August 30, 2006

[link: 7 Hits] Your school will try to teach you facts, which you'll need to pass the test but which are otherwise useless. In passing you may learn some useful skills, like literacy, which you should cultivate. But Guy Kawasaki is right in at least this: schools won't teach you the things you really need to learn in order to be successful, either in business (whether or not you choose to live life as a toady) or in life. Here, then, is my list. This is, in my view, what you need to learn in order to be successful. [Tags: Schools] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 1 Hits] I might have just noted and logged this item, as I would usually do, but it resonates so well with the article I wrote this morning I cannot let it pass by. I liked especially the section on empathy and the idea of symphony (what I would describe as patterns or pattern recognition). [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 6 Hits] Brian Lamb posts the lion's share of a Harper's article on games and learning. Some interesting thoughts, and this caught my eye: "What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation-of a painting, or a historical text-and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. To me, there's a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore." [Tags: Children and Child Learning, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: 23 Hits] Sometimes, when I think back on my school days, I think of myself and my friends as having formed, at least for a time, some sort of fellowship as we trekked through common obstacles. Why have the 'teams' at work never felt like that? They don't really mean anything; "Groups are accidents of geography, of conception or of finances." This article explores the different ways people travel together. Maybe not the final word on the subject, but it should offer some insight into the complexities of collaboration and teams. Oh, and I cannot let this post go by without echoing quote from The Hero of a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell, 1949:

".....The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live,' Nietzsche says, 'as though the day were here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribes's great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair." [Tags: Schools] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] "Yes, you heard that right. Not maths or literacy across the curriculum but blogging. And why not?" It's a good point, and raises to mind once again the thought that the separation of learning into 'classes' is very artificial, and that a person's online presence should cut across these disciplines, and indeed, even school years. [Tags: Web Logs, Schools] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] It's probably unrelated to the lawsuit, but Oklahoma State has decided to drop Blackboard in favour of Desire2Learn, showing that there is at least one university out there not afraid of Blackboard's supposed patent.

Alfred Essa also looks at Blackboard's claim that it supports open source - and laughs. As Charles Severance, the Executive Director of the Sakai Project, comments: "The path to interoperability and free exchange of innovation *is* for us to all to adopt and run Blackboard and then we can freely innovate by exchanging Building Blocks - the logic is completely obvious :)" [Tags: Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, Interoperability, Open Source, Desire2Learn] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

[link: Hits] It has been a while since one of my thoughts has been called "eerily prophetic..." - in this case, though, it's quite something to see one of my thoughts depicted in picture. "Perhaps one day," writes Leonard Low, "we may have mobile devices capable of telling us what we're looking at and providing us with learning opportunities relating the world around us to the learning paths we've set for ourselves." [Tags: Online Learning] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]