Education

Blog posts tagged: Education

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity – TED 2006

Sample posts

The Education Bubble – April 2011

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

9 Brain Rules for Education – Jan 2010

Everything at this school is about connected and applied learning.  The children still have to take written tests, but they also have to do the practical.  For example, in 6th grade, the children have to answer questions on maths ratios.  Then they have to go into the lab and build a 5:1 wheel ratio.

Do books matter? – May 2008

Imagine if we were living in the time when writing was just invented. The theory then would have probably been along the lines: “Writing words down will destroy the art of story-telling.

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How do you best prepare for the creative age? – Hugh Macleod, Apr 2012

To mas­si­vely over-simplify, there were two main pha­ses in the his­tory of edu­ca­tion, pre-industrial and indus­trial. The first meant only the clergy and the sons of the elite were pro­perly edu­ca­ted. Then along comes the second, indus­trial phase, which meant edu­ca­tion on a mass-universal scale, that emer­ges along with the “Age of Rea­son”, the indus­trial revo­lu­tion and the whole modern era.

Per­so­nally, I had a pretty good for­mal edu­ca­tion, where I lear­ned the basics– rea­ding, wri­ting, math, a bit of science, his­tory, lan­gua­ges and a wee smat­te­ring of the arts. I lear­ned to study and pass tests. Like most stu­dents, I lear­ned how to learn, basi­cally.

I don’t think that’s enough any­more, as the THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of under-employed and unem­plo­yed uni­ver­sity gra­dua­tes with good gra­des in Europe and Ame­rica will tes­tify. They pas­sed all their tests fine…

What makes a great teacher? – The Atlantic, Jan 2010

Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools.  – In depth study into differences in teaching and why it matters.

The New Literacy – Clive Thompson, Wired, Aug 2009

Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it… young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.

Educators take Web 2.0 to school – Larry Magid, CNet, Jul 2009

Rather than fight the idea of students using the Web to communicate with each other, the presenters at this event were encouraging it. Chris Lehman, the principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, talked about the use of interactive technology in schools as part of a “collaborative culture” that he says is likely to be with us for a long time.

“Whether it’s a wiki or Twitter, the notion of a participatory culture–upstream and downstream–is not going away,” he told the audience.

Why I am not a professor: the decline and fall of the British University – Dr Mark Tarva, 2007

Universities are extraordinary institutions.  They are in fact, the last bastions of mediaevalism left in modern society outside, perhaps, the church.  Like churches they attracted a certain type of person who did not share the values of the commercial world. Poor communication, expensive reading materials and illiteracy were the foundation blocks for the universities. If today we have excellent communications, free online information and general literacy, we also have an environment in which the universities are struggling to maintain their position.

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