eCROP Blog

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...

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...