Swimming in the Complex

Every now and then, you are reading a book or article, and a phrase jumps out and grabs you.  It happened last night on page 198 of David Weinberger‘s delightful Everything is Miscellaneous. “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple.  It is to swim in the complex.” Wow! David’s book is… Read more Swimming in the Complex

No Teacher Left Behind

Darren Draper had an interesting and thought provoking post Monday, which is no surprise from Darren.  In “No Teacher Left Behind?,” Darren began by noting that he believed the positive message David Truss had posted in “Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?“, but then asked if: In spending so much time to create (shallow?)… Read more No Teacher Left Behind

Bridging the Education Chasm

I blogged yesterday about the role we early adopters need to play in bringing social media to the masses. Got some very thoughtful comments back from a lot of folks. In particular, Colin Warren of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, made a follow-on post at his blog, in which he referenced Geoffrey Moore’s book Cross… Read more Bridging the Education Chasm

Metaphors for Web 2.0

Michele Martin had a wonderful post today that mirrored some reflections of my own. In “If You Behave Like a Disease, People Develop an Immune System“, she talks about how the “viral” model we use for thinking about spreading information on the web may not be the best way of thinking about how to reproduce… Read more Metaphors for Web 2.0

Taking a Different Tack

Friday afternoon, I tweeted that I was checking out a very good list of top K12 Edublogs and asked on Twitter if anyone knew of a comparable list of higher education edublogs. I also noted that I liked the Education Alltop because it mixed higher ed with K-12. Jon Becker tweeted back with a good… Read more Taking a Different Tack

Expert versus Paradigm Learning

Gary Stager is a noted expert in education, and I find value in his constructionist approach to online education. However, he made some comments in Will Richardson’s blog posting “Redefining Teachers as Experts” that caused at a minimum raised eyebrows in this old educator! Will was commenting on sections of Axel Bruns’ new book Blogs,… Read more Expert versus Paradigm Learning

Is the Passion Evident?

Chris Lott posted an exceptional blog post in Ruminate on March 19th: Things I Can’t Teach. It is a short insightful posting so please read the whole thing. As Lott notes, learning is at its heart all about change. It involves being challenged, surprised, overwhelmed, taking the wrong steps, being fearful at times, but holding… Read more Is the Passion Evident?