Category: Learning

Exercise and Authenticity

Here is a version of my “learning to walk at 42” story that seems to capture an important lesson for educators. In my therapy, there were two kinds of activities: exercises and authentic activities. Exercises were just what one expects from the name, actions the therapists directed me to perform to strengthen the neural connections Read More

What it Means to be Knowledgeable

Schooling (at whatever level it is experienced) is intended to help students become knowledgeable. Being knowledgeable is a construct we could spend many pages exploring, but let’s assume that whatever readers might have in mind is a sufficient proxy for this multi-dimensional aspect of human life. The nature of knowledge has changed over the course Read More

Another View of Technology Acceptance

School and technology leaders spend great amounts of time trying to figure out what they should prioritize; this guides their decisions about where resources are used and which efforts receive attention. Despite their insistence that they are data-driven, many school leaders seem to ignore much that we know about how the phenomena they are trying Read More

I > C > A > P

Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com The title of this post appears to be a cryptic message, perhaps an arcane relationship from a long-forgotten physics textbook. In reality, it summarizes one of the most important ideas about learning to be articulated in the last 10 years or so. The relationship makes perfect sense to many teachers Read More

What Do We Know About Learning?

A colleague and I sat together to see if we could agree on a collection of statements about learning. This is what he and I beleive to be true about learning: Learning happens in the brains of individuals; Learning extends into the social and technological environments; Learning is a multi-dimensional process involving perception, recollection, analyzing, Read More

Deeper Learning Defined

Just what are educators supposed to teach? Better yet, what are students supposed to learn? These are questions that educators must consider at a much deeper level than my teachers did when I was college student in the 1980’s, and even when I was a graduate student 10 then again 20 years later. For generations, Read More

Theory & Education

Theory, of course, permeates everything we do. -Stephen Jay Gould Many educators would disagree with Gould’s observation. For these teachers, “theory” is conflated with “silly ideas for which I have no time, I need to cover the material.” I understand this approach, much that we do in education can be done without directly indicating the Read More

Tools for Interaction in LMS

Many varieties of web 2.0 tools have been available since the late 1990’s; these tools are all designed to make it easy for users to publish information to the web and to interact with others via posts and responses. Many of these are built into LMS, so can easily be incorporated into virtual classrooms. The Read More

On Electronic Portfolios

Over the decades I have been working with digital technologies, teachers, and learners; electronic portfolios have been a recurring topic. The story usually plays out like this: I arrive in a school (maybe k-12, maybe college) and there are groups (often departments in colleges) in which there is interest in adopting electronic portfolios. I hear, Read More