education

Students at Notre Dame High School in Sheffield will soon be enabled to use their personal mobile devices - including mobile phones - in the classroom and around the school. This radical move is the result of recognising that mobile devices have a role to play in the modern curriculum, says Paul Haigh, Notre Dame’s assistant head teacher, with a responsibility for specialisms and innovation.

Here's the next instalment in a 'slow conversation' with Seb Schmoller, which kicked off with my post Progressive austerity and self-organised learning, followed by a response from Seb. I think it's fair to say Seb is more cautious than me so far. He splashes a little cold water on my enthusiasm for things "lightweight" — pointing out that the institutional and technical infrastructure underpinning informal learning is far from lightweight — and worries that I underestimate the importance of accreditation. He's probably right. I'll come back to those points in a roundabout way in a bit.

I don’t often get into neuro-parenting here, but I thought this particular research finding was interesting enough to single out. (I mentioned it in my Managing by Mistakes post last week, too.)

The short story is that a lot of what parents and teachers think about praising children and building self-esteem is dead wrong. Well-intended ego boosting can actually cause the child to perform more poorly in school. First, if you habitually praise your kids, you aren’t alone:

A month or so ago, my friend Guy, whose children are educated at home, treated me to one his occasional rants. "People know there's an Arms Lobby," he said, "so they're very wary about calls for more spending on Defence and question whose interests these serve. But there's an Education Lobby too, and it always wants more spent on educational initiatives and new technologies. Because it frames its proposals as Public Goods," he went on, "middle-class liberals find it harder to see through this hucksterism."

by: danah boyd

"New Image for Computing" recently released a report in their first wave to understand the image of computing among youth. Funded by WGBH and ACM, this report examines both race/ethnicity and sex-based differences in perceptions of computing. What they found was that there is little race/ethnicity-based differences in how youth perceive CS but there are HUGE gender based differences in perception.

by: danah boyd

In mid-April, journalists heard about a student poster at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting called "A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students." The poster suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school.

by: danah boyd

Over the weekend, I gave a talk at the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. I have made a crib of the talk available for anyone who might find it valuable:

by: Idris Mootee

Bruce Nussbaum’s (B-week) wrote a post with the title “The U.S. Is A Failure At Innovation.” That caught my attention. What was he talking about? Despite what's going on today, I believe US is still the most innovative country in the world and there are plenty of examples and reasons.

by: David Armano

A funny thing happened on the way back from my guest lecture at Parson's Design At The Edge class. While the students (approximately 80 of them) were busy Facebooking their lives away—they could not fathom the idea of leading a public life or using social networks like Facebook for anything but pure social activity.

by: Karl Long