Changing Education Paradigms

Recently I added a video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about changing education. Today, David Hopkins wote a blog post about the animation that has been done to illustrate the talk. It's pretty amazing. I wonder how long it took?

It's A Book - By Lane Smith

I love this - good to be reminded of the simpler things!

21st Century Literacy

As an ex-English teacher (that should read, ex-teacher of English) my concept of literacy has, until recently, always been fairly conventional. I was interested to read a tweet about 21st Century Literacy, and the new definitions adopted by the American National Council of the Teachers of English.

Their new definition of literacy requires students to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

Their rationale for this makes for interesting and thought-provoking reading, and it's not very long! I wonder how much of this is considered in the New Zealand National Literacy and Numeracy assessments, currently being rolled out with much fanfare at polytechs around the country?

The article reminds me that definitions of literacy amongst our students are probably rather old fashioned. As a result, we run the risk of assuming that, because they meet outdated definitions of literacy, our students are able to cope with the much more challenging literacies of the 21st century.

Stephen Heppel's keynote from Ulearn 2010

I was not one of the fortunates who managed to get to Ulearn this year, and I have to admit to more than a twinge of jealousy when I hear Heppel describe the conference as one of the best in the world. Anyway, in this keynote he talks about technology, learning spaces, and the opportunities for mobile learning in the classroom.

Why online learning needs to get social

This article post talks about the role of social networks in online learning, and contains further links to some pretty amazing online learning courses. Seemed pretty relevant to FOC2010!

Why we should all be playing games

I'm really interested in the value of gaming principles in education. This short presentation by Stephen Knightly looks at a selection of different games and the skills they teach. (This blog entry is almost short enough to be a Tweet! Is a blog crossed with a Tweet a bleet?)