working on it - Recently Updated Pages

best of 90 min

monk51295 — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:19:57 CST

wieman (video) on effective teaching practices, those that allow students to develop their own understanding, by “thinking hard about a subject and then monitoring and guiding that thinking.” "class" time 1) beginning questions/connections 2) play/game time 3) reflect/assess time 4) repeat The pedagogical principles he ultimately distilled include: employing an *expert individual tutor (avg of class with expert individual tutors - 98%) to motivate, pose questions to and interact with students; and probing “where students are starting from and connect with them,” finding ways to have students challenge, explain and critique each other, with feedback from the tutor. description of an expert individual tutor: 1) large amt of role goes into motivation 2) gives very little praise - and it's always about the process - not the person 3) looks carefully to understand in detail what kids don't know so they can be specific in feedback 4) almost never "tells" students anything - more asking - with strategically directed questions 5) most talking is students 6) let students make mistakes (redirections come from more questions so students can correct self) 7) it's not enough for students to solve a problem - big bang comes from reflecting/assessing on the result/self true assessment is an ongoing process with constant feedback via Michael Wesch this is hard to do for more than 2-3 students - so use technology (clickers - not automatically useful, optimize simulations) ie: effective use of clickers - look into this
role of expert tutor....
1. to motivate	look to worldmegan for motivation
2. to know of and make connections (to students current thinking/knowledge) and to know what their brain is capable of : is cognitive load taken into account for students? no - every time you get a new term - the brain has to work on that - (so limit new terms//new ideas) 7 limit experts don't feel it or appreciate it - just giving words give a load - sketch on the board would be easier to take in (dan roam) brain is full during class - short term memory is extremely limited (7 items and 4 ideas at one)	purposes of groups: 1) learn from explaining things 2) a lot of times misunderstandings come from minor details that others may catch but teacher needs to roam and clear up major misunderstandings
3. to increase student acitivity	for lecture - need prep research - having discussion before - come to lecture with questions - that kind of lecture is powerful - but it's not giving info - it's guiding thinking
4. to improve student reflection (best use of clickers: 1) questions are challenging 2) student to student discussion before answering 3) timely specific feedback (some from students - but beyond that - teacher listen to discussions - bring out points of confusion))	absolutely need to measure what students are learning (research shows that what we are using now isn't working well for that) so first work on assessment tools
wieman isn't the only one talking about this idea he terms "expert individual tutor," but his description of it really resonated with me. in disrupting class, clayton christensen has the most clear cut plan i've heard for making it happen through the use of web base instruction. because one-size doesn't fit all. and technology is allowing us the ability to tailor to suit each kid. that link is currently broken, try this one to another video if still broken, as well as this product description, and this wikipedia description of disruptive technology. clayton also writes - 80% of the typical teacher's time is now spent in monolithic acitivity - preparing to teach, actually teaching, and testing an entire class. far less than 20% is available to help students individually....instead of spending most of their time delivering one-size-fits-all lessons year after year, teachers can spend much more of their time traveling from student to student to help individuals with individual problems. i'm like half-way through disrupting class - can't consume it fast enough. eric mazur ontwilight of the lectureandap testing and courses dave eggers in 4 min on the difference one-on-one makes. the flow csikszentmihalyi and goleman have penned - sounds like what willingham touched on in ch 1 and what feynman calls the pleasure of finding things out. does that sound right - or am i missing something? flow comes from losing slfl-consciousness because you are so engaged? and now i must add (almost a year after i first posted this wiki) erica mcwilliams suggested 21st cent teaching skill - to be usefully ignorant.... knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Csikszentmihalyi (flow) and Goleman (emotional and social intelligence) flow: skills so perfectly match the demands of the moment that self-consciousness disappears
earl's stop message
excellent read on - why no lecture
great post by peter pappas - i would guess there's more
are we innovating - or the opposite - check out this video how do we have to behave to create real value - to create authentic value - umair
engage - from ben grey
i quit i think by john taylor gatto - standardized tests
tweaked from wesch - how to run class
voice of tv kids - kait & kyle present - without the embedded videos and lovely mc-stress
on flow
systematic review of summative assessments

findings that the brain is much more similar to muscles than previously thought - the brain needs: strenuous extended use
after 15 min lecture - 10% retention after 2 days practice - 90% retention

no matter how good the 90 min is - still not good enough: good to great idea- and so casual about hw
no matter what you do in classroom - brain doesn't have enough time to build the muscle - so need challenging, authentic hw geared to expert thinking.

