eCROP Blog

Geometries of space provide some useful ways to analyze and graph the participants and resources in a Personal Learning Network or PLN: intelligence of information pyramid; idea transfer speed graph; geographic distance. * The Intelligence of Information Pyramid idea  (Information Pyramid for short) is about the means by which information is stored. This is more than just a concept in information retrieval, it is a way to categorize thousands of possible Web tools, and these Web pages lay out some of the best of these tools/links in a fancy design, a series of tables, Brains, Shelves, Drives ,  with a separate work frame (when the site allows it).  Try creating a bibliography of resources using each of the pyramid's headings. If you have a better link than mine, comment away below. * The Idea Transfer Speed Graph and its concentric circles are about the time it takes to get to an idea, a way to think about the speed with which you can find and use an idea; this ...

We talk the talk of our seminal thinkers such as Dewey, Piaget, Freire, Vygotsky and Papert and research the research of the classroom of tomorrow, but the end result remains students prepared and preparing for teaching the classroom of today. The gap between current cultural needs expressed by cyberspace,  makerspace and entrepreneur type developments and common school practices yawns ever wider. The edupunk movement ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ,  6 ) is in part a reaction to and a means for bridging that gap. Of the available educational alternative models, Montessori was one of the contrarian seminal thinker that did not retreat to academe's writing shelter. She stayed the course in the children's classroom and built a global school system based on her deep observation of child behavior. She designed and constantly refined a very different model. I claim her to be the first edupunk teacher/administrator. Lillard (2005) wrote Montessori: the science behind the genius , which ...

Our first computer, the ENIAC,  cost $6 million in  2014 dollars  (photo on the right). It is a measure of our progress that the equivalent power of this "giant brain" of 1946 can now be found embedded in throw-away $5 animated sound-producing greeting cards. That’s over a million-fold improvement in the cost of decision making, management capacity and economy building in 7 decades. The immensity of such change can stagger the mind, but the future of our children requires us to show some grit. Let's work through it. We've got to get beyond "Wow!". What are the implications of such mind-numbing results? This many fold improvement also added far more value than just cost reduction. Of equal interest but not number-crunched here is the shrinkage in computer size from a giant room to the thumbnail size bump in a greeting card.  At the same time,  the electrical power consumption of such a device plummeted to that which can be met and run for hours on...