Here’s a must-see video of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the TED conference. (Not sure if it’s from this year or last.) Sir Ken is a tremendously entertaining speaker and passionate advocate for re-thinking how our schools work. He argues, convincingly to my mind, that the traditional educational system, designed for another time and place, was designed […]
Author Archive for Ken Carroll
‘A vision of students today’ is insipid agitprop
Published by October 27th, 2007 in Learning 2.0. 19 CommentsHere’s a video that recently did the rounds with the edubloggers. (I can’t access it in China at the moment - transcript is here.) It was produced by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology as Kansas State University.
The video has received much acclaim, including from people I admire, but I must say I developed an instant aversion to it. The problem […]
Is knowledge delivered or constructed?
Published by September 18th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 21 Comments
One of the questions discussed at Learning 2.0 was this: Is knowledge delivered or constructed? Let’s take a look at it.
Delivering knowledge
Traditionally, the task of the educator was to deliver knowledge: teachers took pre-packaged data and dispensed it to learners. Teachers were active, if not dominant (dispeners) while students were passive (receptacles).
Obviously, data can be delivered. Books have done an incredibly good […]
The recent learning 2.0 conference included a number of ‘unconference’ sessions - free-form discussion groups that set their own agendas, rather than pre-ordained powerpoint presentations. I had been a bit skeptical about how these might work in practice. I thought they might lack focus. In fact, the sessions worked really well. Instead of just listening, […]
This weekend sees the Learning 2.0 conference at the Concordia International school in Shanghai. The focus of the 3-day event is ‘Communication, Collaboration, Connection’ and how web 2.0 will affect learning. This Ning site offers lots of information and insights from the event.
I went along with ChinesePod sound engineer, David Xu, who recorded the opening session (Fri […]
ChinesePod has been selected in the Podcast Awards for 2007. The results are based on a public poll.
We’d appreciate your votes over there. It would be nice to win the thing. Apparently you can vote once per day for the next 2 weeks or so.
Ken Carroll
I’d like to return to the question of listening. Since we launched The Fix, two weeks ago, we’ve all had time to assess and consider further innovations to the audio offerings (amongst other innovations). Here are some quick observations that I’d make after two weeks of ‘Fixing’.
The Fix deepens the learning […]
Well, since we’re all mobile, all the time this week, I have a blog I want to share with you. It’s called The Law of Mobility and it’s based on the author’s premise that ‘the value of any product or service increases with its mobility’. Hmmm.
Now this chap is no slouch. His name is Russ […]
Recently I talked about how m-learning will give us the freedom to learn wherever we please. Some people responded to the effect that: “But I can just take my book and go sit under a tree to read somewhere. Books (flashcards, etc) are just as portable. What’s the difference?”
Let me try to elaborate. Reading […]
Any portable (usually hand-held) device used to communicate over a wireless network has the potential for mobile-learning: cell phones, PDAs, laptops, etc. We believe the near ubiquity of these devices will bring mobile, or ‘m-learning’ into prominence in the next 2 to 3 years. (Actually, there are many other trends out there that suggest this […]
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