eCROP Blog

As schools move rapidly towards widespread rollout of 1:1 computer per student systems, educators and culture also stands at the cross-roads for critical decisions about the kinds of software and learning methodologies to be used. Following the money will indicate what choices are being made, as a great deal of it is going to change hands in going forward. Will instruction be authoritarian, top-down state competency, teacher centered instruction delivered to students as containers for holding and repeating information and directions using CMI/ILS/LMS software? Will it be democratic, bottom-up student-interest centered, envisioning students as generators, composing with the rich interactive multimedia of the age, learners as eduentrepreneurs of inventive solutions to interesting problems and participants whose independence and teamwork grow globally by constructing their own personal learning networks and learning products?   Might it be blended? To what degree? How did we get to ...

There are certain facts and questions that would be useful to serve as foundation for curriculum planning. New ones have emerged since I wrote, The Long View – Curriculum into the 21st Century , for the NC Middle School Journal (2014). In short, the adult world is awash in the "new oil", digital information, the product of the silent, invisible and endlessly expanding information explosion; information dominates all other forms of capital, and the economy and culture use digital technology to build new businesses and new careers on it every day.    Over 80% of the population in the United States uses the Net and the Web every day if not through most of its hours.  Such a rapidly changing culture requires inquisitive, question-seeking, self-actualizing edupreneurs. To survive let alone thrive in such a current setting requires a learner centered, student centered educational system that graduates everyone with such skills. Such thinking has long been central to stated...

Finance builds, schools starve – stupid equation.   50 characters Finance builds, schools starve – stupid fixable equation. How many ways can we Tweet this? 88 characters Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; growth’s nub, public schools, begs napkins.    118 characters Fix! Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; our key growth lever, the public school, begs to eat napkins.   140 characters The Truth There are simple new truths we must comprehend about the divergent nature of the global digital buffet table. The current richness and depth of the World Wide Web is built on a little bit extra. The extra capacity of people’s homes, the garage, enabled individual creativity that led to personal computers;  the extra capacity of people, government’s capital, taxes, founded the Internet and the Web. The extra capacity of people's time plus digital devices and the We...

Who are the NC edtech bloggers? Great NCTIES question tweet! I've always wanted to know the answer to that question and those Tweeting at #NCTIES14 have provided us with some great answers. Using a TweetDeck (love this online app) search column for blog OR blogger OR blogging over the last 2 days of the NCTIES 2014 Conference in Raleigh led to this list. I took this to mean the longer form of blogging beyond Tweeting but I've included everyone's Twitter link as well. Our university student teachers need these examples and role models. My thanks to everyone for this dedication and labor of love. This provides a wonderful cross-section of the digitally literate thinking going on in our state. If more bloggers surface, send 'em my way. I've left them in time order to give a sense of the flow and progression as news and ideas emerge over a two day conference. My first impression is that more of this group are more active as micro-bloggers, e.g., Twitter compos...

"It’s not about matching traditional models with existing tools anymore; It’s about developing a brand-new pedagogical model and implementing the Next generation Web environment upon it. " Antonio Fumero Fumero, A. (2006). EDUWEB 2.0 - ICAMP & N-GEN Educational Web.  In proceeding of: WEBIST 2006, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies: Society, e-Business and e-Government / e-Learning, Setúbal, Portugal, April 11-13, 2006. = = = = One can feel the pressure to leap into a fully formed new something and the global need for new pedagogical models is not immune. Many see that new facts have been and can be further arranged in new ways for fascinating purposes. Why? Why is such possibility in the air and does it require an antidote, scaffolding or simply the freedom to roll? Everyone's doing it. The university scene is excited about MOOCS. Educators unsatisfied with the results from lecture halls of hundred...