Monday, April 29, 2013

What we really need to improve education in Texas

Well-trained, mentored and coaching teachers. We lose too much talent. Less bureaucracy, testing, and administrative overhead.

From James T. Mangan's "You Can Do Anything" via BrainPickings.org

The process by which you reason is known as logic. Logic teaches you how to derive a previously unknown truth from the facts already at hand. Logic teaches you how to be sure whether what you think is true is really true. … Logic is the supreme avenue to intellectual truth. Don't ever despair of possessing a logical mind. You don't have to study it for years, read books and digest a mountain of data. All you have to remember is one word – compare. Compare all points in a proposition. Note the similarity – that tells you something new. Note the difference – that tells you something new. Then take the new things you've found and check them against established laws or principles. This is logic. This is reason. This is knowledge in its highest form.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Donald Clark Plan B: Top Ten Mistakes in eLearning

Donald Clark Plan B: Top Ten Mistakes in eLearning

Why are there always acronyms I don't know in blog posts?  What is an MCQ?

Multiple
Choice
Question

There are acronyms because if you teach, you must assess learning to measure your own effectiveness. Especially with adult learners.

I do think condescension is the worst offense. PPT decks help an audience stay focused and hopefully listening on one channel to the speaker who hopefully is not reading the deck. I think the most revolutionary thing about learning is that the TED talk has defined bite-size learning in the 20 Teens.  LMS's are not the answer, or lcms, or moocs or  diploma mills.

Learning is a process of growth. Education is a process of communication. ~ Stephen Downes said many years ago.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Video Editing for Learning

The quick and dirty on using video in the classroom. I realize this may be out of date by now, but then I am a little slow . . .

http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?e=2167