This is Social Innovation Week in Vancouver, with many events planned to stimulate thinking and collaborating about … social innovations (Find out more here). I have an innovative idea to share with SIW in mind, one I perceive as arising with starker irony given the province-wide teachers’ strikes that have also arisen this week. To […]
Daydreaming classed as new disorder – April Fools! (not)
What do Einstein, Nobel prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock and Sir Isaac Newton have in common, besides being extraordinary scientists? They were diligent daydreamers who intentionally dropped into a state of reverie to enhance their thinking and conceptualizing. And were they alive today, and attending a conventional school, they might be diagnosed with a newly-minted disorder: […]
Personalized Learning aligned with Business and Healthcare
For those of us working to stoke Personalized Learning in education, we can take heart that the personalization movement is alive and well and growing in two other fundamental segments of society: Business and Healthcare. In business, the personalization movement has arisen in almost stealth fashion to surround us. Look about and you’ll see evidence […]
UVIC Sci-Faculty Testing Procedures a Big FAIL
This blog is intended to be blunt and to the point. My hope is that it will help to provoke change. Below is a letter I wrote last week to University of Victoria President Jamie Cassels. It follows an exchange I had with the UVIC Dean of Science Dr. Robert Lipson in the past 9 […]
Help Make 2014 a ‘Year of Learning Dangerously’ – and how
Memo from the “Creating Our Best Future” Dept.: As a learning innovator I see widely divergent gestures toward the nurturing of learning across education, gestures that have significant implications throughout society. And in scanning the education landscape my emotions in the past year swung from arm-pumping enthusiasm to head-shaking discouragement. With this in mind and […]
Snakes on a Brain & other Neurological Evolutions to ponder!
This past week brought news from the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that specialized nerve cells in the brains of macaque monkeys respond to images of snakes. The lead researcher, Dr. Lynne Isbell of UC-Davis, surmised that natural selection has favoured primates that strongly respond to snake imagery. This makes good sense […]
School’s Out! Bring on the school slide(s)
Well, it’s a wrap on another school year as of a few days ago. And with the end of school about a gazillion kids are suddenly ratting around poking their noses in all kinds of places and doing all kinds of nefarious activities. I’m being facetious but the start of summer holidays also brings alarms […]
“Eight Ways of Intelligence” speech deepens our understanding
The subject of human intelligence has become overtaken by too-many wooly headed and cloistered researchers who have reduced it to a series of reproducible tests in a narrow range of competencies. By contrast, I highly commend Annie Murphy Paul‘s recent speech, Eight Ways of Looking at Intelligence (found here) in which she concisely, and appropriately serves […]
Shortage of Male Teachers? Here’s another reason …
CBC’s ‘The Current‘ (radio) show aired a feature today focusing on the reasons why there are shortages of male teachers in (Ontario) schools and why enrolment by males in teacher training faculties is declining. The panel interviewed by the show’s host talked about some potential for males to be profiled and suspected of pedophilia as […]
(Authentically) “Flipping” the Classroom
It’s all the rage: Teachers from coast to coast are “flipping classrooms“. To wit, they are directing student to complete core learning via online resources (e.g. videos) at home or outside of class time. What’s happening during class time? That’s for reviewing assignments and homework before teeing up the next “flipped” assignment. According to proponents, […]
Michael’s book,