Comments on: Learn What Doesn’t Change

By: dy/dan » Blog Archive » Picking Up The Gauntlet

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Picking Up The Gauntlet — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:18:08 +0000

[…] Pederson, apropos of nothing I wrote, has developed a sudden, sloppy crush on typography, one of the artistic disciplines that hasn’t changed in several centuries, so that’s great. Because if you don’t know how to work with type, Prezi and CoolIris won’t save […]

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:02:49 +0000

Yeah, great link. Some time ago educators piled on Chicago Graduate School of Business for imposing the constraint on their applicants, "only four static images." Seemed to me then and now that constraints are the mother of creativity.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:26:08 +0000

How do we get students who are very good at what they do to break out of the molds we create and model?

I ran across a guy who has some ideas on this at http://www.goshen.edu/~marvinpb/arted/tc.html

His most important idea appears to be to force creativity by giving restrictive assignments so a student can’t just use what they used to do in the past, which sounds plausible. Obviously for this to work you need to give lots of assignments with different limitations from assignment to assignment.

By: thom

thom — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:38:19 +0000

Cigotie is learning. He’s doing tutorials, ‘copying’, he’s learning his craft. Think about him as a builder. You wouldn’t just go: “Gee nice house, but you just followed someone else’s plans, I’m worried about your indepedent -and creative thinking skills”. Let him gain the skills, his independence will come naturally. Or it won’t. But it won’t come without a grounding in the skills, which is what he’s demonstating.

Also Vicky: Give me a student who is a “rule breaker” (who by definition already knows the ‘rules’ I’m trying to impart) over a student who couldn’t care less about the rules or doesn’t have the assumed scaffold. I’ve had a couple in computer animation, and they’re gems. They force me to learn. It’s wonderful!

Not to be completely contrarian: I concur fully with the posted slide. Spot on. (I don’t this contradicts my first paragraph.)

By: Vicky North

Vicky North — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:16:41 +0000

When we talk about art in all its forms and the masters of art, think about how these people got started. First a student gets interested by exposure to the art. Then they mimic. They then apprentice themselves to someone who is willing to work with them. The next step is experimenting by using their knowledge and tools in very different ways, rebelling against the master they have learned from. It is this last step that we as teacher must nurture. I think this is missing in so many of our classrooms. We ask and expect students to conform to rules and this is the easy part of teaching. It is the nurturing of those rule breakers that is difficult. It is easy to assess work that fits into our rubric. How do we get students who are very good at what they do to break out of the molds we create and model?

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:59:02 +0000

“The worrying view coming through is that students are lacking in reflective awareness...Technology makes it easy for them to collate information, but not to analyse and understand it. Much of the evidence suggests that what is going on out there is quite superficial.” Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner- Centred Design at the London Knowledge Lab on a current study examining the internet's impact on pupils' critical and meta-cognitive skills | Times Online link It's like it always is. People look for shortcuts and fall in love with flash and marketing. Teaching these skills is hard. Assessing them effectively is often as hard or harder.

By: Nancy Bosch

Nancy Bosch — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:24:16 +0000

I struggle to find content amongst all the chatter about the shiny new tools. I’ve seen hundreds, tried tens and stick with a very few.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:19:42 +0000

Seems to parallel this quote pretty well. And make sure you include glogster in your list of shiny, cheap tools.