Baldy7's Posterous

The advent of digital technologies and deregulated networks triggered a long-overdue process of deinstitutionalization and deregulation that from today’s standpoint appears to be irreversible. This process was based on a fatal promise: self-organized access to knowledge, independent of any further mediation other than that of the medium itself.

Consequently, public institutions’ state-approved monopoly over the manufacturing of knowledge gradually lost its function, its own existence rendered pointless or at least resistant to any kind of upgrade that would run the risk of radically putting their own functioning into question.

How can we envision, design, develop, and enjoy environments in which one learns “with” someone else instead of “from” or “about” others, as Deleuze suggested? How can we invent, create, and compose “spaces of encounter with signs” in which distinctive points “renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself?”³ What would make these spaces different to the ones we have been forced to experience in the past?

What was the most surprising finding to you? What did your research elicit that you didn't expect?

We were surprised by how only a fraction of Twitter users actively tweet. And this small fraction of Twitter users provoke responses (mentions) and initiate information cascades (retweets). I guess many people use Twitter to browse others' messages rather than generating a lot new messages themselves. 

The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Stephen Downes, a researcher for Canada’s National Research Council, recently wrote, “We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for us.” Amen. My kids are growing tired of the one-size-fits-all education that we’re providing for them, and so am I, especially now that there’s an increasingly relevant alternative.

The downside is that it is not a classroom learning tool unless you restructure the classroom.   By that I mean, there is no benefit in giving kids iPads in school if you don't change school.   You might as well send them off with babysitters to play eight hours a day.   Without the right pedagogy, without a significant change in learning goals and practices, the iPad's potential is as limited (and limitless) as the child's imagination.   That's great--but it misses the real potential of the device and the real moment of interactive, complex communication that is our Information Age that these kids have inherited and will soon be shaping

Hashtags have also undergone mission creep, and now do all sorts of interesting things. Frequently, they are used to set apart a side commentary on tweets, sort of like those little mice in the movie “Babe” who appear at the bottom of the frame and, in their squeaky little mouse voices, comment on what you’ve just seen and what you’re about to see. A typical commentary-type hashtag might look like this:

“Sarah Palin for President??!? #Iwouldratherhaveamoose”

This usage totally subverts the original purpose of the hashtag, since the likelihood of anyone searching the term “Iwouldratherhaveamoose” is next to zero. But that isn’t the point. This particular hashtaggery is weirdly amusing, because, for some reason, starting any phrase with a hashtag makes it look like it’s being muttered into a handkerchief; when you read it you feel like you’ve had an intimate moment in which the writer leaned over and whispered “I would rather have a moose!” in your ear.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.