expert student will have:
1) factual knowledge
2) oranizational structure
3) monitor own thoughts
so - needs more than just knowledge

pre ap lesson plans resource page

monk51295 — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:38:46 CST

look into this	findings.........
shtetl optimized
cameron found at edutopia.org	just get out of the way - whether we like it or not - kids have the means to learn and teach themselves
mathcasts	math 24/7, k-7
more examples of mathcasts	8th grade
bike inventor	24 yr old
transparent humans	devijver's new book
margaret wheatley	on change	whoa.. look at this.. meg wheatley in 2009, and now into her... this very article. it was already in me at one point. dang. (written jan 14, 2012)
metanoia, ryan bretag, no more lectures,
working nowhere and everywhere	no more need of institution
calc level dmi	nice zoom out of what integrals and derivatives are
group vs network	link in bud hunt's post
wesch at pdf	media as environment, the evolution of "whatever"
shirky on media	public vs audience math as media
ben grey's outline for his workshop on literacy
dan meyer on teaching from 1) carefully selected image 2) carefully selected question	how to assess all 10 videos
on tweeting	in school
eyeplore
how to set up resources, modules for others to use	this is a wiki for geometry
visual hygiene/edupunk
just heard Alan November speak about teachers giving the 10 most important things they want students to learn to their students and tell them to find information for better understanding. perfect - yay - look into alan november	my favs who owns the learning three skills to succeed
zpd zigostky - rather than sat's to judge - see what they can do without and then with help..
video on how to teach science with science tools mit talk - nobel prize winner	Wieman strategy t
video - another from mit	how to make teaching come alive - walter lewin
sugar stick	(how to video ) http://blip.tv/file/2290366
how the west got it's education
alg 2 curriculum
letter to class
art benjamin
for financial literacy	common craft in the making
bif	recent article explaining bif
more on bif	from creativity central -the art of collaborative innovation - unusual suspects

financial literacy

Anonymous — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:45:25 CDT

financial literacy at arizona - aplus common craft blog on financial literacy

financial literacy at arizona - aplus

common craft blog on financial literacy

transparent humans

Anonymous — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 02:46:59 CDT

this document belongs to steven devijver:

Transparent Humans

Handbook to 21th Century Untraceable Structures

21th century options and opportunities create enormously eclectic and diverse structures which I call untraceable structures. Such structures can be anything: society itself, industries, social groups, law enforcement networks, government local or global, educational systems, self-organized groups, anything.

The sheer vastness and complexity of these structures makes them untraceable. These structures are all interconnected, each one taking its input from the output of other structures. They are also deeply obscure: very few people know how they work, what keeps them ticking. These structures cannot even be outlined with certainty: where does one structure end and another begin? What happens to other structures when one of them fails? What happens when the success of one structure means the failure of another structure?

We are notoriously bad at choosing for which we have two solutions: social learning and social knowledge. Social learning creates conditions in which we can learn what we could otherwise never learn. Since each social occasion is unique so is what we can learn as participants. Social knowledge is the spreading of awareness between people as a consequence of special circumstances that are larger than one or a few people. Such special circumstances are called Kairos in systems theory.

What is special for me may be inconsequential for you so Kairos and the social knowledge that follows is not uniformly spread between people. Depending on your interests and personality certain events will move you and others won't.

Together social learning and social knowledge are caused by what happens to untraceable structures and at the same time affect these untraceable structures. Here's a simple example: in the Tour de France of 2007 the German national television decided to broadcast the three-week cycling event as long as no cases of doping were found. As soon as cheating cyclists were caught in between races the German television would stop airing the Tour de France races for the remainder of that years event. Sure enough cyclist were caught and the German television responded as promised.

In 2008 the French anti-doping agency changed their methods so that doping cases would only be announced after the Tour de France was over, denying the Germans the opportunity to disrupt television broadcasting again. These kinds of action and counter reaction cycles happen every day all around the world and we're often spectators. Social learning is an attitude where we become aware of such social interplay.

Both the French pride and prestige derived from hosting the world toughest cycling event as well as the German irritation with doping in sports are untraceable. The way these motivations and intentions are intertwined and affect structures, institutions and groups is untraceable. We might be able to predict or guess events before they happen, and we might be able to similarly estimate their consequences. It's not just that we can't know what what will happen upfront, we're often unable to even know or find out what has actually happened after the facts.

This is typical for untraceable structures: events that influence our daily lives in small and big ways seem unavoidable, seem to defy all intervention and are hard to inspect or research. The pervasive 20th century explanation is that institutions are required to organize large groups of people in order to get certain desired outcomes, and that these institutions have to work according to rules that cannot take personal circumstances into account. In other words: institutions know they affect people yet have to make simplified assumptions about the overly complex world in order to function.

But this view of the world is flawed: it's not so much that the world is overly complex - it often isn't - but that the world is unknowable, untraceable. Complexity can still be known - albeit requiring serious effort. But the world is inherently untraceable: impossible to inspect and understand, despite our best efforts.

The 21th century view on untraceable structures is that to know something about the world or to learn something about the world we have to immerse ourselves. We can't stay at the sidelines and work according to flawed assumptions. Instead, we have to go through the efforts of social learning and remain perceptive of social knowledge. We have to map untraceable structures to the best of our knowledge and constantly stay on the outlook for events that might impact our position in the world. The challenge is not dealing with complexity, it's staying relevant.

Although the ideas behind untraceable structures are deeply phylosophical they aren't very hard to understand. Many of the phenomena we've experienced in the first decade of the 21th century are perfectly in line with the laws of untraceable structures. Throughout this book you will be guided through the different elements and processes that are related to untraceable structures. But you won't learn much by simply reading this book. You will be faced by many challenges that can be broadly categorized as either social learning or social knowledge. In other words, you will have to immerse yourself in the 21th century - which is all around you - and adapt your world view from one of complexity to one of relevance.

Learning something new about the world requires us to learn something new about ourselves. That is why life is a highly positive experience. Even at the most devastating and overwhelmed moments we still have the opportunity to learn something new about ourselves. The 21th century will force all of us to move from individuals that interact with a world that is separate from the self to people who are fully integrated with the untraceable world.

Being integrated or not with the untraceable world is a matter of disposition: what are you aiming for and how are you reading other people? The main reason why so much wealth was created during the 20th century is because an individualistic attitude is much more expensive than a community attitude. A more expensive attitude consumes more resources and shares less, meaning that production and trade have to increase resulting in more wealth.

Yet while the 21th century will force us to become less individualistic it won't be for the obvious reasons. We won't become less individualistic because of resource depletion, food and water shortages, overpopulation and so on. Instead, we will become less individualistic due to our own internal conflicts. The excessive individualism we read in the behavior of others - not just in consumption but in all kinds of attitudes - encourages and even forces us to be equally individualistic, leading us so far as to question our own sense of identity.

Our reading of other people and our relationships with other people create what I call an emotional identity: an identity that is largely determined by how we feel we fit in the world, and by what other people are doing. In a very individualistic world like ours our emotional identities will be very individualistic as well. In fact, it will overshoot, creating such a individualistic identity that we can no longer identify with ourselves, let alone with others. This emotional identity is created regardless of who we would like ourselves to be. Through our perceptions our emotional identity is forced upon us.

As we doubt our own identity more and more as well as our relationships with others and with society at large we start building a second identity: a traced identity. This identity is constructed through reading what other people are doing, but reading their behaviors as expressions. Based on those expressions we try to trace who these people are and ultimately who we are. We've all been building this traced identity for a long time now and in this 21th century our traced identities are finally starting to get some significance.

Our traced identity is the product of a lot of searching, a lot of questioning, and a lot of observing. This traced identity - once it becomes somewhat developed - gives us the important power to fundamentally ask questions about our emotional identity and the emotional identity of others and of society. It also allows us to connect with people that are also working on their own traced identity, and allows us to compare notes.

Such a world where people have two identities and where traced identities are starting to matter is fundamentally different from a world governed by emotional identities. A traced identity is much more malleable that an emotional identity which also makes it more ephemeral. A traced identity depends much more on memory, remembering and organizing knowledge. It requires significant training before an adult brain can form a traced identity. But most importantly, our traced identities significantly change the way we look at the world, and ultimately change the world. A traced identity is a searching, inspecting, demanding identity. It's much more open to learning and organizing knowledge, but it will also be very demanding.

People with a developed traced identity continue to have an emotional identity and they will have to learn to make the two work together. Personally I'm trying to do this by learning how emotions work in our brains and how they affect our behavior. I often fail spectacularly at striking a balance between my emotional and traced identities, usually when my emotional identity gets the upper hand.

Yet I feel that my traced identity is what has kept me sane over the years. Now that the 21th century is well on its way and traced identities are starting to take over the world I'm glad I can work on my traced identity with more vigor and help spread the idea and how it relates to untraceable structures.

Emotional identities are pretty useless for living in an untraceable world. They depend completely on what others are doing and how we want ourselves to be seen by others. Creating a traced identity for many people is a pretty big challenge, most people are even unaware that they can have a traced identity. Emotional identities very often means that we "don't get it". Because emotional identities are tuned to the people we spend time with the most, understanding or learning about people or social phenomena we're not involved with becomes very challenging. Traced identities are much better at understanding unfamiliar phenomena provided that we challenge ourselves to get the best possible knowledge.

Emotional identities often fight against phenomena or people that are conceived at a thread. Just the fact of having a somewhat developed traced identity will in many circumstances allow us to react much more productively to unknown events. Yet traced identities can have their downsides as well. Traced identities are based on assumptions about how the untraceable world is fundamentally structured. The purpose of a traced identity is to bring personal structure in untraceable structures, but to be able to do such a thing we need to make some assumptions on how we think that structure looks like.

Whenever we are confronted with evidence that our assumptions have been wrong we need to go through the expensive effort of re-evaluating and rebuilding our traced identity, or risk loosing our traced identity altogether. This reassessment is likely to happen regularly early on when we form our traced identities. These are exercises we have to go through to increase the effectiveness of our traced identity. The ultimate goal of a traced identity is to navigate a world that is inherently unnavigable by integrating ourselves into that world to ever large extends. The closer our traced identity matches the underlying structure of untraceable structures the better we'll be able to navigate.

Traced identities is what is guaranteed to make us attracted to communities and less attracted to individualism. Obviously, spending enormous effort in creating a second identity is a very individualistic endeavor. However, the point is to integrate ourselves and our behaviors with structures that are created by many. The most important difference between traced identities and emotional identities is in how they affect our behaviors: emotional identities will copy behavior while traced identities will integrate behaviors.

Copying behavior gives us an emotional reward by attributing value and importance to what others are doing. Integrating behavior gives us structural reward by confirming the value of social learning and social knowledge. Both identities are based on what other people are doing, the difference is in how they affect our behavior and thinking. Both identities are formed through our perception of the world so any sensory input is likely to affect both of our identities at the same time.

An attitude of copying attributes value to behaving like others are behaving, a fundamental desire in all social species. An attitude of integration attributes value to finding one's own place in the world, a fundamental desire of our species. Key to integrating yourself is describing the world as you experience it. By publishing accounts of your experiences you give others the chance to integrate you and your experiences in their own personal structures.

In order to make sense of the big domain of untraceable structures, and in order to get you to work on your traced identity this book has to do more than introduce. You will need to get down to business and the remainder of this book is designed to do just that. Fundamental to operating a traced identity is an understanding of untraceable structures. You will also need to get experienced in both social learning and social knowledge. You will have to reassess your own personal history and integrate that in your own traced identity.

You will need to look at the world around you - your studies or job, your role in society, your likes and dislikes, your ambitions and desired outcomes, your integration and place in the world, the institutions around you, how institutions affect people around the world, and so on - and integrate all those things in your traced identity.

Next you will need to explore the untraceable structures. You will need to find out that integrating yourself with the world is very different from copying from others. Copying is fundamentally a one-way modification: you copy from other people which doesn't cause a modification for them. Integration is fundamentally a two-way modification: you take on a new structure and by doing so you modify that structure. That modification might affect other people which in their turn integrate that modification and might modify the structure and so on.

Finally, you will need to practice both social learning and social knowledge. The abundance of information - a relatively new condition - means that new structures have been created that didn't exist before. Social learning allows us to learn something about these new structures that we weren't aware of before. Social knowledge is the valuable bits that are hidden in abundant information. Social knowledge is discovered by detecting what untraceable structures are doing, how they are changing and how they are affected by seemingly undetectable forces.

The main goal of this book is to create augmented identities: identities that are formed by our relationships with untraceable structures. Relationships always happen in a medium. Media might be proximity, disposition, attitude, challenge, goals, destinations, transport, location, interests, search, emotions, and so on. Media make relationships possible yet media have to be detectable to exist. As an example, I believe an important revolution will happen when people can cheaply and reliably visualize their own brain activity. The output of what our brains are doing can become the input for how we behave.

Media has to be perceived in order to exist. What we perceive influences our identities because our identities are the basis of our perception of reality. Our identities allow us to be observers and our identities have to change in order to know observed changes or novelties in our realities. An important part of that reality is what we call information. Information is a mysterious thing. It's difficult to argue that a spreadsheet file is information and our perception of the structure of the universe is not information. Information is strange because once something is characterized as information everything in the world automatically becomes information.

Information is abstract bits of data about existence. In the age of computing everything is information because we realize that what we perceive through our senses is actually abstract information about the world. What we perceive are not the things themselves, they're sensory input about those things. That sensory input is abstract: it's related to things that exist but only describe those things.

Hence, information is everything that we perceive. Our identities provide a context in which to evaluate that information. Information becomes valuable when we can relate what we already know to what we perceive. This discovery of patterns enhances our understanding of the world and there's nothing we care more about that about that world.

Life - being alive - is equal to the ability to process information. Hence, the information that we process is our life. Traced identities provide an alternative way for processing information. Our emotional identity is what makes us human. Our traced identity is what makes us 21th century humans.

Existence is equal to being processed as information. To the best of our understanding the first life in the universe is 4 billion years old in the form of single-cell organisms. The universe before the rise of life did not exist. The history of the universe prior to the rise of life came into existence once humans started studying that history. It's a counter-intuitive description but it's consistent with the laws of life and existence.

Ever since philosophers and scientists started to studying the universe they've contemplated about structures and phenomena before they were actually observed. It's a crucial aspect of identity: the ability to make predictions about both life and existence within the identity framework of the person that makes the observation.

Media is the shared acknowledgement of the architecture of information. This makes media a relative concept since it depends on the acknowledgement of living beings. A visually impaired person will not have the same architecture of photographs as a visually fluent person. This acknowledgement requires living beings to communicate about the architecture of information. Living beings do this through behavior. Behavior is the way in which the architecture of knowledge is acknowledged. All living being have the capacity to perceive the behavior of other living beings. This does not have to be conscious behavior, and living beings do not have to be aware of the existence of other living beings. It's the ability to perceive behavior that matters.

Remember that existence is a consequence of being processed as information. Hence, by perceiving behavior the existence of the thing is taken care of. Plants for example don't know from each other that they exist. But information processing doesn't require a theory of mind, in fact it doesn't require a mind at all. Plants - even the most simple ones - process information in all kinds of ways. First of all, they process sunlight. Photons are information about the sun and by extension about the universe. Sure, photons are physically real things, but until they are being processed as information they don't exist.

Plants have complicated relationships with bacteria. Bacteria process information, but plants also process information about bacteria. Bacteria have been discovered that help plants to grow on marginal land [1]. These bacteria create enzymes and hormones that help the host plant to grow. Plants don't "know" about bacteria, enzymes or hormones but they do respond to them and this response is a proof of information processing. Sure, the underlying processes are chemical and biological but fact is that these plants and these bacteria fit together. The output of one is a suitable input for the other. That is, the output of one affects the other.

Information is everything that is perceived, or more specifically, information is everything that can be perceived. Plants can perceive the produce of bacteria, hence they can perceive information that is provided by the bacteria. Information processing is mindless, meaning that taking output as input is sufficient to do information processing.

Structure:

- Introduction

- Identities

- Untraceable Structures

- Information Theory

- Social Learning

- Social Knowledge

- Wealth

- Value and Meaning

- Money

- Tracing A New Identity

- Augmented Identity

This structure sucks, I need to find a message for this book. What's the message?

The message is: agency and structure are perceived as one. How does that happen?

Because structures are untraceable it's uncertain what is cause and what is effect. Agency is the idea that all actions have a cause and that this cause is the agent. Structure is the idea that immobile objects need external forces to be applied in order to cause effects.

The idea of untraceable structures is that effects can no longer be linked to causes with certainty. Without certainty there are no causes because a cause needs an effect.

[1]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126104349.htm

=======

Long before the advent of computers our ancestors have realized that the universe is computable. Computers make computation easier, more reliable, faster and cheaper. However, computers introduce new problems, most importantly the problem of consistency. A human computer can both know the parameters to compute, the algorithms to use, and the validity of both input and output. Computers are very poor at choosing algorithms and can say very little about the validity of output.

Hence, computers cannot make any meaningful claims about the consistency of a computation. For example, it cannot determine if the selected algorithm is the correct one, or if the input data correctly describes elements in the real world. Computers however are part of the universe,

[The fallacy is that data needs to adapt to our needs at this moment. That's a very individualistic view. The real goal is to mix ourselves with the data - to stop seeing ourselves as distinct from the data - so that both the data and we adapt.]

manifesto public to ed

Anonymous — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 02:32:36 CDT

working on it in etherpad

what i had up to april when services stopped:

all with steven:

1 problem......UNCERTAINTY

- uncertainty without a commitment in the classroom to build a public causes selfish acts (from both teacher and student): when there is no public, no medium, and no commitment towards each other's performance in the classroom everybody is on their own when faced with a challenge.

uncertainty causes community

commitment reduces uncertainty

2 solution.....PUBLIC/COMMUNITY

- you learn when you help others:

help others and yourself, build your media through building your public.

learning is social - people and story telling at the core

want students to learn more?

1) model learning through pln's (with or w/o tech)

richardson: how to network a) safely b) ethically c) efficiently

2) invite them places w/rich questions

3) get out of the way

4) repeat till 1,2,3 is flow

http://monkblogs.blogspot.com/2010/02/standard-process.html

personalization - through pln's - student centric as kids are creating their own public - engaged in meaning-making and writing about self-selected topics that are relevant and interesting to them - wieman's expert individual tutor - web 3.0 tailoring

cameron - knows intuitively how to create value, add his default intention is to share it with others - most of the time for free. That why he has a public

do we insist that the class is one public?

or do we just insist that each one in the class finds/creates their own public (like in real life)

that would allow for more of a passion driven pursuit.

ie: some who need it - may be a part of a community of 2 (them and expert individual tutor), others may end up with a community of hundreds

thinking of the adult as the only teacher is artificially turning abundance into scarcity

and it's minimizing our available resources exponentially

we can ask interesting question, like: how do you feel about your friend not being so good about math?

a fixed group of people that constantly interact with each other and learn from each other

the leader also learns, but in different domains

if teaching is helping others then everybody is at the same time student and teacher

the adult in the room is also student and teacher, and is there to supervise and direct, but no to control

in order to maintain community/change - need to work thru 3 human universals

1) We're all humans and we all want to be treated as humans all of the time.

2) We all make mistakes. When those mistakes are rectified gracefully remarkable stories

are being created.

