Whether working with the TALONS, philosophers, or the #IntroGuitar community, I am fortunate to get to spend a good deal of time planning lessons and thinking of learning experiences that are not only ‘memorable,’ but hopefully also: personal, meaningful and – optimally – transformative. I would agree with a definition that sees learning as Jeanne […]
Read more "On Memorable Learning"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 […]
Read more "“…not a class that teaches guitar, but one where you can learn guitar.”"It’s a great thing to receive invites like this one from Manitoba civics teacher extraordinaire Matt Henderson, and be prompted to a discussion of knowledge spanning two continents and including some of my favourite edu-thinkers in a single Tweet. A huge admirer of GNA Garcia, Zoe Branigan-Pipe, and Thomas Steele-Maley for their influence on my […]
Read more "On Knowledge"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 […]
Read more "On 21st Century Schools"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 […]
Read more "This year’s new Dylan: Design Thinking"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 […]
Read more "Ethics Unit Feedback and Reflection"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 […]
Read more "Blogs as Documents of Learning"A few of us from the #Tiegrad group met up on Sunday morning to talk about all sorts of things: project updates, questions, and frustrations, the nature of personalized learning and education in the ‘open,’ and the unique moment each of us finds ourselves in: presently at the intersection between teacher and learner. Even Valerie Irvine, […]
Read more "On Teaching and Learning"Given the way my own learning had unfolded this semester, it’s not surprising, perhaps, that I would be coming to identify (and experiment) with the idea of emergence in my classrooms and the extra-curricular projects I’ve undertaken. My goals of a month ago talked about my intentions: “to create […] space to reflect on this year’s […]
Read more "Social Media and Personalized Learning Project(s) Update"Having come to the conclusion of our Metaphysics unit in Philosophy 12, I asked the group to respond to several reflection prompts in a Google Form posted on the class site. Some of the questions addressed individual growth and learning related to participants’ chosen philosopher and activities undertaken during the unit; others focused on the […]
Read more "Metaphysics Unit Reflections and Feedback"