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Month: January 2010

EduCon Reflections

EduCon Reflections

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I am attending EduCon 2.2 and just getting ready to start the final day.  Yesterday I had the privilege to facilitate a conversation with Danja Mahoney and Michael Springer, and chat with some of the smartest most thoughtful educators around. Our topic was Subversive PD: Creating a culture of collaboration to bring educators into the 21st century.  Our focus was looking for strategies that work, in the absence of administrative and teacher support and/or awareness, to foster professional growth. Are…

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EduCon 2.2

EduCon 2.2

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Tomorrow I head off to EduCon 2.2 this will be my third trip. The first conference was something of an experiment with about 75+ attendees.  The conference grew out of a conversation and the conversation has not ended.  This year there will be 500 participants, reaching full capacity. It will be a lot more crowded, I hope it brings richer deeper conversations.  We shall see.  This time around I will also be facilitating a session, I was privileged to be…

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Do You Debate?

Do You Debate?

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I believe that critical thinking, analysis, and the ability to pull ideas together are essential to learning. However it has been my experience that in the current context of content based testing, time for complex analytical discussions, examination of multiple perspectives and allowing time for students to draw their own conclusions has been limited. I was wondering if its absence in the classroom had been replaced with time outside the classroom.  In my high school and college days debate clubs…

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Is being knowledgeable and being educated the same thing?

Is being knowledgeable and being educated the same thing?

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I have been doing a lot of reading in the past year, or so, on education, learning, schools and teaching.  I believe I am on the verge of a paradigm shift in my thinking.  The constructivist in me tells me this is part of the normal learning process that comes about from gathering new information and analyzing it from different points of view.  You see the conflicts with your old knowledge structures and you need to rebuild them to accommodate…

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A request for a little help from my PLN

A request for a little help from my PLN

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I have been involved in formal schooling as a student and educator for about 40 years, so you would think I know the purpose and goal of education.  But as I became connected to other educators and began investigating technology and the tools that support learning something began to change. I was consumed by learning. In fact I think I have learned more in the last few years of my informal (non-traditional) learning then I did in much of my…

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