dmlcentral.net
Apprenticeship 2.0 Could Fuel 21st Century Learning
In a recent New Yorker piece on cookbooks, Adam Gopnik observes that "the space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense." Although Gopnik is explicitly referring to cooking, this statement could be equally applied to most forms of learning since the nineteenth century.… more
eBooks and Learning
Now that the ebook industry has set its sights on the textbook and educational markets, it's especially important for educators to shape discussion of the benefits and potential impact of ereaders. Rather than bemoan the loss of wood pulp and glue that make up current texts, we are better served by asking how these physical objects serve learning, and what is lost (or gained) by replacing them with electronic texts. One doesn't have to abandon a love for print books to appreciate the unique affordances of new technologies. For example: how many would prefer poring through multiple volumes of a print encyclopedia to the clean, stream-of-consciousness experience offered by hyperlinks in a digital encyclopedia?… more
Classroom Authority and Twitter
An interesting aspect of Twitter's recent surge in popularity has been how educators have embraced the technology, not just for networking and personal communication, but also in the classroom. Many teachers have found Twitter to be a helpful tool for accessing the backchannel—the discussion students are having about what is going on in the classroom—in real time. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Jeffrey R. Young interviewed two teachers who use Twitter in large lecture courses, projecting students' Twitter posts in the classroom live. Experiments like these frighten many instructors.… more