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...

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...

As the embedded map above shows, 36% of the 115 public school districts in NC have major digital 1:1 programs extending across all students at some range of grade levels. (Please note any corrections needed in the Comments box below.) Some districts have gone K-12 (though most of those are intermediate grades and up); many have gone 6th grade and up; and more are just high school in implementation. As there is no choice but to look ahead, where should we focus in this turbulence between the paper-textbook past and the digital future? North Carolina faces a double-whammy. On the one hand it struggles with the long standing issues of the last century stirred by the industrial age and factory manufacturing, improving student achievement against a range of challenges. More recently these challenges have included sinking teacher morale, sinking numbers of support staff, sinking recruitment and sinking budgets while facing accelerating teacher attrition ( Bonner & Stancill , 20...

Teaming and presentations are important functions of the digital palette in cyberspace. This is a draft version essay on the potential instructional uses for screen mirroring. This makes it easy to use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to create mobile device screen demos, collaborate, and to use a projector to engage audiences in team/group activities up to an entire class from which a presenter could pick one or more mobile devices to display. It is worth considering how much this capacity can be used to replace the functionality of interactive whiteboards and large digital TV displays such as Apple TV. It clearly replaces the need for for a VGA connector and keeping the iDevice tethered a short distance from the projector's computer.  This screen mirroring feature is built-in to more recent Macs as AirPlay and on for Nexus 10 and 7 devices is supported by Miracast. The features of  AirPlay can be extended with Reflector or AirServer software in the $15 rang...