Article: Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?

admin — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:58:31 +0000

By JARON LANIER | New York Times
If machines are to improve teaching, we must recognize their limits — and our own capacity for magic. Full article

Lanier ends by saying “I am a technologist, and so my first impulse might be to try to fix this problem with better technology. But if we ask what thinking is, so that we can then ask how to foster it, we encounter an astonishing and terrifying answer: We don’t know.

The artifacts of our past accomplishments can become so engrossing in digital form that it can be harder to notice all we don’t know and all we haven’t done. While technology has generally been the engine that propels us into unknowable changes, it might now lull us into hypnotic complacency. ”

Published: September 16, 2010
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-essay-t.html

Education Reform debate

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:06:26 +0000

One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read was Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit. A MacArthur fellow and educator, Delpit argues that many minority students are erroneously labeled “underachievers” due to failures of communication between teachers and students. Delpit’s persuasive arguments for balancing creative thinking with structured learned came to mind when I saw that Diane Ravitch, an education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is, according to a recent New York Times article, in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling. Ravitch has reversed her position on reform strategies she once advocated, like standardized testing and charter schools. This has angered critics and heartened admirers. The New York Times article on the evolution of Diane Ravitch’s thinking is here.

Amy Ione Online » No Child Left Behind

Article: Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?

Education Reform debate