Educational Technology and Cognitive Development, tech as a literacy tool, project based learning mindsets and methods.
Dr. Tal Slemrod has been collecting data on what students and teachers prefer in regards to different forms of remote learning. Now, during Omicron spikes where the narratives are emotionally charged and Reality is quickly constructed according to cognitive bias, Dr. Slemrod reminds us of how data can counter policy loaded with politics. A great listen for anyone affected by the school closures of late.
School board meetings have become politicized, teacher unions and mayors embattled, and teacher have been called unprintable names. But what happens when it is the students who decide to fix what they perceive to be a dangerous environment. Ayleen and Ximena organized a district wide petition for students to strike by not showing up to school if demands for a safer environment are not met. Student agency and advocacy in Oakland, California.
John Thill explains cycles of planning for systems and phases through the Covid_19 period, the challenges of balancing ongoing research, anecdotal evidence, and local, stated, and national politics. John details innovations such as door step book delivery, online programming, and becoming what is needed during the pandemic.
Hugh Gash calls educators to encompass the mystical experience in teacher reflection, an acceptance that much of how learning happens cannot be known, and in that acceptance lies hidden epiphanies. Gash also discusses "Radical Constructivism" including circularity, social, and embodied experience in learning. Gash's concepts are refreshing to an increasingly edu-corporate approach to learning design.
Before we all were participating in the Covid_19 pandemic social experiment of living like astronauts, Arnab Chakravarty had already embarked on his own journey into his own circadian rhythms. His ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) thesis was the culmination of months living "off the clock". In this session Arnab delves into moving away from a monochronic mindset.
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.
