- You noticed, didn’t you?
Pat yourself on the back if you must, but know that the irony of a post on “brevity” running longer than that oft-referenced Tolstoy novel wasn’t lost on me. I took that post through seven drafts
Idle, agenda-less curiosity: does the rest of the edublogosphere get it right in one take or, if not, how many drafts do you run through on an average post? and, even after burning back a lot of brush, I knew I’d catch some heat. I blame all your Twitter-addled attention spans.Anway, to minimize reader fatigue, it’s worth mentioning that I did what anyone oughtta: add pictures! Kinda symmetrically too:
- None of you seemed to mind my four-slide sales pitch, though, and I just want to point out again how little technical skill it required:
We stole photos and scanned handwriting. The end.
Month: August 2007
Total 42 Posts
The teachers I work with โ the veterans, anyway โ measure their careers as the pendulum swings. They’ve seen us swing between whole language and phonics, standardized assessment and teacher autonomy, constructivism and direct instruction, enough times to just bunker down and wait out the uncomfortable stretches.
Me, I haven’t seen much, but I’ve got my eye on a new pendulum. At this end you have districts struggling to implement system-wide e-mail, districts still taking attendance on paper, still finding novelty in PowerPoint.
A lot of edubloggers are struggling mightily to push that pendulum across this dizzying chasm. They’re pushing us toward connectivity, global communication, and tech integration. They’re a determined bunch and I have little doubt they’ll get us there. At a certain point, though, many years from now, they’ll realize that their returns are diminishing. Like widgets to a blog, they’ll keep adding internet apps to their projects and tech elements to their rubrics but student confusion will increase and satisfaction will decrease in spite of their best efforts.
The question for 2007 is, “can I integrate more technology into my lesson?” The question for 2057 will be, “can I integrate less?” Bank on it. Options will be unlimited. It’ll be on us to make the cuts, painful cuts for some.
Which brings us to last week’s discussion of the Chicago Graduate School of Business and how so many people have misunderstood CGSB, in particular, and instructional design, in general.