I was at a technology and education conference, earlier this week. But as I reflected on my learning from the conference, I came to the conclusion that it didn’t seem like a technology conference.
Instead, it was a mindset conference. It was an innovation conference. It was a conference about the power of connectivity. It was a conference that encouraged people to shift the way they think.
It was amazing!
One presenter at the conference, the keynote, George Couros, went so far as to discourage participants from applying the “tech” label to themselves. What?! He was talking to a room full of the “tech” people!
Technology isn’t something new, personal computers have been around for almost 40 years now. It is all in the mind and how you’re going to use technology to extend learning.
On a stage in San Francisco, IBM’s Project Debater spoke, listened and rebutted a human’s arguments in what was described as a groundbreaking display of artificial intelligence. The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents – mostly newspaper articles and academic journals – to form its responses to a topic…
It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that…
How you view math and shown math relationships can affect your understanding of math. What does mathematics look like to you? Do you see a wondrous landscape filled with connected ideas, or a sprawling mess of symbols? The distinction matters a great deal, because your mathematical worldview is inextricably tied to your success in the…
In the past, I’ve written on ideas for gamification—using games in the classroom—but lately I’ve been reflecting on some of the bigger ideas that games open up in terms of pedagogy and the classroom experience. While we can use games as tools and perhaps build units that are gamified, we might also adopt some basic…
Teachers in Littleton, Colorado — like teachers in many places — are increasingly asking students to read and write online. Free tools like Google Docs have made it easy for students to work on the same piece of writing at home and at school, and have allowed teachers to explore collaborative writing assignments and synchronous…
The Bridge concept — low-cost private schools for the world’s poorest children — has galvanized many of the Western investors and Silicon Valley moguls who learn about the project. Bill Gates, the Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the World Bank have all invested in the company; Pearson, the multinational textbook-and-assessment company, has done…
