Educational Technology and Cognitive Development, tech as a literacy tool, project based learning mindsets and methods.
Dr. Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant has been interviewing educators from around the world during Covid_19 crisis, and blogging about the crisis in school leadership during the pandemic political plague in the U.S. Here he discusses openness to teaching and learning innovation and the plan to continue learning online until school reopenings.
Dr. Jenae Cohn discusses multimodal communication, taking the students' pulse, broadening bandwidths, call and response content creation, strategizing synchronous and asynchronous time, onboarding the tech stack, online course design, and the new ethics around tech and student privacy. An amazing discussion bridging the current hybrid learning design challenges from K-12 to higher education.
Meredith Dodd of the University of Chicago Dewey Lab School talks about the mindfulness of tool within a Reggio Emilia environment applied to our hybrid digital and physical world. While we set out to discuss SeeSaw, Zoom, and mobile devices with early childhood, we quickly wander into what the digital world offers in deepening metacognition and working cooperatively with others.
Andrew Quitmeyer lives in Gamboa, Panama running DinaLab, a center for Digital Naturalism. He works to change the way researchers interact with their data collecting by moving the lab to the floor of the rainforest. The implications of his ideas go way beyond scientific study, it seems similar to Francisco Varela's "Embodied Cognition" only with Arduinos, LED's, and laser cutters. Confused? Good, that is a good state of mind to begin this podcast.
John Fallon and Pual Darvasi discuss alternate reality gaming in the classroom. In their breakdown of "Blind Protocol" they discuss how teaching English Language class turns into an exercise in holistic literacy where knowledge becomes, in the Deweyesque sense, actionable upon the context of the immediate environment. Fallon and Darvasi are gaming pioneers who, impatient with the slow rate of change in education, create a way to mix physical and digital sensory reality with that of mental representation.
Wiktor Przybylski and Jakub Kowalik run Hackerspace Krakow and here they discuss the freedoms of learning in a Hackerspace compared to work and school environments.
M. H. Rahmani explains the prolonged space of problem defining in the process of making. His thesis project, reFrame, serves as an example of making as a long process for investigating scientific, psychological, philosophical inquiry. John Dewey called for "Art as Science". This talk breaks down interdisciplinary "technologies".
Sylvia Martinez discusses the need for teacher time and continued development of theory of knowledge, the updated Invent to Learn 2019 edition, and the upcoming Constructing Modern Knowledge make space she and Gary Stager host every summer.
Dr. Robert Sommer, author of Personal Space, the Behavioral Basis of Design discusses his seminal work. Dr. Sommer elaborates on learning spaces and the multitude of perspectives with a single learning space.
Dr. Stephanie Cox Suarez discusses her experiences with documentation with the Project Zero Making Learning Visible project and her work with the Reggio Emilia approach. Here she touches on themes of the importance of documenting group learning, using repeated viewing of documentation, and stresses not the capture of the learning artifact but the unpacking.
