Each spring the TALONS undertake an In-Depth Study, a five month “passion project” wherein they are asked to document their growth and learning toward personalized goals in learning a skill or craft. There are two universal goals for the In-Depth Study: 1. Know something about everything and everything about something. In school you are usually […]
Read more "An Open Learning Project"In a facilitator’s guide for Collaborative Inquiry for Educators, Jenni Donohoo presents the formation of professional learning communities as a means of addressing “adaptive challenges,” or those “for which the necessary knowledge to solve the problem do not yet exist” (Vander Ark, 2006 p 10). Many aspects of professional development seeks to approach these types […]
Read more "Why Collaborative Inquiry?"Upon completing my undergraduate education, I toyed briefly with the idea of heading directly into my Master’s, though at the time it would have likely been in American literature or an MFA program in fiction writing than the course I’m currently following. Then again during my course work to obtain my teaching certificate, I […]
Read more "Blog as Prologue"The passage of autumn into winter in the TALONS classroom is marked by the arrival of the Eminent Person Study and culminating Night of the Notables. And while there is a great deal of tradition and meaning transmitted down through years to the current group of students undertaking the project, the chain of cultural transmission […]
Read more "#Eminent2014 in Motion"Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to hook up with the CUEBC conference organizers in time to access the bypass on the wifi/landline connection that was preventing our session broadcast from going out live on the air. But the hardy souls who joined me to discuss distributed web radio took the challenge in stride and still managed […]
Read more "(Recorded) Live at #CUEBC!"On Friday I’ll be presenting at the CUEBC Conference in West Vancouver, sharing a little of the gospel of distributed web radio stations DS106Radio and 105 the Hive, meaning I am now putting together slides, collecting images, links and the like. Developing a script, of sorts. Outlining a “talk,” y’know? And when it comes to […]
Read more "Live from #CUEBC"While I attempted to introduce the new academic year in a blog post that wound up meandering into too many of my thoughts and feelings on the culmination of BC teachers’ recent strike action, here I intend to share my initial guiding interests and projects setting out into the 2014-15 school year. As I alluded […]
Read more "Reclaim TALONS"Maria Montessori presents a critical consideration of the “New Pedagogy” (1912) by discussing the advent and implementation of the “scientific pedagogy” that took root in Italy around the turn of the 20th century. Montessori’s critique focuses on the shortcomings of scientific pedagogy to address the human subjects (and observers) involved in the study of teaching […]
Read more "Précis: A Critical Consideration of the New Pedagogy in its Relation to Modern Science"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 […]
Read more "Attention!"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.”"