Three weeks ago I did a couple presentations to parents about Parenting In the Digital Age:

This FREE workshop is for parents, both the tech savvy and the less technically inclined, who would like to develop family expectations around the use of technology to play, learn and connect.

For this presentation I created a wiki: http://raisingdigitalkids.wikispaces.com/ and tonight I’ve finally uploaded the presentation to Slideshare.

A key part of the presentation is the handout called ‘Engaging with kids‘.  It is made up of a series of questions based on the presentation, but not necessarily in the presentation. The point is asking questions and finding the right balance or ‘fit’ for each family rather than offering any kind of prescribed answers.

I spent most of the day writing presentation notes and editing my slide transitions out for the Slideshare version. My goal was to create an online presentation that others could use.

Special thanks to:

• Dave Sands, much of my presentation came from ideas shared in his presentations. I had the honour of co-presenting with him, on an earlier version of these presentations.

• Amalia Giebitz, who organized these presentations, doing all the work to get ICD support and even recruiting friends to come to the events.

Feedback, as always, is appreciated!

“I can do that without technology” -Actually no you can’t!

Here is the Slideshare.

This was the presentation I first created for BLC08, and I wrote about it here.

I’ve finally edited it for the web… a tedious task as I tend to use a lot of slide transitions that do not convert well to individual slides. I shared a few presentation notes on this Slideshare, but not too much. This is a great feature I’ll probably use more in the future.

Here again is the Ustream: This version was done for student teachers at Simon Fraser University. As a video, it has a slow start with student teachers discussing a statement, and sharing ideas until about the 13 minute mark. Also, the slides in this video won’t match perfectly to the Slideshare above as I had to explain some of the slides for the stand-alone slide show, but it would be easy to connect the two presentations.

I’ll be using some of this presentation as the intro to one of my BLC09 presentations:

The P.O.D.s are coming!

What are PODS? They are Personally Owned Devices, and they are already infiltrating our schools. For now they get tucked away in lockers and backpacks, but as the saying goes, “If there is an elephant in the room, introduce it!” Students are bringing small machines with huge potential into our schools. It is time to introduce these tools into our classrooms and also to make sure that we have the knowledge and the infrastructure to use them to their fullest potential.

And I’ll probably link to this post in my PODs presentation. I first discussed PODs here.

It’s nice to finally be able to share this presentation and as always, I’m offering it with a CC license:

Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

I’ve bounced some digital immigrant/native ideas around a few times. Now I have one more thing to add.

When I was young my sister had dolls that spoke. This was so amazing! You pulled a string in the doll’s neck and as it recoiled the doll said, “Hi Ma-ma” or some other short phrase. Later the dolls would say a series of phrases, changing with each pull-of-the-string. Now my daughters have My e-Pets and Webkinz. Next comes this video:

It seems that the ‘Immigrant/Native’ argument is moot. I called the digital range in competency/capability of students a spectrum, not a dichotomy, (I think the correct word should have been continuum -note the reflection/comments on the post to see why I now think ‘spectrum’ is better than ‘continuum’). The fact is students can’t be lumped into general categories such as this. George Siemens summarizes this point better than I can, so read his post, and I’ll move on to the point of this post.

There is an issue of ‘digital exposure’ that many (but not all) of today’s kids have that simply wasn’t available when we were young. Despite my new distaste for the ‘digital native’ catch phrase, I am back to liking my Batman/Borg quote:

“I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives.”

My daughters interact with their toys in ways that I never could. In the same vein, two year old Paige from the above video will expect her toys to interact with her, to provide her with choices that I never had. Does it not follow that she will expect the same interaction and engagement in school?

Basically this is about ‘exposure to’ and ‘integration with’ digital technology at a young age as opposed to ‘adaptation to’ digital technology later on in life.

When Paige is 9, she will have peers that instant meesage each other on their PDA‘s… they will be more likely to communicate online at a younger age… they will be more likely to connect to like-minded social groups digitally. They will be continually exposed to ‘new technology’ that they won’t ever remember living without. (Technology and tools that we name, and they participate with.)

