Posted by Aaron Eden on February 22, 2012 – 7:58 pm
This is a pretty important point, given that education seems to be the slowest field to innovate. Or more accurately, schools seem to be inordinately slow at innovating their cultures and structures to adjust to what we know about teaching and learning . To help answer that question, albeit in very general terms, I offer this quote recently encountered in one of the books I am volleying between at the moment: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson.
“What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wise and diverse sample of spare parts – mechanical or conceptual – and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations – by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges – will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”
So what specifically is it about schools that limit their ability to innovate? Please share with the rest of the class…..
Posted by Aaron Eden on February 17, 2012 – 5:21 pm
This is a followup to my recent posts relating to digital textbooks, Apple iBooks for eTextBooks- getting there? and EdTech Policy – Drinking the Kool-aid?
I recently attended a live demo of MBS Direct’s Direct Digital solution, in which I and several colleagues (teachers and techies) got to Q&A a top developer on the current product and where it is headed. The verdict in a nutshell? Overall all pretty impressed, but watch out for those DRM agreements!
(View a recorded demo here: Blue “WEBINARS” button, then choose the third pre-recorded option – “Direct Digital: Your Content, Your Reader, Any Device”)
I dutifully report here what we discovered.
Read More »
Posted by Aaron Eden on February 9, 2012 – 4:44 pm
Every student should have an iPad with textbooks in iBook form! Oh, really….?
(See more on iPads and eTexts in this blog in: Apple iBooks for eTextBooks- getting there?
In Michael Hiltzik’s recent piece in the L.A. Times, Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?, an important question is raised (the Times answers this question for us in the HTML page title of the Web version of the article: “Hyping classroom technology helps tech firms, not students”). I totally agree and disagree at the same time. Let me ‘splain.
I agree in that much of what tech firms are trying to sell to our schools is not going to help much (as it is designed to fit into the defunct mode of education we retain where school is walled off from the real world, in which the few “good” schools strive for relevant when we should be striving for real). Yes, much of what they are pushing is out of self-interest, and our major investment at this time should be to create well-designed learning with highly skilled and capable teachers (I prefer “learning coach”, but that is another post…).
However!
…..Learning with technology is now as crucial as learning with books was when they first came on the scene: what we can do with technology is much more powerful that what we can do without it. Read More »
Posted by Aaron Eden on January 20, 2012 – 5:40 pm
OK, so Apple launched its new authoring platform for iBooks which is supposed to revolutionize eTextBooks. I’m not sure the revolution is fully realized yet, but this would appear to move us in the right direction. We might be at or near step two of three in the near-term evolution of eTextBooks, which I see as:
- Textbooks transliterated for reading in eReaders. Basically, the benefit here is that students can stop carrying around those insanely heavy backpacks. Downsides include lack of ability to notate or highlight, or clumsy ways of doing these things.
- eTexts have rich media, ability to notate, some social/sharing component, and include a mechanism for backing up texts and associated meta-data.
- All of the above, but platform independent.
From the demo in link above, it looks like rich media and notating are fairly well developed, but I’m waiting to see what social components there are, if any, and how easily they back up meta-data. I’m also a bit turned off by Apple’s continued monopolism (see a discussion here about the controls on content development for the iBook).
MBS Direct has supposedly finally ironed out their web-based reader, and I will report back here after I have been able to test that (in the next couple of weeks). My problem with web-based readers is that, although they are platform independent, they require an internet connection when you want to access content (barring an “offline” mode which they may have or might develop).
Please comment below with thoughts on where eTexts are heading, what you are using, what you would like to see…
Posted by Aaron Eden on December 20, 2011 – 6:58 pm
Just a quick thought on the terminology used to differentiate school types. Also called “keywords” in the SEO industry, I’ve bumped up against these distinctions many times in recent years in helping schools determine what words people are using to search for schools on the Internet.
Until recently, it seems we had a pretty clear dualistic environment: we had public schools and we had private schools. Not too many years ago now, private schools (with the help of their marketing friends) realized (perhaps rightly so) the negative connotations in the “private” moniker, and opted for the much more approachable term “independent”, which is descriptive of a much more positive aspect of private schools: their independence from much of the state control and regulation their public counterparts are subject to. (Incidentally, the public have not bought into this naming convention, and still search almost exclusively for “private schools” on the Internet).
But now with Charter schools we have a sort of hybrid that threatens to muddy the waters even further. Charter schools also champion their independence (albeit not quite as loosely granted as that of private schools), and yet they are also public (meaning they charge no tuition).
So are charter schools “independent” schools? If they are following the advice of their marketing friends, they will certainly play up that angle. Ironically, if they want to enjoy the benefits of their association with independence in the Internet search world, they would need to get found for searches of “private school”, a term not even private schools want to put on their Web pages.
Good luck everybody!
