently, collaboratively, and resourcefully.” So decrees Lee-Ann Gray of the ability of Design Thinking to “make school more like real life.” Gray positions her view of schooling’s purpose clearly in her opening paragraphs, where she notes that, […]

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This year’s new Dylan: Design Thinking

I’ve quoted D’Arcy Norman’s MSc thesis here before. However, newly immersed in the introductory strides of Design Thinking, courtesy of UVic and #TieGrad’s EDCI 335 course, I think the following bears on our emerging discussions: …educational technology can be prone to cycles of hype and fetishism, where new tools and applications are rapidly adopted by individuals who are […]

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Ethics Unit Feedback and Reflection

This semester I’ve been using Google Forms to collect reflections, self-assessments and unit feedback from both the Philosophy 12 bunch, as well as the TALONS. As with many aggregating aspects of the web, what I appreciate about this method of collection and feedback is the ability to analyze trends and other information (beyond the individual […]

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Blogs as Documents of Learning

I started blogging with the TALONS class (since expanded to two) a little more than four years ago. In that time I’ve learned a great deal about the capacity for such digital publishing tools to help realize aspects of the larger purpose of schooling; part of this has come through developing my own informal network […]

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