Article Archive
I'm getting ready this week for MassCUE, the annual Massachusetts gather of the EdTech community. It's held at Gillette Stadium, which is a quirky and awesome place to go for a conference. The Kraft family is very generous in sharing the space, and John Kraft last year gave the best impromptu "keynote" of the conference […]
I spent two days last week at the Open Education conference in Park City. It’s a community and a movement that has evolved around developing and distributing educational content. It’s right there, in the title, these are folks with an interest in “resources.” For a long time, the group has been primarily interested in making […]
If you wanted an introduction to what I care about, where I've come from, what I believe in, and what I'm hoping to do next, here's a video introduction to my work. This was produced by the media production geniuses at the Digital Media and Learning Hub at U.C. Irvine when I was a Digital […]
I'm in the process of writing a paper based on some findings about collaboration in wikis, from a large scale content analysis of 400+ wikis drawn from nearly 200,000 wikis. The core findings are that student collaboration only happens in about 11% of U.S., K-12 wikis, and most collaboration is simply posting individually created content […]
Today I have a video op-ed up on the Harvard Graduate School of Education website, where I address some of my concerns about the role of education technology in expanding educational inequalities. Here's the video, and I'll expand on my concerns below: Basically, I think there are two visions for free and Open educational resources […]
Tom Daccord, my partner at EdTechTeacher, and I recently made a series of professional development videos with McGraw Hill for their new Social Studies program Networks. I'll post them here over time, and the whole collection can be found at http://vimeo.com/edtechteacher/videos/sort:newest. One of the really fun parts for me was that the producer of the […]
We're unlikely to have much luck improving student learning outcomes with technology if we don't measure the impact of our technology investments and interventions. In the last year or so, I've been thinking a lot about how I can be of service to school leaders who are trying to figure out how technology should fit […]
Following up on my recent post about Bud Hunt, his research, and assessment, I thought I'd share this video from our series with McGraw Hill about Alternative Assessments Using Technology in the history classroom. The full video series is here: http://vimeo.com/edtechteacher/videos/sort:newest. Technology in Social Studies Classrooms: Alternative Assessments Using Technology from EdTechTeacher on […]
I have a been working recently with several schools and organizations in thinking about the Flipped Classroom (we even have a summer workshop coming up at Harvard this summer). I'll probably write more about Flipped in a future post, but the idea is that you reorganize instructional time so that the most cognitively demanding tasks […]
Audry Watters at Hack Education has a write up of some of my thoughts on inequality, and it stimulated a lively conversation, mostly hostile to my views. Having Jim Groom respond to my work was quite a treat, even if he calls my arguments silly. And someone even refers to my work is evil--I'm just […]
I'm getting ready for talk at the Berkman Center on Jan. 17, and I've been continuing to think a lot about issues of equality and education technology. I have one observation that I'll be trotting out in that talk, along with a corresponding suggestion. There are lots of different kinds of inequality that teachers encounter […]
I got a lovely note this week from a teacher in Silicon Valley. In it, she remarks on how in her current high-performing, wealthy districts, students are taking the lead in using OER tools to push forwards their education. I'm reposting the note with her permission, though I've obscured her name and the districts that […]
I'm taking my last class at HGSE, a 3-day Jan Term seminar, with three folks who have been in the education reform business for a long time, Bob Shwartz, Mike Smith, and Michael Barber (that's Sir Michael Barber to you, buddy!) It's called Seminar on Education Policy: Effective Education Systems, but it probably could be called: […]
For the first 10 or so years of my career, I was pretty much exclusively interested in pedagogy, instruction, learning, and the classroom level education. The instructional core is where the rubber meets the road, where teachers and students get to together and try to rewire each others dendrites and neurons in pro-social ways that […]
I gave an hour long talk today at the Berkman Center (link to event here, livestream, etc. will be up eventually), which mostly focused on how technology innovations interact with our extremely inequitable education systems. I made a passing comment that in one school I visited in rural South Georgia, a common pejorative among kids was "that's […]