This is a beautiful 3 minute summary about Social Learning. It is not the media, it is what you do with it.

Learning 2.0 Tetrad Through Marshall McLuhan
If you haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan, well you’re simply missing out on one of Canada’s most innovative thinkers.

In this post Dan Pontefract applies the principles from McLuhan to Learning. It is a brilliant thought piece that sets a very new yet somehow familiar context for the future of learning.

Myths About Learning

Will Rogers once said, “It isn’t what people don’t know that hurts them. It’s what they do know that just ain’t so.” All of us – teachers, parents, and students – retain outdated ideas about learning that are based largely on our previous experiences in school. Modern brain science has helped steer us in the right direction.

Click the link below for a few of the biggest myths:

Although written about student education. The myths apply equally well to all learning design. What is it about active self-directed learning that makes it so hard to get?

Martin, F., & Klein, J. (2008). Effects of Objectives, Practice, and Review in Multimedia Instruction. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 17, 2, 171-189.

Florence Martin, Assistant Professor in Instructional Technology, Department of Instructional Technology, Foundations, and Secondary Education, UNC Wilmington, NC. did this nice bit of research on what mattered in a course.

"Don't lecture me" (with Twitter track) - Donald Clark at ALT-C 2010. If you still think that lectures are a preferred method of teaching you must be an academic

62 games4learning “games, simulations, and activities for engaging learning.” Curated by chris_saeger

I collect resources about games for learning on scoop.it.
http://www.scoop.it/t/games4learning/

The wonderful new library is open. It has a community atmosphere with free wifi and a good coffee shop. The quiet reading room even has a fireplace. By the way the mountain in the background is where I live.

River of Life

Brief Description:

River of life is a visual narrative method that helps people tell stories of the last, present and future. Individuals can use this method to introduce themselves in a fun and descriptive way; a group can use it to understand and reflect on the past and imagine the future of a project; and it can be used to build a shared view compiled of different and perhaps differing perspectives. River of Life focuses on drawing rather than text, making it useful in groups that do not share a language. When used in a group, it is an active method, good for engaging people.

This is a nice way to create more powerful stories as a part of a learning event.

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

As an advocate for active learning and fun, I am heartened by this quote from the article. " Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play." Why is it so hard to convey this in the United States?

Welcome to edevolution, a video project thought of and created by G/T  middle students in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Thank you for taking time to watch the video and visit this website! For more information about what the Education Evolution is and what it means, take a look at a quick summary of us here or head to the blog page.

Don’t know why you’re here or came here by accident? Watch the video anyway!

A great example of what is possible when you unleash the learners with social tools.

Every day, before leaving the office, save a few minutes to think about what just happened. Look at your calendar and compare what actually happened — the meetings you attended, the work you got done, the conversations you had, the people with whom you interacted, even the breaks you took — with your plan for what you wanted to have happen. Then ask yourself three sets of questions:

• How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
• What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
• Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?

This HBR article by Peter Bregman gives useful advice for ending a day with learning. Debriefing is the most important part of simulations and other forms of active learning. The questions proposed here enhance a debriefing to include observations about interactions with others, especially saying thanks. Thanks to Peter Bregman for the wonderful idea.

99's on the 9th
A Newsletter of 99-Word Stories that
comes to you on the 9th of every month.

May 2011

Built to Last
The Incan ruins of Machu Pichu are famous for their massive stone walls fitted together without mortar. Even after hundreds of years, the blocks are so tight there's not the slightest gap between them. What's more, each block has a unique, irregular shape. Some are larger than an SUV!

Why build with such irregular stones when clearly any shape could have been fashioned? Because these walls have withstood earth quakes when walls of standardized block have crumbled.

Helping people fit into the place that's best for them builds a stronger organization than forcing people to conform.

These 99 word stories can inspire many hours of individual or group reflection. Constructing a 99 word story is a worthy challenge for any group. Give it a try.

In the near future, as the computer, the television, the telephone (and more) continues to converge, we will most likely enjoy even more powerful capabilities to conveniently create and share our content as well as participate in a global learning ecosystem

The learning ecosystem for the co-creation of content and shared learning. I think the challenge is to move beyond educational television and webinars that are little more than powerpoint lectures at a distance. We have to think of the "audience" as the people who produce the results! both in terms of learning and performance.

Published: January 13, 2011

Topics: Cause Marketing, Nonprofits, Philanthropy & Responsible Investing, Corporate Social Responsibility, Nonprofit Management

What inspires people to act selflessly, to help others, and to make personal sacrifices? Each quarter, this column features one piece of scholarly research that provides insight on what motivates people to engage in what psychologists call “prosocial behavior” — things like making charitable contributions, buying gifts, volunteering one’s time, and so forth. In short, it looks at the work of some of our finest researchers on what spurs people to do something on behalf of someone else.

The trust experiment described in the article strikes me as a worthy classroom activity. Oh and guess what. It is those who have less that are more generous. No wonder It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom ..."

by Linda Holmes

iStockphoto.com

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Enlarge AP

Fermilab and the Tevatron sit in the Illinois countryside near Chicago.

The world of physics is abuzz with news coming from Fermilab. It's the largest particle physics laboratory in the United States and the place where I did my first postdoctoral fellowship. Scientists there have been very busy lately. For the past few months they have been pondering a bizarre and unexpected signal from one Fermilab's detectors, the giant CDF.

While the venerable Standard Model of particle physics — which summarizes all that we know of the world of subatomic particles and their interactions — predicts that the signal for a particular process should go down with energy, the data from Fermilab is showing a mysterious bump at about 144 times the mass of a proton. With results collected so far, the odds that the bump is just a false alarm are less that about 0.076 percent. The technical article describing the findings can be found here.

While it may only be an anomaly. The Idea that the standard model of particle physics could change just demonstrates how tentative our understanding of the universe really is.