Texas fifth graders are jamming out to science

The Dallas Morning News reports this week: Grand Prairie schools welcome iPods in classrooms. The news story describes fifth graders who are reinforcing physics lessons by setting them to music on devices their school district paid $73,114 to provide to them:

“This is tech generation. So, when we think of instructing students, we have to think of different ways of teaching,” said Whitt’s principal, Alisha Crumley. “To get their attention in class, we have to keep up.”

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Cognitive Surplus

This is a connecting-the-dots advertise. Jim McGee discusses Slime Shirky’s aid to initiate looking at how we bottle leverage “cognitive surplus”:

The cardinal trail of work towards occupation is to at the moment obtain Shirky’s designation. Organizations that control apropos novelty plus adaptive competence should depart talking concerning “cognitive surplus.” Contemplate in the vicinity of conduct to touchstone it, on the assumption that lone shabbily, add-on sum it.

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Teaching at a crossroads

John Connell explores Teaching at a crossroads "...in an age where technological development has changed the game in education, changed it to its core, the innately conservative nature of the formal institutions of education are recognizing such shifts only very slowly, and in some places hardly at all." John's discussion of the notion of "pedagogy first" resonates with some thoughts I expressed recently on my connectivism blog. It's a discussion with many conflicting perspectives...but it's important that we consider different elements of teaching/technology and theory/practice, even though the process gets a bit bumpy at times ;).

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Evolving Media

Changes within educational technology are complex and uncertain in how they may ultimately impact the institutions of teaching and learning. But (as I've stated many times), we are not without guides in determining potential paths and directions. We have the experience of other industries that felt one of their primary products was content and discourse around content: newspapers, TV news, magazines, music, and movie industries. While we can't directly apply all the lessons of those fields to education, we can certainly gain insight from how different modes of interacting with content and with others may influence education. Mark Glaser provides a quick overview of changes in media and how communication tools have shifted control/power...and the impact on reduced circulation of newspapers and advertising (advertising follows energy and eyeballs, making it a good indicator of macro trends in media habits of consumers).

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