Arising as regular as the whine of summer mosquitos are now annualized calls by school administrators and educators warning parents of the “summer slide“. The “summer slide” isn’t a fixture in the local playground but an imaginary bogey man that, allegedly, causes students to forget what they learned the previous spring in school. Believers in […]
‘Prosperous life’ research highlights folly of conventional options
Thanks to info pouring in from the frontiers of neuroscience, psychology and sociology, I’m increasingly aware of the opportunities we have – as parents, educators and advisors – to positively influence the directions of learning and wellness, and particularly among children and youth. To this end, new knowledge we have makes clearer the choices we […]
Look Beyond Education ‘Miracles’ and You’ll See Natural Learning Reflected. SelfDesign, too.
A common subject in this year’s back-to-school stories, as it has been for the past few years, is the ‘Finnish Miracle’. That is, the Finnish education system, made over by government in the 1970s and now considered a startling success, worldwide. To most reviewers, ‘success’ is attributed to the Finnish education system because of the […]
RE – “Urban Legend” that Self-Directed Learning is Effective
Yikes, I just caught up to a paper published last year in Educational Psychologist, “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” (link here). In this paper the authors focus on three themes they mark out as “urban legends”: i, that there exists a new generation of “digital natives”, ii, that learners have specific […]
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 […]
“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 […]
Personalized Learning III – Resource Links
In my presentation and workshop last week at the BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils spring conference, I provided the list below of Personalized Learning Resources. The list is aligned with the categories I provided in my previous two entries:• John Holt resources [unschooling] (johnholtgws.com)• Dr. Maurice Gibbons (selfdirectedlearning.com)• Reggio Emilia [child-centred] – see Wikipedia […]
It’s a DIY / MAKERS’ World! (i.e. Learn Your Way!)
Everywhere I look today I’m being drawn into a secretive, seductive world: DIY. Be a Maker. Build a Treehouse, or a pair of snow goggles, or a solar theramin (I had to look that up). Learn how to identify animal tracks in the snow, or mushrooms in your neighbourhood. Get your bike or your […]
Groundhog Day Redux: Standardized Testing casts long shadow over education
Each year Groundhog Day reflects to me equal parts optimism and ennui. Optimism because, well, a soothsaying celebrity rodent seems refreshingly naive and pagan. If only life could always be that simple. We could be taking our cues from gerbils and garden slugs, even the lowly paramecium. I figure we’d be off the hook for […]