Musings on Education

My particular “section” of education doesn’t deal with teaching under age individuals, so I don’t often consider that side of education.   However I ran across this article about social media and education, and realized that even though I educate adults, there are other things to be considered as well.

Which is why I really like the Google circles concept, and hadn’t realized it, but am actually using it for educational purposes.   I’ve got some circles that are topic oriented, and I’ve asked people to please let me know if they want to be in these circles.   If I have something to say on that particular topic, I’ll post it to that circle.   It’s not a “formalized” process, like handing out assignments, but it’s definitely educational in nature.

For example, if I figure out a new and interesting way to use Nessus  I’ll post it to my Nessus circle.   If I have been doing some thinking on 10th century european philosophy, I’ll post it to that circle.

I was disappointed that the author of this article restricted her to Twitter, Facebook, and texting, when these Google circles seem to be able to resolve some of the issues she raises.

When teaching technology related topics, we constantly need to examine potential approaches to communication and delivery to effectively education our students with respect to the subject matter we are teaching.    While we tend to focus on the “new and innovative” approaches to teaching, it can be useful to go back, and look at some past teaching theories, and see how they fit within the subject matters we are covering.

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This morning, on the radio, I was listening to a discussion about moving public education to a year round school year, thus effectively eliminating the summer break.    I’ve spent a  fair amount of time considering the concept of “lifelong learning” so I speculated on whether this was a particularly good idea.

Summer breaks historically

Historically summer breaks were created for two reasons.    In agricultural areas summer breaks were given so “kids” could work the family farm.    Hence why the break was in the growing season.

In urban areas, keeping schools cool enough to stand during summer can be extremely expensive, and there are certain cost saving associated with not having classes during the summer sessions.

While the former is becoming less and less of a consideration, the latter still exists.  But should it be a consideration for education?

I began to think about my own summer breaks over the years, so long ago.   I realized that for many summers, I spent them with my grandparents, where I studied piano, learned basic gardening, geology, and explored native american ruins in the southwestern United States.  I went to a summer camp one year for a couple of weeks.

As I grew up, I started taking advanced mathematics in the summer, learned the skill of surveying, and backpacked throughout the rocky mountains.

As I approached my collegiate years, I toured europe (an experience I’ll never forget) and Hawaii.   I also spent a summer working in an outdoor education camp.

With the exception of studying mathematics, none of these were “traditional” in classroom educational experiences.   However they are skills which I took with me into adulthood.

Perhaps if we’re thinking about extending the school year to “year round” we need to think alternative educational methods than the classroom, and perhaps fill those three months of vacation with “alternative learning” approaches, rather than another three months in the classroom.

So, across my desk today came information about a new educational tool called udemy.   The idea behind udemy is to give instructors the tools they need in a web based format to teach courses.   Now we’ve seen this before from very education focused tools such as Moodle  to generic web publishing tools such as Youtube and Ustream that allow you to put up content that happens to be educational in nature.   I’d even had the opportunity to take a course via LiveJournal.   While I haven’t explored all the sections of udemy, I thought I’d put up a quick look at it now, with more to come.

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Position:  Chair of the Department of Pagan Pastoral Counseling

Effective Date: one year with possible renewal (more…)

If you do a google search on effective  PowerPoint presentations you’ll literally find dozens of pages giving tips and tricks.   However most of these a focused on using PowerPoint for “briefing” or making a sales pitch.   PowerPoint is also used in the classroom (in particular, the virtual classroom), however how one uses it effectively in the classroom is different.  Here are some things to consider when designing PowerPoint slide decks for the classroom.

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The best invention of life is death — Steve Jobs

Yesterday marked the day of someone great, or perhaps even a better phrase, “killer”, Steve Jobs.  As we mourn his passing today, society is talking about all the technical contributions he made to the computing and technical industry.

But what is not being talked about is how Steve impacted education, and technology education.

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Marketing departments of companies often discover that training sessions can serve as a potential area for marketing.  After all, you have a captive audience for several hours, they have paid down money to learn about your product, why not tell them about other products while they are there?   This has brought up some reasonably heated debates over course content and format.   Its worth spending some time talking about the cross purposes of training  vs. marketing, and where you’re likely to encounter problems if you try to cross these two departments to get more “bang for your buck.”

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One of the things that has come up a lot within our department is what I’m referring to as Layers of Understanding.   When a person leaves our class, how well they understand the materials we’ve educated them on can take on three layers.    I’ve read about similar concepts in several books, but I think in the IT industry, we can describe them in some very meaningful terms:

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I’ve been a teacher all my life, I just haven’t always been paid for it.   One of my co-workers asked “how is it you teach so well?”  I sat down for a minute, and didn’t have a good answer.   The problem was, it was so organic to who I was, that I had never dissected what made me (and still makes me) an effective educator.

So, I decided to dissect it, not so much for myself, but for the benefit of those around me, so I might be able to take the “just teach it” concept and make it more useful.   It all started with one book, “Telling Ain’t Training.”

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