Dave’s Whiteboard

From The Washington Post today, an opinion from Patrick Welsh: A School That’s Too High on Gizmos.

Welsh teaches at T. C. Williams high school in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s concerned about what a former school administrator calls technolust — the tendency (as Welsh sees it) for the school to apply technology for technology’s sake.

He mentions a $495 device called a school pad, which allows a teacher anywhere in a classroom to underline an image projected by the room’s LCD. This pad reminded one teacher of “the Magna Doodle pads we had as kids.”

Welsh talks about other technological problems — student laptops that can’t connect to the school’s wireless network, for example.

I suspect there’s a midpoint between technolust and teacher inertia. And I wonder whether Welsh or his colleagues are exploring ways to harness blogs, wikis, or other collaborative tools to foster learning. I think I’ll drop him a line and ask.

Although he wrote about it last month, I didn’t see Dick Carlson’s highlighting of a virtual hip replacement operation until today.

It’s one of many resources at Edheads, which looks to be a real asset for teachers.  I dove right into the Flash simulation.  It starts a bit leisurely, but then, I’m not in the target audience of 7th through 12th graders.

At first I thought the interactions were a bit obvious, and when I tried making my incisions in the wrong place, nothing bad happened to the patient.  But putting the lesson in context — demonstrating for children how hips get replaced — I thought it did a solid job.  Make the incision, stop the bleeding, retract the muscles, all using believable animation which avoids the overrich detail you’d have with video of actual surgery.

And avoids the expense, too…

Created by Michael Wesch and a couple hundred students at Kansas State.

Speaks pretty well for itself:

An online double play (Stephen Downes to Graham Wegner to Konrad Glogowski) took me to a thoughtful post on creating genuine learning experiences.

I particularly noted Glogowski’s striving to balance the demands of his job. At one point he says, “We need to move beyond the traditional approach of ‘pick the tools, add students, and stir.’” The next sentence: “My curriculum is still to a large extent dominated by units, lessons, assignments….”

He offers a “work in progress,” his five-stage process for creating learning experiences. (Click the image to view a larger version.)

Chart by Konrad Glogowski. Used here under a Creative Commons license.

As I read the post and the chart, I immediately thought of comments in the August/September issue of Scientific American Mind. Mark A. W. Andrews wrote about satisfaction:

In your question you hint at a distinction between pleasure and satisfaction. In fact, MRI brain scans have provided evidence that there is indeed a significant difference between these feelings. Pleasure and happiness are passive emotions that happen to us as the result of outside stimuli. Satisfaction, on the other hand, involves an active pursuit — it is the emotional reward we get after adapting to a new situation or solving a novel problem.

Glogowski’s work with his students, it seems to me, will greatly increase their satisfaction with their ability to learn.

Another thanks to Stephen Downes for highlighting a post at Graham Attwell’s The Wales-Wide Web.

Eleven secondary schools in Knowsley, England (in the Merseyside area, north and east of Liverpool), will close by 2009. In Attwell’s link to this article inThe Independent, you’ll learn that the schools, which serve some 21,000 students…

…will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft - which has already developed links with one school in the borough….

The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.

Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

I’m stunned by the scope of this effort, which seems to involve not only what we in the U.S. would consider public schools, but also at least three Catholic schools. Wherever they’re enrolled, 21,000 high school students constitute a very large district — one the size of the Prince William County, Virginia schools (suburban Washington DC), and larger than the Denver public schools (18,300 high schoolers).

More at the Education and Learning section of the Knowsley website.