Meanwhile, I will continue promoting the value of integrating technology into the classroom to teachers who have “enough on their plate already”. I will offer out some ‘delicious‘ tools for their utility belts… while Paige plays with an iPhone and learns to connect to the world around her in ways many of us are now learning about… learning side-by-side with a two year old.

Originally posted: December 11th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: In any given Grade 8 class, I have had students at a Grade 4 to Grade 10 competency in Math. The gap has been equally as large in writing and reading skills… and it follows that I will have similar competency level issues with students’ abilities in connecting and communicating digitally. Digital exposure will lead to greater digital competency, but that competency can be very focused or limited in scope. For some, (like the students I highlighted in the reflection on a recent post), digital exposure has sparked an interest in understanding how computers, technology, and/or the internet work. These students will be digitally competent in most, if not all, areas. For others, competency will be very limited and demonstrated, for example, in the ability to play games, even ones that they have never played before, at a competent level very quickly. Yet others will be able to text messages without needing to look at their phone, and yet find themselves lost when trying to embed a video onto a blog. We’ll have both Batman-like and Borg-like students in our classes. - – - – - The Digital Immigrant/Digital Native dichotomy is untenable. Gaps in Digital Exposure and Digital Competence will be no different than the gaps we see in basic skills or content areas when we enter a classroom.

We are influenced by so many things in our lives. Identifying what has a significant influence on us can be difficult. Here are two things that I believe can be categorized as most influential… and they both happened Monday.

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1. Fifteen year old Kristine wrote a very influential blog post last May. It coincided with a lesson I was doing in my class for our school’s Renaissance Fair. The post, “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci“, has made the finals for the Edublog Awards ‘Most Influential Post ‘. She is the only student to make the finals in this category. Furthermore, the post has had an impact on me, and many teachers that I have shared it with. Thinking back now, as I write this, I realize that Kris has influenced my blog posts, time and again. (The student as teacher, or at least as an influential node in my learning network:-)

As I told Kris in my comment months ago: “You are, and always will be, a lifelong learner who engages in a quest to meaningfully exploring your world, (dare I say like da Vinci)… I guess one would argue despite your education rather than because of it… so there is hope, and there is potential for us to find our next da Vinci… perhaps SHE is within our midst today:-)”

As edubloggers I think that it is great to recognize students like Kris who deserve more recognition than they usually get at school. We should also recognize that although we strive to give students the best possible experience in our classrooms, Kris’ message holds more truths than most would like to admit. May her blog influence many learning discussions in the months to come.

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2. Two good friends, Dave Sands and Gary Kern came to my school Monday night and did a presentation with me on: Technology, Your Child, and You. Twenty seven parents braved the threat of the first snowfall of the year to participate in the presentation. On a personal note, I felt a little like a rookie called up to the majors to help out with this presentation. Dave and Gary have given it many times, and they had a ‘flow’ about them that I lacked. Overall I think it was great to be part of the presentation and it was fun to see my Batman/Borg metaphor being used (though they use the more recognized Terminator rather than the Borg).

Dave was very impressed with the parent’s involvement and interest. The most vocal of them wanted answers about what to do about Facebook and all the screen time kids have. This presentation however was much more about asking questions than giving answers.

The presentation delivers a number of key ideas: Technology feeds student needs. Technology isn’t going away. Parents need to figure out what they value, and they need to understand and engage with the technology their kids are using. If parents want influence with their children, they are far more likely to get it engaging from the inside rather than policing from the outside.

A simple example: a kid that won’t phone a parent from a friend’s house to say they are changing locations, might not think twice about texting a parent while in the back seat of a car heading to the new location… if text is a mode of communication that the kid already uses with their parent.

The presentation is very well designed and parent feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with several of them wishing more parents showed up, “Parents need to hear this!”

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It was a most influential Monday!

