Please visit the Macarthur Digital Media + Learning blog for my recent post about re-considering MOOCs beyond classroom comparisons. Feel free to share your own insights about MOOCs as something more than courses and more than textbooks…. Image credit: tomdz
Please visit the Macarthur Digital Media + Learning blog for my latest post about the societal challenges facing education. I posit that we are expecting too much of technology if we believe it will single-handedly fix problems with education. Image credit: Brad Flickinger
Any parent or teacher will tell you that, while sharing some similarities, each kid is different, even within the same age group or the same family. The same kid will be different at different times of the day and in different contexts, just like adults. It seems an obvious point. Yet, as adults we are…
Also posted at DML Central: http://dmlcentral.net/blog/monica-bulger/trouble-testing It’s obviously summer because my news alerts are no longer steadily reporting concerns about education, our children’s future, the problems with teachers, etc. Perhaps now, then, is the perfect time to address the issue of testing and its troubles, while a little distance might provide perspective. So, why do…
I wonder if the technologies that will truly disrupt education are the ones most talked about (Khan Academy, online courses in their many forms), the subtle, yet game-changing shifts (digital texts) or the quiet ones we have yet to consider? While discussions focus on online courses, student assessment, and gaming, a very disruptive technology is…
Yesterday, I attended Google’s Big Tent Event in Hertfordshire. As an academic, I’m used to attending conferences at universities or Hiltons, not countryside resorts with helicopter pads. The event was held in a grand tent that could easily hold 500 people. It was well-insulated from weather and noise, carpeted, with an extraordinary sound and projection…
I’ve been traveling to Oxford for the past two years and in that time, I’ve gotten familiar with the City Centre area, in particular, the city’s homeless. For the most part, the same people show up at the same posts every day, with a few newcomers, but rain or shine, they’re there, selling the Big…
Started as a way to tutor his cousin, Sal Khan has developed an extensive library of online lessons in subjects ranging from Math to Science to History. While most online learning approaches are stuck in either the lecture format or the impersonal slide delivery (or worse, just a list of readings), Sal found a way…
When I was in high school in the late 80’s — early 90’s, it seemed that the U.S. education system was an abysmal failure — after all, weren’t the Soviets and the Chinese students scoring higher in math? Today, headlines still decry our education system as a failure. In a recent op-ed piece published in…
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field. I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition…