ED: Learning. To Make a Difference

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

This piece, The Inverse Power of Praise, appeared in New York magazine a little while back.

Great Student Task Manager

Funkware’s Task List is a task manager made specifically for students. It tracks assignment due dates, progress, grades, GPA and even has a tabbed note editor and allows the user to attach multiple files to tasks. Best suited to high school and university students. For Mac only.

Much Ado About Nothing

Have a look at this video:

Shift happens. Yes, that’s true, but that’s not a new idea. Heraclitus told us we could never step in the same river twice. The mistake modern education tends towards is to take these sorts of shifts as unprecedented or revolutionary and calling for unprecedented or revolutionary change in education. When I was at Columbia University last February, I listened to Dr. G.C. Spivak, a woman of astonishing intellectual power, say that there are no revolutions, or ruptures in her words, just repetitions. Globalization, she says, for example, is merely another repetition of eternal attempts to take in the world under a single theory.

But not only do we misunderstand the nature of change, we also misunderstand the rate of change. There has always been more to know than could be known; remember Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The modern world has succeeded in writing down a great deal more than has ever been written down before, but not in understanding humanity any better than, say, Shakespeare did. It’s much ado about nothing, you might say.

What this means for education is that its job will always remain as it ever was: to cultivate humanity, to try to answer Aldous Huxley’s excellent questions: Who are we? Where are we going? How will we get there?

Computers Like Bicycles

At Island Pacific School we have two computer labs with 28 computers for some 55 students. But I have yet to see any of our students take real advantage of the technology. To them, the internet is a glorified encyclopaedia and a word processor just a fancy typewriter. Our students work faster, but hardly any smarter than I did 35 years ago when I was in middle school using pencil, paper and an Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Picasso said computers are useless because they only give answers. Allan Kay, the inventor of the graphical user interface, says that he wouldn’t let anyone withing 15 yards of a computer unless he knew it was like a biciycle to them. He asks: Does a computer in the school function as a bicycle for the mind, amplifying the student’s own capabilities and new knowledge, or is it more like a car with pre-packaged formulas that allow the student to become soft in the head while appearing to really go places?

After reading Kay’s thoughts on computers in classrooms, and listening to Steve Jobs’ comments that inspired Kay, I began to wonder whether we should throw out our computers altogether–at least for a term–and spend more time on teaching our students to think first about where they’re going, and only then to jump on the computer/bicycle to get there faster and more efficiently.

(A parenthetical remark: Part of the computer problem may come from the commodification of edcuation. That is, if students see their work as a medium of exchange, as essays for grades, then they are making marvellously good use of computers. The faster they work, the faster they can bring their papers to market.)

Steve Jobs video:

Sir Ken Robinson Talks Creativity at TEDTalks

From the TED website: Sir Ken Robinson is the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. In this talk, he makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

These days it’s rare to see a speaker deliver a pitch without Powerpoint; rarer still to see one speak on education without resorting to platitudes.