One of the purposes of research is to establish a foundation of prior knowledge for future experiments to engage and extrapolate before proposing a new design that will further the field. This is important; without an understanding of what came before, research runs the risk of reinventing the wheel, or even (worse yet) coming up with something more rudimentary than the wheel.…
Tag Archives: constructivism
constructions
…The major aspect [of kitchen math] is not the failure of School but the success of people who had developed their own methods for solving such problems – not what School failed to convey to them but what they constructed for themselves.
The MOOC Paradox – Expecting External Motivation to Produce Internal Motivation
Reading John Gatto’s pioneering work Dumbing Us Down, and took to musing on one of the paragraphs, this one from Dan Greenberg, founder of Sudbury Valley School, who wanted to look at what students need from modern education in a modern economic, social and political landscape:
Children must grow up in an environment that stresses self-motivation and self-assessment. …
Courses as Maps or Incendiary Devices
Khan and Papert: Transformational Computers vs. Transformational Computing
In doing some MOOC reading I again got into the comments section to find a difference of opinion, this time on Khan Academy, a content delivery system many xMOOCs herald as inspiration for their wares. I evoked Seymour Papert’s 1991 book The Children’s Machine, specifically his kitchen math discussion, in an attempt to look at why a lecture-based mathematics instruction often doesn’t translate into understanding math for application in life.…