Treasures picked up along the shoreline of the web.
“It is necessary to note that Finland never intended to be a world leader in education. That wouldn’t have been an inspiring and engaging vision the country needed to reform its inequitable and traditional educational system to drive necessary economic and social changes. The goal was to secure equal educational opportunities for all Finnish children until the end of compulsory schooling at the age of 16”
— http://www.pasisahlberg.com/blog/?p=29
“But little Timmy can’t do it. He never could. And yet when you talk to comic book creators, they’ll tell you that they got started by drawing copies of other peoples’ work. Musicians start by playing the music they love. Painters start by copying other painters. Filmmakers try to recreate the effects and scenes they’ve been inspired by in big-screen releases.”
— It’s time to overhaul copyright law | Technology | guardian.co.uk
“It is not the uneven quality of facts found on the internet that is to blame for uninquiring minds, it is the way they have been taught to think - and the way their written work is marked.”
— Reference books? Give me Wikipedia | Magnus Linklater - Times Online
“The one click I am making less and less is the one that turns my TV on!”
— The Obvious?: “One click away from danger”
“Perhaps he’s just afraid that a Nigerian schoolchild, empowered by the technology entrusted to them, will take him to task for his patronising attitude, or perhaps even turn out to be a better journalist.”
— BBC NEWS | Technology | Give me rice, but give me a laptop too
“like quotations. Usually because the author manages to say in fewer or more descriptive words what I’ve been thinking”
— A couple of insightful quotations… at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk
“The bedroom of the average connected young person today is a much more powerful learning environment than most classrooms in most schools.”
— Miscellany
“You get £150 million for new buildings but you get absolutely zero to develop a change agenda. And that is my biggest fear for BSF nationally.”
— Merlin John Online Ltd
“However, most of those countries that have a better education participation rate amongst 17 and 18-year-olds have achieved this without compulsion, never mind sanctions.”
— BBC NEWS | Education | Waving a big stick at teenagers
“They don’t do much, but that doesn’t stop RFID tags from being incredibly useful, in ways that range from the mundane to the sinister. They’re like bar codes on steroids, because you can read them at a distance. They’re getting so cheap that manufacturers basically need a reason not to put them in things.”
— Tag, You’re It - TIME
“As a school administrator I see that funding and teaching of new technology almost always limits students to superficial use and shallow achievement, through two constraints. First, student use of technology is severely limited in time, perhaps to one class period per week. Second, students are not permitted to go beyond the (usually) superficial knowledge of their teachers — knowledge that is often acquired by teachers only recently in a few hours of training, and presented in cookbook fashion”
— Economist.com
“I still really have no idea what it means to learn something. Are we talking about changes that happen in the brain? Are we talking about retaining facts to be able to spew them out later? Is learning a change in attitudes towards other people? Is learning having more skills and abilities? At different points, I guess learning is probably all of these things, but I was greatly troubled by the fact that this presenter equated learning with retention.”
— Remote Access
“The good news is that my daughter’s teachers are at last beginning to use computers. The bad news is they are using them to make PowerPoint presentations.”
— Pointing in the Wrong Direction
“we were treated to a shooting star every minute or two and even tracked a few satellites across the night sky. Better than TV, that’s for sure!”
— BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Meteor shower: Your comments
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education. We want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” So said Woodrow Wilson in 1909 to a group of trainee teachers, when he was Principal of Princeton University. Wilson, of course, was a child of his time”
— John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Values and the Future of Education