Serendipity35

There are so many things I want to blog about and so few hours to do it. Luckily, there are plenty of others mining these fields, so sometimes it's a bit easier to put a few ideas together here. (Though I still seem to spend an hour doing copy, paste, format, links and images.)

Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence, which is one of the topics addressed in the 2008 Horizon Report that I wrote about yesterday, get a good treatment in this post by Henry Jenkins. "The kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence."

The Crisis of Significance is a post by Michael Wesch who talks about a simple 2 question survey he gave his students:

Q: How many of you do not actually like school?
A: Over half raise their hands.

Q: How many of you do not like learning?
A: No hands.

He then suggests that:

"The most significant problem in education today is the problem of significance itself. Our students, our most important critics, are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education" and he suggests that at least part of the problem has to do with "a growing cultural gap between students and teachers, partially driven by new media."

From the Top News links at eschoolnews.comcomes a story headlined Schools need help with tech support that I might sarcastically put in the "Duh" category, but it has a few interesting stats taken from a survey that reveals school IT departments are understaffed, impeding technology integration, and that schools fail to teach innovation.

"U.S. teens say they aren't being prepared well for technology, engineering careers. Nearly three out of five American teens (59 percent) do not believe their high school is preparing them adequately for a career in technology or engineering, according to the 2008 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey that gauges Americans' attitudes toward invention and innovation.

The disparity is more pronounced among some groups historically underrepresented in these fields. Roughly two-thirds of African-American teens (64 percent) and teen girls (67 percent) believe they are not being prepared well in school for these careers.

The survey's news is not all bad: It reveals enormous optimism among America's youth - provided educators are savvy enough to change the way their schools teach. Nearly three out of four American teens (72%) believe technological inventions or innovations can solve some of the world's most pressing environmental issues within the next decade, including global warming, water pollution, and fossil-fuel depletion. And nearly two-thirds of teens (64%) are confident they could invent some of these solutions.

That last stat is nicely contrasted with the adults - only 38% of them believe they could invent something to help protect and restore the natural environment - and, more than half of those adults are only 18 to 24 years old.

and Ferris Bueller didn't even have the Internet to distract him in 1986

Profs compete for students' attention

The quote that caught my eye in this article was:

"...Nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10."
from a UNC graduate student on the distracted classroom experience read the story on CNET.

Anyone who has taught to a class of students with computers in front of them can identify. Though I have to add that it's the same experience these days presenting to a group of faculty (for example, in a lab setting) or at a tech conference. Lots of channels competing for the audience attention.