Education Innovation

Essential Education: Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

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Education Today: No Future Left Behind

This is your future. These are your future students. These are you future church members. These are your future employees. This is not the future, this is reality.

You can't block it, fight it, filter it, firewall against it, ban it, outlaw it, or stop it.

You can join it, collaborate with it, advise it, share wisdom with it, engage it, and participate in it.

This is your future..and the future is now. This is your reality.

Subliminal Advertising in Teaching and Learning

I was wondering if the characteristics of subliminal advertising might have implications for teaching and learning.

by BBColin

The impetus for this question is this excellent You Tube video in which to marketeers are influenced in their ad strategy by strategically placed subliminal visuals. Take 6 minutes to watch what happens to these two pro ad people as they create and idea and then see how their ideas was influenced through subliminal messages.

Link To You Tube Video on Subliminal Advertising

I wonder what sort of subliminal messages the the classroom or school campus is sending our students. It it one that locks them into a certain way of thinking or using the same visual over and over again. Or is your room or school campus sending messages that help to subliminal messages of learning or creativity.

Does what students hear and see on a subliminal level influence their learning and their thinking? Probably. But, can we as teachers, educators, trainers, pastors, etc. harness the power of subliminal messages?  Or, should we even attempt it. Is there too much downside from thinking seriously about subliminal messages.

Will we one day come to see that power of subliminal messages and even begin to plan purposefully to use it in our lessons, training, or sermons?  What benefits might this bring? What dangers might it unearth?

Subliminal Messages as a learning and teaching tool. That is Education Innovation.

Learning and Success Is Trying Longer and Harder

From Mark Batterson's blog Evotional.com: Spirit Fuel, comes this interesting thought. I has implications for all of our learners, be it school, church, or corporate training. The power of persistence.

I came across a fascinating study this week. Can't stop thinking about it. Priscilla Blinco did a study involving Japanese and American first graders. She gave them a very difficult puzzle to solve. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes or 40% longer.

Any one want to guess who has higher scores on standardized math tests?

Fascinating study with interesting implication. The argument is that we might give IQ more credit than it deserves. Persistence quotient might be a better predictor of success! How long are you willing to try something before giving up? Successful people, in every arena, aren't just smarter. They try harder and try longer.

What would it mean for our teaching if we knew our students would last a little longer?  What might that mean for your school, your church, or your business? What would the cummulative effects of this look like over years of teaching and learning? 

Success. And that is Education Innovation.

Learning To Learn

Learning to Learn
From: kmehairy,
Excellent presentation on what learning means and why we learn.

Learning to Learn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: learning learn)

SlideShare Link

Do You Speak Math: Differences In Math Success May Lie In The Language of the Student

American students’ math scores have been the source of much consternation for politicians and educators alike and a source of endless debate about how to improve our students’ math ability when compared to students from other countries.
by misspiepie

What if our students have a built in disadvantage in math based on the language they speak?

What if speaking and therefore thinking in English hampers our students mathematically ability?

Author Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers:The Story of Success, explores these interesting questions.

There is a huge difference in the way number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed.

“In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t.
We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the ‘decade’ first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen).”

Now imagine how hard it is for the native English speaker to makes sense of these strange inconsistencies as they grow up, but imagine the difficulties of second language learners. So, the Western languages’ inconsistencies create built in math difficulties. In other words, the very way we speak numbers is creating learning problems for our students.

“The number system is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.”

Add thirty-seven plus twenty-two.

“Ask an English-speaking seven-year old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math…Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine."

It is much easier to hold the second written equation in your head because of the logical nature of the system.

“That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.”

So by nature of our language structure, our students are a year behind in math by the time most start school.

Doesn’t it make sense that if math is understood in a much more systematic way, as opposed to a clumsy, complicated, and arbitrary linguistic structure that students may enjoy math a little more. And if they enjoy math a little more they will try a little harder to solve a problem or spend a little more time on it. And if they try a little harder on each and every problem or spend a little more time to arrive at the solution before giving up. Maybe that student would enjoy math more and take more math classes or more challenging math classes.

And if a student did that year after year, what would be the difference in math ability between one who did and one who did not?

According to Gladwell that makes all the difference. And knowing that fact might make the difference for our students. And knowing that difference and figuring out ways to account for that difference through new ways of teaching math to our students would be a needed change.
That would be Education Innovation.

by {Jadranka}

Anything That Can Be a Video Will Be a Video

Anything that can be a video will be a video, or so says this post from the site ReadWriteWeb
Here is an excerpt from their post Is YouTube the Next Google?

Generation YouTube

"Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube. In the first half of the 20th century, people grew up reading books and newspapers. Then there was a generation that grew up on movies and television. The last shift was to the Internet. And now web video is creating yet another generation.

"Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.

"True, the current model of YouTube is still raw and still skewed to entertainment. But imagine online video 5 years from now, geared to kids, where entertainment, games, education, travel -- everything for kids -- is mixed and delivered via searchable channels. This would be a big change on the Internet and in the world. Just as we no longer think twice about Googling, kids of the future will be consuming huge volumes of information via video.

"And now tell us your stories. Are you seeing your kids use video more than text? Do you yourself use YouTube to find information?"

This has some interesting literacy ramifications. In the future, students will expect to learn about subject matter by watching a video about what it is they are studying. Will there are many sources of great educational video content, TeacherTube, United Streaming, Cosmeo, etc, the need for video that covers all range of information will greatly out pace these sites ability to add content.

What students will require is almost Wikipedia like source of video content. This will require an amazing amount of video to meet such a demand. This is an excellent candidate for crowdsourcing. I posted previously about the oppoturnity that existed to crowdsource a textbook. (Crowdsourcing A Textbook and Disrupting The Textbook Publishers) For this example, think Wikipedia. Just as an amazing committed crowd adds and monitors content on Wikipedia, so too could committed people film, edit, add, and monitor video content about subject that are important to them. This would enable a large amount of educational video content to be produced without cost to schools or students.

Imagine what education might look like when students have video on demand to learn concepts and ideas. No longer would students have to imagine a place, or a process, or an event. They could watch it. It's not the way we learned, but it's not about us. It's about them. That's Education Innovation.

The New Media Litearacies

Discovered this video from my PLN. It was created by the The New Media Literacies Project.
According to their site..."Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world."

This group is doing some great work in this field.

The video list these skills as part of the New Media Literacies student will need to learn.

Judgment
Negotiation
Appropriation
Play
Transmedia Navigation
Simulation
Collective Intelligence
Performance
Distributed Cognition
Visualization
Mulitaksing

Take a look at the video