There is incredible diversity within our higher-education system. I have personally witnessed a class taught by a full professor to two (2!) undergraduates at a wealthy liberal-arts college and read senior theses produced in close collaboration with full-time research faculty that would put most graduate work to shame. Online higher education can’t touch that. But...
Category: online learning
Is Diane Ravitch anti-technology?
I confess that I’m struggling with Diane Ravitch lately (and not for the reasons I struggled back in 2010). I think that she’s a valuable voice in the educational policy landscape and I greatly appreciate her passion and her ability to energize educators and citizens as she speaks up against political and pedagogical abuses of...
Bad teaching in classroom = “crisis.” Bad teaching on YouTube = “revolution.”
effective teaching is incredibly complex. It requires planning. It requires reflection. And it certainly requires more than just “two minutes of research on Google,” which is how Khan describes his own pre-lesson routine. … teachers aren’t “pissed off” because Sal Khan is the world’s teacher. They’re concerned that he’s a bad teacher who people think...
The voice of the active learner [VIDEO]
Upcoming travel and events December 3-5 – International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 3 – Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network, TBD, VA February 25-26 – Missouri Educational Technology Leaders CTO Clinic, TBD, MO March 10-13 – Central & Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary June 8-9 – Roanoke County Public...
Forward tutoring: Educate, volunteer, improve [guest post]
[This is a guest post by Dustin Lewis, a 5th grade teacher at the American International School of Budapest. Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, he has been teaching internationally for four years, with a previous stop at The Anglo American School in Moscow. Dustin also works part-time promoting First Tutors, a UK-based tutoring service that specializes in...
A Japanese approach to Khan Academy
@Michael P.: Taking your last comment first, I think that is a very important point that is generally ignored by politicians and education deformers. There’s an old saw in education: you test what you value. To me, that means that everyone notices what’s going to be tested and assumes that’s the only thing that matters...
Learning is the formation of connections
At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication. What we...
Education in a digital world [VIDEO]
Upcoming travel and events December 3-5 – International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 3 – Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network, TBD, VA February 25-26 – Missouri Educational Technology Leaders CTO Clinic, TBD, MO March 10-13 – Central & Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary June 8-9 – Roanoke County Public...
Interest-driven learning is now both accessible and required
Upcoming travel and events December 3-5 – International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 3 – Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network, TBD, VA February 25-26 – Missouri Educational Technology Leaders CTO Clinic, TBD, MO March 10-13 – Central & Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary June 8-9 – Roanoke County Public...
Containers [SLIDE]
Upcoming travel and events December 3-5 – International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 3 – Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network, TBD, VA February 25-26 – Missouri Educational Technology Leaders CTO Clinic, TBD, MO March 10-13 – Central & Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary June 8-9 – Roanoke County Public...