Originally posted: November 29th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: A look at some amazing students and teachers. Kris is now my blog-hosting techie, I provide her with free hosting (Bluehost gives me more space than I’ll ever use), and I get step-by-step help with things like upgrading to the newest WordPress version. She has also been invited to post on Students 2oh, although she hasn’t done so yet. Another student, Raj, got wind of the fact that our computer teacher, Mr. Yuen, and I were going to create a Wiimote smartboard and he took the idea and ran with it! He also took this programming passion into his classroom and is co-creating this page in Mr. Mak’s 1-1 room. Mr. Mak was the second of two teachers at our school to get the computers for his 1-1 class, so he had to wait until late February to have them passed on to his students. I arrived at the school in February, showed Mr. Mak Wikispaces and gave him some suggestions about how he could use it. Since then he has blown me away with his fearlessness. Check out Mr. Mak’s Class Novel or his ToonDoo Anti-Bullying cartoons (note that Raj helped with the instructions), or his Career Research assignment (where 1 person from each of 3 different classes shares a page). Discussions get posted by students late at night, and I see students in the computer room at lunch working on their wikipages. This isn’t a wiki, it is a learning hub! Also, our computer teacher, Mr. Yuen, jumped onto wikispaces too! His students aren’t just using wiki’s, they are also using tools like: Slideshare, Screencast-o-matic, Dvolver, Jing, Flickr and Audacity, (links to these are on his wiki’s navigation bar). This is a teacher who asked me “What is a wiki?” when I got to the school! Since then he has leaped into the world of web2.0 and has not looked back. I’ve had skype conversations with him well past midnight: I suggest some tools and links and then he shows me some fantastic things he has tried out. Next year Mr. Yuen will be our afternoon librarian and we are revamping the Library’s outdated computer lab. I can’t wait to see how influential this amazing teacher will be when he starts collaborating with teachers coming to the library to do projects! So there you have it: Two amazing students and two amazing teachers that are lifelong learners. Four ‘most influential’ people that inspire me with their passion for learning and sharing with others. - – - – - Comment from the original post: David, what a way to start the week! I just finished reading Kristine’s post, and I absolutely agree! I think every educator needs to read and talk about this post. We have young DaVinci’s sitting in our classrooms ready to be developed. Let’s hope her well deserved recognition for this post will influence many! Angela Maiers on Thursday, 29 November 2007, 23:58 CET

Amy Capelle has started a very interesting discussion in Ning’s Classroom2.0

She asks, “Are they really digital natives?”

The discussion there is great! Here is my response:

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“I come from the Batman era,
adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek,
assimilating technology into their lives.”

That’s a quote I use to differentiate digital immigrants from digital natives.

BUT I have realized that it is much more about comfort level & exposure than it is about age. While I am helping some frustrated students open a sign-up verification e-mail, other students have logged into the new site, added a photo, and changed the appearance of their personal page.

There are three digital divides here preventing me from effectively using technology in the classroom. (Two from my post, and the 3rd added from this Classroom2.0 discussion.) These divides are the gaps between:

1. What I know and what I need to know.

2. What the school has in the way of technology and what it needs to have.

3. What skills/abilities students enter my class with.

#1 I can change.
#2 will never change fast enough.
#3 is the shift in this conversation.

I have both immigrants and natives in my class, so the distinction is moot.

In another post I said,

“And then there is my class Science Alive! wiki… “I think that I am guilty of seeing the value of using technology in guiding learning, but not effectively guiding learning in my technology use.”

I have done a pretty good job of getting my students going… but now as momentum builds I have come to the realization that I don’t have a marking rubric to guide me, or my students, as we move towards a final product.

My class is assembling a lego model without the instructions, or even the image of the final product on the front of the box. This isn’t a problem for the creative/motivated students; they will assembly a better model in ways that I could never have ‘instructed’ them… but some students need structure, they have been fed it for years and expect it (even from yours truly – this isn’t finger pointing, it is observation).

I let technology supersede pedagogy.“

Digital immigrants or digital natives is nothing more than a discussion of digital competence… it is a spectrum, not a dichotomy!

Where does this leave us?
We want all of our students to be digitally competent.
We want all of our students to be articulate thinkers.
We need to make this happen in pedagogically sound ways.
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Let us go to the very beginning of the whole debate and none other Mark Prensky himself. In his article, Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom, Prensky says:

“…technology adoption… It’s typically a four-step process:

1. Dabbling.
2. Doing old things in old ways.
3. Doing old things in new ways.
4. Doing new things in new ways.”

I think we get excited when we see ‘new things in new ways’, but often we end up (re)creating old things in new ways. The real conversation needs to be around the constraints of curriculum and standardized testing.

