Innovation for Education

I'd like to begin this week's reflection by saying that I think this is one of the most important books we've read so far. Howard Rheingold's text is a dense research-filled tome about the various personal, social, psychological and societal impacts of our use of the Internet. His goal is to lay out for us the ways we might become more effective users and participants in the net-saturated world. People used to say things like "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Well, I feel strongly that it's time to put adages like that behind us. That time is already here. I'm typing this reflection into a self-publishing platform called blogger, one of the earliest blog platforms that's still going strong at 17 years old -  an impressive pedigree for any Internet medium. If Blogger were one of my students, it would be old enough to take its driver's test. As I type this I'm using a Smartphone app called Grubhub to order Chinese ...

I found this great TED Talk this week about how play often leads to innovation. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_how_play_leads_to_great_inventions#t-433198

This week I learned that there is a ton of confusion among educators about the issue of using copyrighted materials. In her book Copyright Clarity , Renee Hobbs says that a lot of teachers misunderstand or choose not to understand the law and their rights, and this has a detrimental effect on classroom education. I'd studied this stuff aeons ago in film school at Temple University (where author and educator Renee Hobbs founded the Media Education Lab). There I'd heard a lot about media literacy - about the way media messages are deliberately constructed, and how they can be used to shape and influence public opinion and even the outcomes of elections! It's so important for teachers to be able to communicate this to their students - to teach them that their world is full of messages - on billboards, on TV, on cereal boxes, on the Internet. Everything they read or see is produced by someone with an opinion, a message and particular a bias. It's so important, now mor...

Those of you who are busy evaluating web sources this week will be intrigued and entertained by this video. These are the testimonies of people who were present at the assassination of JFK - or are they? http://www.clickhole.com/video/these-people-were-there-when-kennedy-was-shot-and--5090