Innovation for Education

Spring Semester 2017 - EDIT 782/783 - Week 1 My Wordle This week's requirement was to read several texts about literacy and to distill keywords into a " Wordle " word cloud. My Wordle looks like this: The most prominently featured words in this word cloud are "digital", "literacy", "reading" and "writing". When I compiled my notes and keywords into this cloud, I was pleased to see that "digital" and "literacy" came up most prominently. I think these tow words lie at the core of what 21st Century students need. Modern literacy includes the ability to read and write, as in past generations, but differs in that it includes many more new forms of fluency. Teachers often complain that their students do not read. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students today are reading an enormous amount, but in ways that differ from their parents and grandparents. Students may learn from what they read in their a...

My photo of Connecticut Ave Sunday night We need better crap detection now . On Sunday afternoon, I walked to Little Red Fox, my favorite DC cafe, to get a sandwich. It's a weekend ritual for me. About thirty minutes after I left the place, police had the block barricaded and patrons in all the nearby restaurants were on lockdown. A nut with an assault rifle was threatening diners at Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place right next door to my lunch cafe. Today I found out that this incident, one I very nearly was a part of, made the New York Times: In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns To me this is yet more evidence that we desperately need better "crap detection". This isn't something that has implications some day down the road. This is relevant right now. People with misguided ideas about how the world works, motivated by completely fictional news, are taking to the streets to act, sometimes aggressively in response to what they read. The wor...

I really enjoyed Howard Gardner's book The App Generation. I read it during breaks at work, stopping to highlight passages I thought were important, and I found myself highlighting quite a bit. Gardner's ideas about this young generation's unique characteristics, skills, challenges and habits really resonated with me. There is so much discussion right now about what the app world is doing to our attention, biases, habits, social interactions and relationships. This world is new, and we're just figuring it out. Some of what he described I could relate to; some I had observed in my own students and even in my peers. Some of this stuff mirrors what I'd read in other books on similar subjects. One great book in the same vein is comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance . If you haven't read this book yet, I can't recommend it enough. Not only is it filled with Ansari's lovable charm and hilarious wit, but he wrote it with sociologist Eric Klinenber...