“This is why the foundation of education systems today should not be the rails, but it should be the side trips. It should not be the central standard curriculum, but it should be those directions that students, that learners, both teachers and students, can navigate to on their own.” (David Warlick)

New things in new ways… creating articulate thinkers… and building digital competence as a by-product.

Originally posted: September 19th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: I remember laboring over the semantics of my title for this post. I used the word ‘spectrum’ then changed it to ‘continuum’ and then back to ‘spectrum’. The reason I stuck with ‘spectrum’ is because the competence and exposure to technology that students face today are not uniform as a continuum may suggest. Students can have very narrow bands, or very wide arrays, of knowledge or expertise when it comes to their use of technology. So if I were to make the post title into a statement it would be: Rather than a Digital Native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy, students have a wide spectrum of digital competence positively correlating to their digital exposure. - – - I’ll save the conversations around assessment, pedagogy and standardized testing for another day. Comments on the original post: David,You always do such a great job of bringing things together, focusing on what is truly important and not the chaff. Schools and school jurisdictions are slow moving in so many ways. They are not adept at recognizing change or at responding to that change. This, at times, has been a very useful such as when bandwagon ideas and such were not able to make big headway. However, we have come to a time when change is necessary and vital to our ability to prepare students to transition to that place we call world. Unfortunately we cannot continue to wait until everyone has reached stage 3 or 4 as outlined by Prensky because, as you point out, our students aren’t even there. With the shifting sands of technology, I don’t believe we will ever get there. Educators will need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with change being a constant and not having all the answers. When we realize that we, too, can be borglike if we but allow ourselves the opportunity to revel in the change and not fear it, helping our students will become synonymous with helping ourselves. Keep writing, David. You have a gift for sifting and finding that nugget. Btw, I’d like to try the book club idea again. Interested? Kelly Christopherson on Thursday, 20 September 2007, 07:22 CEST Thanks for your kind words Kelly!“Educators will need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with change being a constant and not having all the answers.” What a great point. We expect our students to change, grow, and be lifelong learners… should we not do the same!Yes, I would like to try the book club again, and yes we can make it work this time… but I need a couple more weeks before I can think of opening a book for pleasure. Do you have any in mind? David Truss on Thursday, 20 September 2007, 08:32 CEST The Borg! Resistance is futile – therefore we all will be assimilated into the Web2.0…I am neither immigrant nor native – I am an illegal alien and loving it! mrsdurff on Friday, 21 September 2007, 03:24 CEST David,You certainly have a great take and grasp on the issues education faces, especially in regards to technology in and out of the classroom. I’ve enjoyed so much, your “thoughts”.Isn’t that what it is all about? Whether it be a violin, a pen or a mouse – this interaction with ourself, the fertilizing of ourself to bring more splendour and light into the world?We are doing that here, you are doing it so well with your blog. It is your violin. I enjoyed the stories so much and you’ve inspired me and I think I’ll start a story of the day on my own site – stories for teachers.I’m gonna keep lurkin’ David Guest on Tuesday, 02 October 2007, 01:55 CEST

I haven’t written too many quotable quotes in my day… but I like this one:

I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives.

I just wish it was true! The fact is that my utility belt is often lacking…well… utility, and my students are far from being the technological ‘assimilators’ that I believed them to be.

My post’s title came to me after I read this in Dave Maclean’s post:

Interestingly, I am not seeing the tendencies of digital natives that Marc Prensky writes about. In fact, what I am faced with is students with relative apprehension towards blogging.

Students are not the ‘digital natives’ I thought they were. In fact ‘digital immigrants’ are much more the norm (in my Grade 8 class). Now don’t get me wrong, they are savvy in many ways when it comes to technology. Give an avid Gameboy or Xbox user a new game that they know nothing about and they can make it to the second level before I know what all the controls do. Hand them a cell phone and they can text someone before I can figure out how to clear a number I pressed by mistake.