3) We all have our own cultures and values that don't always match but we all try to do good.

w/in plns - discover design do

per alan november - who owns the learner....

and - 2 things we're short on: time and money

so give them back time in class and quit spending so much on gimicks to help teach

3 sustainability.....SUCCESS

- success is defined by how everybody is doing

(kids ask each other - how can i do better)

status is not from teacher but from other kids in class

community reduces uncertainty

together we are more

new media changes how we know ourselves

if we don't learn socially there's a host of things we'll never learn

To learn something new about the world we first have to learn something new about ourselves.

the quality of the school should depend on the innovation of of the kids

"focus on the performance of the public instead of on the performance of self"

as long as others aren't getting it you know that your learning isn't complete yet

if people can't accept this they can also not accept that you can't be right by yourself

they start from a selfish mindset and get to this logical conclusion

if we define school success by the performance of their publics that students will know that they can't perform well against 'the nation' through a selfish mentality

whatever their community - the goal is to learn something that they will then create a platform to share it with others - a larger public

so - the new assessment - graded on what your public has learned

kids should understand that how well they do directly depends on how well others are doing

in my days there were very smart kids in the class, and then the rest of the class, there was just a divide and it didn't matter to or for the smart kids how badly the other kids were doing

a bad school is a school with such a divide

and state-wide and national genius contests make this problem worse.

any focus on the performance of self is a loss

the guideline should be: how is everybody doing?

smart kids in class get status from their teachers

that status is probably intimidating for other kids, making his status unreachable for them

so they just let the smart kid doing, increasing his status

that could be replaced with kids awarding each other, not the teacher

assess through portfolios/google-ability/your public's growth

http://monkblogs.blogspot.com/2009/07/tests-drive-usare-we-driving-kids-to.html

uncertainty - connections - commitment - public - media - ......repeat

Leaders are those who most publicly learn and bring others with them along the way. - Ben Grey

it's surprising how closely leadership and media are related

1/ the class room is the public

2/ everybody is both teacher is student

3/ learning is social

4/ focus on the performance of self is a waste

5/ success is defined by how everybody is doing

6/ status is distributed by everybody, the adult should not get the upper hand in status distribution

7/ learning is a group effort, only if the group has learned is learning complete

8/ describing the adult in the room as teacher is troublesome

9/ in good schools everybody is doing well

sounds like a manifesto

the current problem of education is two-fold:

1/ under-estimate the true costs

2/ over-estimate the true value

how do we have to behave to create real value - to create authentic value

the value is in how much students learn,

if we think they learn close to 100%, but they actually learn only 10% ...

so umai haque says: "the world is a function of what we do"

ok- so if we assume that the world is indeed a function of a what we do

basically this is emergence

then, if professionals in education use assumptions that are antagonal to the true capabilities of our brains and psychology then it's going to be very hard to create any value and we will automatically underestimate the costs because we'll be thinking we're doing ok.

so anybody who believes is performing ok but in reality is not is under-estimating the true costs of his or her actions

from comments of the lament post

am Says:

Comment #13 June 19th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

school should teach people to communicate effectively. Initially this implies imprecise communication like English and Spanish, reading and writing.

But later as we try to describe things more fully we may employ the language of math. For example, lets take a table and see how we can draw it, we can measure it and precisely define its attributes. In fact we can do so so precisely that we can end up telling how heavy it will be, how much room it will take, and how much it will cost.

As school advances and the need to describe things increases we can use math to describe chemical and biological proceses, physical processes, and sociological processes.

In fact, as people advance in their education they tend to need math to precisely describe what happened, their theories of what will happen, etc..

In this manner, students can enjoy the benefits of math in all fields as they advance in its study.

Steven: the 1-minute and 5-minute versions are there to grab attention and lay out the intended outcomes

Steven: the 15-minute version can give more background

Steven: and the 1-hour version can talk about how we got here, our journey so to speak

Steven: people love to hear other people tell stories, especially from people they can relate to

Steven: by putting the story in the longer version - and the outline in the shorter versions - you direct people to the longer version

1 problem......UNCERTAINTY

- uncertainty without a commitment in the classroom to build a public causes selfish acts: when there is no public, no medium, and no commitment towards each other's performance in the classroom everybody is on their own when faced with a challenge.

uncertainty causes community

commitment reduces uncertainty

2 solution.....PUBLIC/COMMUNITY

- you learn when you help others:

help others and yourself, build your media through building your public.

learning is social - people and story telling at the core

want students to learn more?
a standard (fixed)process