Recently, a colleague asked me, “What is the difference between open educational resources and the materials I get from a publisher?” While the most obvious answer for educators is “cost,” it seems there is something far more important for educators, and that is the right to revise and redistribute works that are licensed under Creative Read More
Year: 2018
The Organization of Training, Learning, Design
This is a continuation of the Training, Learning, Design post. This theme continues as well in the post Design Defined. We know educators need three types of support when they are creating technology-rich teaching and learning. Previously, I introduced training, learning and design as the types and each is labeled based on the focus of Read More
The Capacity to Learn
This post concludes the theme begun in The (Overturned) Model of Standard Education and continued in Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education A dominant theme in the literature on the future of work is that workers—all workers, white collar, blue collar, in the services, information field, and trades, and yet to be discovered fields—will have Read More
Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education
This post continues the theme begun in The (Overturned) Model of Standard Education Many educational scholars and practitioners have recognized the inadequacy of the Standard Model in recent decades and they have proposed alternative models of education. The (incomplete) list of alternatives includes authentic learning (Herrington, Reeves, & Oliver, 2014), natural learning (Caine & Caine, Read More
Skills Inversion
For much of the 20th century, educators were adults who had earned an undergraduate degree which typically requires four years of study in higher education. As undergraduate students, these adults had become skilled users of print which was the dominant information technology in both society and school. As a result, educators were the most skilled Read More
Transparent Taming of Wicked Problems
117: Transparent Taming of Wicked Problems In ta previous post, 21st century education was presented as a wicked problem. Whereas tame problems are definable (cause and effect can be clearly identified), understandable (methods for resolving the problem are known or can be known), and consensual (reasonable people will agree on the need to solve it), Read More
Reinterpreting Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom’s taxonomy has been a staple of educational theory for decades. Most educators first encounter the concept during their undergraduate preparation, and it is used as a model to ensure learning objectives are expressed in terms that encourage more sophisticated types of understanding. While Bloom originally used the image to the right to capture the Read More
Wicked Problems
88: Understanding Wicked Problems In the 1973 article, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Horst Rittel, who was a professor of the science of design at the University of California, Berkeley and Melvin Webber, who was a professor of city planning at the same institution, recognized many problems include a social dimension. While many Read More
Technology Acceptance
89: Technology Acceptance In 2003, Venkatesh, Morris, Davis and Davis modified the TAM into the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). Through the UTAUT, the scholars sought to compare and unite into one theory eight different theories that had emerged for measuring technology use. According to the UTAUT, four factors are directly Read More
Horizontal versus Vertical Reform
Educational reform in the last several decades has been horizontal as schools commonly jump from one initiative to another with little reason. The typical cycle is familiar to many: First, an initiative (supported with little or dubious evidence from the learning sciences) is introduced and implemented (with little or dubious support and rationale). Second, problems Read More