Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

In a recent blog post, Jerrid Kruse summarizes some of the tension between technology as a tool to perpetuate traditional practice vs. technology as a lever for new ways forward. New ways forward require philosophical transformation in the hearts and minds of the teacher and the learner. A shiny tool alone won’t suffice.

Kruse has also posted his paper that expands on this topic.

I’m sharing this particular post with some of our Sales team as a baby step toward understanding some of the fundamental underlying challenges of teaching with technology.

I’ll probably regret this, but I’ll be presenting at the next Ignite Salt Lake, revisiting the topic of my WCET pecha kucha pres from last year, which connects teaching and instructional design to, yes, skateboarding (more…)

I’m working on a concept map assessment for my web development students as a means of evidencing an understanding of the properties and relationships of contemporary web languages.

Here’s the first draft of the criterion map (more…)

Knewton has put together a tidy little infographic on Blended Learning (K12) that’s worth examining–even if you’re in higher ed (more…)

I facilitated an ITC webinar today on increasing student retention in higher education courses, and though the framing was a little fuzzy, the presenter provided some interesting ideas, which I’ve reflected on, diverged from, and finally consolidated down to three points (more…)

Or, Blogs, “Blogs,” and Discussion Boards*

I subscribe to TechTrends as part of my AECT membership. It has a great subtitle (Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning) and it is peer reviewed, though I don’t know if it’s considered a journal or a magazine (I lean towards “magazine”). Sometimes there are some good articles, sometimes there are bad ones. One particular article in the September/October 2010 issue caught my attention: “Using Blogs to Identify Misconceptions in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Course”. Not exactly a home run of a title, but I’m interested in examples of student blogging in action, so I read on (more…)

Nixty.com is billed as “a truly disruptive educational platform”, a free, public LMS aimed at delivering both traditional and informal, open educational experiences. Seth Gurell and I reviewed Nixty pretty thoroughly this week, then co-wrote this review. Michael Feldstein, Alan Levine, and others[1],[2],[3] have already provided some insights and serious commentary on the idea of Nixty and its claims. Our review neglects that side of the discussion and focuses on the basic features, usability, and feasibility of the system from a designer and a user perspective (more…)

University of Wisconsin – Extension hosts what I think is a pretty thorough introduction to evaluation logic models, a topic that grabbed my attention when first encountered in the Fitzpatrick, Sanders, and Worthen textbook “Program Evaluation”. In addition to resources and examples, the UWEX site includes a complete lesson module on logic models. Unfortunately the materials are not open licensed.

I’ve written very briefly and meekly shared with a few close colleagues my interest in the role of solitude in learning–especially in context of modern networked communication media–i.e. the web. Recently I’ve begun to consider how metacognitive strategies figure into a view of the learner as a necessarily solitary figure and as a (even occasional) member of a learning community). I read an article this week past weekend that sparked some ideas (more…)

I traveled to Denver this week for WCET 2009, and though I was sunk with a cold on the second day, so far I’ve enjoyed participating in the conference, and, as always, have found the Twitter backchannel (#wcet09) a great way to connect with more ideas, and more people (more…)