As overheard in school:
Thoughts
Lost Potential: Confronting the Cost of Free EdTech
Guest post by Sandra Kuipers
Free educational technology is not necessarily open educational technology and failing to make this distinction impacts education on an individual and global level. Online resources and technologies present attractive opportunities to infuse learning with digital media and content. However, these …
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Can We Stop Software From Eating School?
In 2011, Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of the venerable Netscape, noted that “software is eating the world”. His observation was intended to reflect the way that computers, and the software they run, were flipping the business world on its head. Nine years on, and Andreessen’s words ring truer than ever. If anything, it seems that he understated the shifts we were seeing and feeling. In 2020, you could reasonably look at the changes of the past decade and say that “software has eaten our culture”.
The Art of Growing Up
This post was originally published as an ICHK Teacher Insight.
The process of becoming an adult is one of life’s main preoccupations: it takes a long time, and requires the investment of a considerable amount of personal, familial, societal energy. As a secondary school …
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Anxiety
Are my anxieties a deliberate result of the capitalist systems within which I have grown up?Traditional Schooling
Although not quite as vociferous as Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971), I am nonetheless a constant critic of what might be termed "traditional schooling". Discipline, rigor, neat rows of desks, exams. You know the drill.
Over a number of years I've criticised my own traditional teaching practices in my talks on Free Learning. To illustrate my point, I've used a three-leaved Venn diagram outlining the interplay between grade worship, conformity and dependence. Expanding on this line of thinking I've recently added a fourth leaf, delusion, which I've previously written about on this site. The result:
Is it any wonder that our school systems produce so many humans (and I include myself in this bracket) who struggle to live within the societies we are building?
Over a number of years I've criticised my own traditional teaching practices in my talks on Free Learning. To illustrate my point, I've used a three-leaved Venn diagram outlining the interplay between grade worship, conformity and dependence. Expanding on this line of thinking I've recently added a fourth leaf, delusion, which I've previously written about on this site. The result:
Is it any wonder that our school systems produce so many humans (and I include myself in this bracket) who struggle to live within the societies we are building?Baking Bread
In last year’s End of Year Assessment (which I did not write about, but you can get a sense of it from the prior year’s) students asked for more curriculum surprises. One them related with obvious relish the tale of the (very random) occasion …
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Talking As Adults
At ICHK Secondary, as in any school, we find student culture shifting constantly, with new and exotic behaviours bubbling to the surface in a steady stream. Given a broad and contemporary diet of influences, including families, peers, mainstream media, social media, Internet memes and …
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Narrative First
Somewhere towards the manic end of last school year I read a copy of Neil Postman’s The End of Education (recommended and loaned to me by my Head of School, Toby Newton). Whilst there were many parts that I enjoyed, and some that I …
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Student Self Direction
One of the key design goals behind the Free Learning pedagogy was encouraging students to direct their own learning. Based on the experience that many students lack the skills to make the most of pure inquiry-based learning, Free Learning makes use of a map of …
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