However, little things are coming up that show me that ‘digital natives’ they are not! (For example, simple things like opening a ‘verify your e-mail’ message and thinking that the act of opening it, -without following the embedded link-, is enough to get verification). But this is just a case of being naive… my students have shown me that they are willing to learn, and that is refreshing!

To start off this calendar year, I created a private community here on elgg*, and set up all my students with their own blogs, as well as some community blogs (see more in my last post). But the few technical problems I had on elgg with my last project are now amplified making it impossible to use this platform… don’t get me wrong, I enjoy working with this elgg blog, but the computer lab I use with my students at school uses either Netscape or Explorer with Mac os9, and the combination is nothing short of brutal! So I adapted. After 2 days of getting everyone set up on elgg and trying to make the best of a bad situation, I stayed up most of the night and figured out how to get everyone a private blog on Google’s Blogger, (here is a step-by-step Powerpoint). BUT… Blogger was not in my utility belt when I started this. As a result I have hit a few school crossing zones on the internet highway.

First I realized, as I started accepting e-mail invites to view my student blogs, that every student is now going to have to invite every other student to see/comment on their blog. I have a Social space for both classes to converge so that means almost 60 e-mail invites that each student must accept. The invite itself is easy, I just have to e-mail the list to each student (the same addresses in the To: box as in the body of the e-mail), but accepting invites will be a tedious step that I didn’t need at elgg.

Then, I just found out that I can’t RSS private blog feeds on Blogger- not even to Google Reader. So now I will have to make the blogs public. Not a big deal except that I was holding off on my letter home to parents about the blog until I had it up and running, and I felt comfortable inviting them to read the class blogs and their child’s blog… but if I am gong to have grade 8′s posting comments ‘out in the open’ parents should be informed in advance.

And here is the clincher… I have spent HOURS playing with these technological tools in the last couple weeks, and very little time on the new Science curriculum. There are two digital divides here preventing me from effectively using technology in the classroom. These divides are the gaps between:

1. What I know and what I need to know.

2. What the school has in the way of technology and what it needs to have.

In a way, these will always be struggles that we are faced with… but there is a bright side. I think that with open source software and friendlier and friendlier user interfaces we will see the divide narrow. Case(s) in point: Computers won’t need to be bogged down with expensive applications, and we won’t have to settle for outdated browsers when we can upgrade them with free open source applications. And, I needed some knowledge of html (a slow learning process for me) to move things around and add items in the right column of this elgg page, whereas all I had to do was cut-and-paste some code to do the same thing with Blogger. So the gap is narrowing, and it is becoming easier to be more efficient and effective with our integration of technology: This is a good thing, that we are slowly moving towards. So what are the missing ingredients to speed this up? Professional Development, and mentorship come to mind… so does asking for help.

Well it is past midnight and I have to draft a note to parents…

Are students today digital natives? I would say only a select few that have chosen to be so (out of interest in what technology has to offer as opposed to a birthright of a generation).

Am I digitally naive? Yes, I need more guidance than I have asked for. With this last attempt at blogging with students I know that I have re-invented the stone wheel and there are tons of rubber wheels spinning down the web highway. Many students are also digitally naive, and we have an obligation to help them get ‘good wheels’ too.

Is there a digital divide? Yes, there are at least two that are relevant to teachers in the Western World, but these are getting smaller!

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ps. I think that my kids may be the first truly digital natives: My 4 year old after getting a Webkinz stuffed animal for Christmas, “Now I get to go on Webkinz-dot-com!”

