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…
Today I’m giving a lecture about learning environments that promote interdisciplinary dialogue in Internet Science. After 10+ years working in an interdisciplinary space, I take for granted how much easier it has become, I forget the many times I sat through lectures that were like a foreign language where every third word made sense. I…
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…
How often have you walked out of a room and barely remembered anything from a lecture or presentation? It feels that often presentations focus on information transfer rather than connection. If much of what is communicated in academic presentations could easily be done asynchronously, academics are regularly missing an opportunity to connect with and engage…
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…
To ban or not to ban laptops in classrooms? What about cell phones? And calculators? Before we hand students a list of technologies to leave at home, let’s consider the real problem: attention vs. distraction. If you’re going to ban everything distracting students, you should consider what you’re wearing, how you talk, the guy in…
Most of the fun tech tools I use were shown to me by designer friends and colleagues. I find this realization interesting, because I’ve spent the past six years working closely with Computer Science students and can only think of one app a fellow student showed me the entire time we worked together. My art…