eCROP Blog

The evidence seems to be saying that there is something broken about the point of writing. In short, at a time of rapid digital change and critical need for creative and inventive composition of all kinds, our children are taught composing with just essay-type text. Within that particular medium, less than 1/4 of them are succeeding. At the same time, Cyberspace and Makerspace settings bring other communication options in which students might be motivated to find success, and  curiously, eventually leverage their text writing skills as well. Research Evidence  The research on writing instruction and the abilities of school age children is not particularly thick, but certainly sufficient to establish a kind of rough outline of a measuring stick on public school children’s numbers of words, sentences, paragraphs and pages across grade levels and to report a measurement of effective student progress. The data indicates that at best students write some ten sentences a w...

As financially starved public educational systems in the U.S. slowly turn to find culture's new digital direction, there is a deeper shift happening.  There is a shift in the world's awareness, a shift from a linear (graph on left) to a nonlinear view of how things interact and develop. This shift requires an intuition about exponential behavior for which it has so far demonstrated considerable ineptitude ( Bartlett , 2005). Why is it that nonlinearity tends to create surprise at the speed in which apparent slow growth becomes dramatically different?  Surviving, let alone thriving, may be more connected to solving this problem of understanding than we yet appreciate.  So little of the patterns of this now well defined logic and mathematical knowledge ( Houghton , 1989/2009) is widely known.  In fact, such ideas are central to motivating the application of the public's newly found and growing interest and struggle with the teaching and practice of the pinnacl...