Originally posted: January 15th, 2006 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: *elgg – My blog was originally hosted on elgg.net, then the address was changed to eduspaces.net. I moved to davidtruss.com because eduspaces was going to be moved again… Although that is no longer the case (right now), I am glad that I have made the permanent change! I’ve added the comments on my original post into the first comment below. I won’t get any further into the digital immigrant/native discussion here, as I come back to this topic and the batman/borg analogy many more times in the coming year. What I will address is how blogging/open source/web2.0 tools have gotten much easier and friendlier to use in just 15 months since originally posting this. I can laugh now at my poor strategy for connecting blogs, when all I would have to do today is have one subscription to each blog on Google Reader, tag them and share them. Although things are getting easier, we still need to be patient with newcomers to the digital frontier. As I begin hosting my blog, I sometimes feel totally lost when trying something new. That same feeling can be overwhelming, just cutting and pasting some html code, for someone doing it for the first time. It can be like being taught the algorithm in Math, without any conceptual idea of what is going on… veer one half-step away from the instructed path, or reach one fork-in-the-road, or circumstance where something needs to be altered and the whole thing gets both confusing and frustrating. We need to ‘expose’ people to new technology gently and be aware that comfort levels are dramatically different.. but more on that later.

Here is the gem I took from David Warlick’s Keynote “Derailing Education“. Warlick is referring to Friedman‘s ‘Experts’ and ‘Adaptable People’… from The World Is Flat.

“These are the kinds of people that need to be coming out of our classrooms, people who know how to make themselves an expert and people who can learn, and unlearn, and relearn very easily.

“This is why the foundation of education systems today should not be the rails, but it should be the side trips. It should not be the central standard curriculum, but it should be those directions that students, that learners, both teachers and students, can navigate to on their own. We have the ability to do that today.

I really like what Warlick says here, and as a classroom teacher I know how much fun those ‘side trips’ can be. A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

• Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
• Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue . (Note my last blog.)
• Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
• Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
• Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler's] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.
• Schools provide the boats, (and some have holes!)- resources, technology, and structure. You can also think of the boats as the curriculum, the (way too big) frame used to support (or should I say slow down) the learning.

OK, so I may have gone a little too far with the metaphor. However it makes the point that there are a lot of challenges to providing a meaningful education in this day and age. Having said that, I am keenly aware that it is my practice, my willingness to be a lifelong learner, and my knowledge of how and where to ‘point’ that limits what can happen in my classroom.

Consider this: Ten years ago I could only type using the ‘hunt and peck’ approach. Six years ago I had an Apple Macintosh, with turtle-slow internet access, in my classroom. Less than a year ago I had never built a web page. I still struggle with a lot of the terminology at sites like Techcrunch, and it still takes me over an hour of tinkering to do something any ‘techie’ could do in 20 minutes.

The learning curve is huge, and the gap of what I know and what I need to know is growing exponentially. The fact is, teachers are no longer capable of being the ‘keepers’ and ‘distributors’ of knowledge. In fact, our generation of teachers are less equipped than students to keep up. I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives.

In late March of this year I started on this website with a blog titled The purpose of a system is what it does. But our current system is currriculum driven, and it can be difficult to take side trips, (in fact it is outright impossible in some of the advanced classes with Provincial Exams). However, if we really want our students to be the future Experts and Adaptable ‘sailors’ of the world, then not only do we need to stay abreast of the ‘new literacy’ but the structures in our classrooms, and our schools need to change.

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On a related topic, Warlick’s ideas about Geography changing is also good. Marcie T. Hull does a succinct summary of Geography becoming more like time.

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A well said rant on the problems with rote learning and why we need creative thinkers:

Why Malaysia needs creative thinkers

by: Suresh Gnasegarah

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Jan. 17th, ’07 – I found a wonderful post by Subbaraman Iyer:

The education and learning approaches

The Education paradigm emphasizes acquiring a body of knowledge, “right” information, once and for all.

The Learning paradigm emphasizes on learning how to learn, how to ask good questions, pay attention to the right things, be open to evaluating new concepts and having access to information. It emphasizes the importance of context.

The Education approach is to treat learning as a product, a destination; and the learning approach is to treat learning as a process or a journey

The Education approach consists of a relatively rigid structure and a standard curriculum and a prescribed approach to teach, whereas the learning approach consists of a relatively flexible curriculum and belief that there are many different was to teach a given subject.

(I want to quote the whole post!)…Read the rest of this at his site!

Originally posted: November 11th, 2006 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: I’ll add just one more aspect to my sailing metaphor: Standardized testing is the anchor we are dragging behind us! It was for this post that I created the quote: “I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives.” I’ve used it, dissected it, rejected it, and come back to it since.