Pedagogical theory is not only technical but cultural, ideological and political. If it is to have any impact, it must be self-consciously all of these. So wrote Jerome Bruner in his book, Relevance of Education. He died last weekend, on 5th June, aged 100, in the same city in which he was born: New York […]
Continue reading →This is the second piece of a 2-part post. Part 1 can be found here. In my M-Learning post from August 2014, I wrote that: …providers of content, courses, and programmes of study, both free and paid-for, will increasingly customise and configure their products for the mobile learning market – many are already doing so, of […]
Continue reading →There are those who would prefer to pretend otherwise, but developments in the digital and networking technologies over recent decades, developments that are growing faster and deeper with every day that passes, have profound implications for education. The shifting technologies are, I believe, asking hard questions of educationists in relation to their use of basic categories such […]
Continue reading →This is Part 2 of a 2-part post. See Part 1 here. So, what ought the more sensible and, I would hope, somewhat more progressive, amongst us in education be looking to the Internet of Things (IoT) for in relation to learning and teaching? I do not have all the answers, but I do think […]
Continue reading →This is the 1st part of a 2-part post. According to the Horizon Report for 2015 (Higher Education edition) the Internet of Things (IoT) has a 4-to-5-years adoption horizon in university education. Of course, we will only know the accuracy of that prediction in 2019/20 (although, as has been noted many times before, while we do tend […]
Continue reading →For as long as school has existed, the fundamental model of schooling has remained the same: scarcity of information and a paucity of means of access to that information led to the teacher being the chosen conduit of knowledge, with learners sitting passively at the feet of the learned to soak in knowledge. That the expected passivity […]
Continue reading →During a recent online debate, one of those undemanding messages that so many Twitter-inhabiting educators seem to love popped up on my TweetDeck and then popped up again and then again and again as more and more people retweeted it, until finally I was forced to mute the originator of the platitude just to make it go away. It read: Technology does […]
Continue reading →Does the term ‘digital pedagogy’ have any validity? It depends, of course, upon the assumptions we make about pedagogy generally and therefore on the definition of terms that arises out of those assumptions. The first problem, for me, is that too many see pedagogy as a universal category rather than as a category that needs […]
Continue reading →This is the second part of a 2-part post – read Part 1 here. What does it mean to be a teacher today? What does it mean to teach? In an age where learners have access to the same rich information sources as teachers, where the scope for self-directed learning is hugely greater due to […]
Continue reading →This is the first part of a 2-part post – there is a link to part 2 at the end of this post. Teachers, we are told, make or break an education system. McKinsey, in its 2007 report How the World’s Best Performing Schools Come out on Top, told us that three things should matter […]
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