education

I resist requests to pin down Agile Learning with a tight definition. I see it as a family of approaches, and when you've seen a few of these approaches perhaps you start to detect the family resemblances, and spot more distant relatives. Sure, the approaches share some things in common. The main thing, I think, is that they offer a response to the unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in now, characterised by enormous richness of learning resources and tools, combined with harsh austerity in financial (and thus human) resources. I also happen to think that a degree of self-organising by learners is a promising path to take.

When children first start to draw we teach them to colour in between the lines. We reward accuracy rather than interpretation. Neatness, not expression. This says a lot about our own predispositions. In this short but insightful interview, Seth Godin talks about an education system characterised by an industrial model from an industrial era.

“What does the distribution of wealth tell us about future retirement resources?”

This report was produced by the IFS for the DWP. It is a well researched document and provides a valuable insight into the ownership of wealth in the UK. It is a long report, 90 pages, stuffed full of data.

At this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, I had a chance to speak with Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In her short but insightful book, Kamenetz outlines the forces that are starting to transform higher education in the U.S. and suggests alternative scenarios for what a college education might look like in the future.

Scott Golder recently wrote blog post at Cloudera entitled “Scaling Social Science with Hadoop” where he accounts for “how social scientists are using large scale computation.” He begins with a delightful quote from George Homans: The methods of social science are dear in time and money and getting dearer every day. He then turns to talk about the trajectory of social science:

Richard Carey reports on his latest post the study conducted by Dr. Silvia Bunge, a neuroscientist at UC Berkley, concluding that some video games help enhance kids' reasoning and processing skills. Findings even yielded that some games helped in raising kids' IQ points.

This post was originally written for the DML Central Blog. If you're interested in Digital Media and Learning, you definitely want to check this blog out.

As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects.

Being the dean of a Design School is no easy job today. Design schools is struggling to serve three masters: to the student and the industry and to the society, the last one is a new one as designers generally have come to a consensus that design for social change is part of the design agenda.

I am deeply grateful for all that was accomplished by second wave feminism. I love living in a world in which my job opportunities are not constrained because of what's between my legs. That said, I also struggle with the externalities of the accomplishments in the 1970s. This week, I found myself thinking about the role of teaching and nursing in society and the relationship between feminism and those professions.