opening up

Posts Tagged ‘learning’

the blinders of convergent problem solving

In 19801 Mindstorms, Seymour Papert wrote:

I have seen [a resistance to "debugging"] in many children’s first sessions in a LOGO environment. The child plans to make the Turtle draw a certain figure, such as a house or stick man. A program is quickly written and tried. It doesn’t work. Instead of being debugged, it is [...]

erring on the side of duplicity

When most teachers walk into a classroom, they’ve already put in hours of work preparing for the next forty minutes. What they say, what they do, what materials are made available, how they organize students—to some extent, all the teacher’s moves have been orchestrated ahead of time. For many teachers, careful orchestration is [...]

idea: web-enabled foreign language instruction

Update (03.12.08): Looks like this market is doing just fine; MyHappyPlanet is actually solving the problem.
So, a recent story in the New York Times brought to mind an old idea of mine seeded by a friend’s description of a matchup service in Germany dedicated to setting up meetings between English-speakers seeking to learn German [...]

comment on: “A Theory of Society”

A comment of mine on a fantastic post over at The Wry Observer:

I’m pretty excited about these ideas. It is worth noting at least two ways in which past theories have implicitly accommodated learning:
-The characterization of comparative advantage (in all domains, not just goods and services) as a consequence of differences in information
-The unstated conflation [...]

data visualization as pedagogy

There is a misperception of science/math as “the way” to teach rational, critical thinking. Unfortunately, that puts the cart before the horse: math and science can provide fantastic contexts for rigorous, critical thinking. There’s no doubt that a strong education in the hard sciences can be a straightforward contribution to a student’s ability [...]