End+of+Semester+Project+Extras

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Who made the wordle is it from our blogs? T



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 * Here is the bullets I promised--Trista**

__ The Children’s Machine __ 

__ Rethinking School in the age of the Computer __ by Seymour Papert  v Yearners and Schoolers Ø “Why, through a period when so much human activity has been revolutionized, have we not seen comparable change in the way we help our children learn?” (p. 2) § Schoolers are those who do not think the problems with education require a mega-change § Yearners are those who desire “better ways to teach than what School decrees” but do not feel it is possible (p19) Ø “Does School utilize the way human beings most naturally learn in nonschool settings?” (p 5) Ø Papert’s “goal became to strive to create an environment in which all children…could learn algebra and geometry and spelling and history in ways more like the informal learning of the unschooled toddler or the exceptional child than the educational process followed in schools.” (p13) v Personal Thinking Ø “The best learning talks place when the learner takes charge” (p25) Ø Can computers give children an “explosion of creativity?” (p33) Ø Purpose: “Provoke an fuel imaginations” (p34) v School Change and Resistance to Change Ø School assimilated the computer into its system and built a curriculum for it making it the $1,000 flash card which drills and kills the desire to learn (p41) Ø “The institution of School, with its daily lesson plans, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, ... tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of technician.” (p55) v Teachers Ø School has divided knowledge into individual building blocks to be assimilated by the students (p62) rather than allowing the teacher to be a co-learner (p67) Ø “School does not have in its institutional mind that teachers have a creative role, it sees them as technicians doing a technical job…” (p70)and teachers awareness of being teachers rather than learners is an obstacle (p72) Ø “The problem for society is to give teachers the same pluralist support that the best of them give their students.” (p81)

[] StarTribune, 11/06/2010 v A Word for Learning Ø Pedagogy is the art of teaching. Is there a word for the art of learning? Ø “The deliberate part of learning consists of making connections between mental entities that already exist; new mental entities seem to come into existence in more subtle ways that escape conscious control.” (p105) v An Anthology of Learning Stories Ø “Unfortunately, School’s preference for the testable, delimitable, and listable … result is isolated pieces of ‘knowledge’ without the intuitions and the connections…” (p107). Ø “Knowing that one can exercise choice in shaping and reshaping one’s intellectual identity may be the most empowering ideas one can ever achieve.” (p123) v Instructionism verses Constructionism Ø Instructionism: “The belief that the route to better learning must be the improvement of instruction.” (p139. Constructionism: “ The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning for the least teaching.” (p139)   Ø “The most important principle of mathetics [the art of learning]…comes from knowing you can learn without being taught and often learn best when taught least.” (p141)    Ø Learning is tinkering, bricolage or DYI. “Use what you’ve got, improvise, make do” (p144)    v Computerists    Ø “School insists on the student being precisely right.” (p167)    Ø “The normal state of thinking is to be off course all the time and make corrections that go back sufficiently to keep going in a generally good direction. This kind of thinking is always vaguely right and vaguely wrong at the same time.” (p167)    v Cybernetics    Ø Blueprint programming [knowledge]: exact directions. The robot might be able to circumnavigate a specific box. (p187) Ø Vague programming [knowledge]: move toward the goal with feedback. The robot can circumnavigate any object of any shape or size. Ø There is more knowledge than anyone can ever learn and increasing. § “Is there a billionth that will be especially effective in opening doors to much larger areas and giving people more freedom to make personal choices?” (p192) v What Can be Done? Ø ‘Little’ schools in an interacting system collaborating on a problem § Build a sense of community § “Permits a group of like-minded people—teachers, parents, and children—to act together on the basis of authentic personal beliefs.” (p219) · Schools benefit from parental commitment (p221) Ø Against: “Wonderful networks of access to knowledge for some people while others are excluded … a breeding ground for intolerance and hatred.” (p225)