Innovation for Education

Greetings! Welcome to  A Community of Practice , an education blog created to share ideas, research, and practices for creating community in digital learning. For those of you who I’ve not met yet, my name is Zack Cyphers. I am an education and technology specialist at the National Museum of the US Army. Everyone always asks, “where is that?” I’ll explain:  The Army is the only branch of the military without a national museum, and when construction is finished in 2019, the Army’s art and artifact collections will move into a beautiful new facility on Fort Belvoir in Virginia (down the road from Mount Vernon). Right now I’m helping to write and produce education programs, games, videos, tours, guides, and interactives, so that visitors will have some great experiences when the museum opens. I studied film and media arts at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I taught documentary filmmaking to high school kids in a “second chance” diploma recovery program. My student...

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...