22 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
    1. Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs.

      Many developed countries have national curricula and specific teacher-training standards, but the United States does not. Instead decisions on curricular and standards are created and enforced at the state and local levels, often by politically elected figures including governors, mayors, superintendents, and school boards.

      This leaves early education in the United States open to a much greater sway of political influence. This can be seen in examples of Texas attempting to legislate the display the ten commandments in school classrooms in 2023, reading science being neglected in the adoption of Culkins' Units of Study curriculum, and other footballs like the supposed suppression of critical race theory in right leaning states.

  2. Oct 2022
    1. https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

      Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.


      These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

      It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

      These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

      Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

      Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

      One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

      If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

      The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.


      Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

  3. Jun 2021
  4. Feb 2021
  5. Oct 2020
    1. Adapting adult learning theory to support innovative, advanced, online learning - WVMD Model

      This article details how to build an innovative online learning environment using methods based on influential adult learning theories. These theories include Social Development Theory, Behaviorism, Critical Reflection and Nurturing the Soul. 10/10, many theories throughly discussed.

  6. Sep 2020
  7. Aug 2020
  8. Jul 2020
  9. Nov 2019
    1. Training and Development Policy Wiki

      This webpage, under the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) .gov site, provides an extensive list of technology resources that can be and have been implemented into a variety of employee deveolpment programs. These tools allow for more personalized learning, active participation, collaboration, and communication.In the first section of the site, examples of Web 2.0 tools are listed that can promote collaboration and constructive learning. You can also find technologies that are used in specific sectors, such as the Federal Government and the Private Sector. Clicking on the links redirects you to additional resources on the tech tools, including how to use them effectively and professionally for employee training. Rating 10/10

    1. 1Engaging Adults Learners with TechnologyThrough

      Instruction Librarians from the Twin Cities Campus Library created this instructional gudie as a workshop for implementing technology for adult learning. First, the authors describe key characteristics of adult learners as identified in the theory of andragogy. Examples of these characteristics include the need to know, learner responsibility, past experiences, and motivation to learn. The authors then suggest instructional practices and activities to meet the needs of adult learners, Finally, they provide examples of technology tools for effectively engaging adult learners. Rating 10/10

    1. This article, developed by faculty members at NAU, provides research behind and practices for technology-infused professional development (PD) programs. The authors first emphasize the importance of designing professional development for teachers around how they and their students learn best. Many approaches to PD have taken a one-size-fits-all approach in which learners take a more passive role in absorbing standardized information. The authors in this article suggest the need for a more effective model, one in which teachers play an active role in learning in ways that they find most effective for them and their students. Technology can support this PD through interactive and learner-centered instruction. Rating: 9/10

    1. Advantages of Online Professional Development

      This chapter, "Advantages of Online Professional Development" describes the benefits of online teacher professional development (OTPD), which implements technology to deliver training and learning in an online environment. OTPD allows teachers to participate in a flexible, self-directed, and collaborative learning community. They can interact with other teachers synchronously and asynchronously, or take professional development courses at their own schedule.

    1. The text documents a year-long research project into experiential learning in teacher professional development. Teachers participated in experiential learning themselves to then begin to implement it into their own classrooms to serve their students. By and large, teachers were receptive, had misconceptions addressed, changed their practices with their colleagues and students to develop more engaging and active classrooms. Essentially, a shift from teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning was achieved in small increments by using experiential learning and reflection to facilitate teacher growth thereby creating new pathways for student learning. Given the nature of the traditional methods predominantly used, this study seems to reflect some elements of transformative learning in which teacher conventions and ideas were challenged and adjusted through heterogenous groups and personal reflection. Rating: 9/10

    1. The Northwest Center of Public Health Practice's toolkit title "Effective Adult Learning: A toolkit for teaching adults," is . a highly comprehensive resource for instructional design for adult learning instructors. Sections include course or training design, objectives of adult learning, various tools to help in the process of course design, and brief overviews of adult learning methods and theory. The embedded section review charts make it easier for quick references. Rating: 10/10

  10. Mar 2019
    1. As one understands professional development in educational technology as potential transformational learning experiences, one can begin to reconceptualize its outcomes.

      This article provides an in-depth view from the teachers perspective about how to prepare for technology in their learning environments. Through professional development training, teachers and instructors can gain new knowledge about how to incorporate new technologies into their practice. This article focuses on one study and concludes that new technology needs to be introduced slowly for best practices.

  11. Dec 2018
    1. Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental or observational sciences between "descrip­tion" and "explanation" appears here as one, even more relative, between "inscription" ("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")-between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found, and beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual struc­tures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnog­raphy, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

      The nut of Geertz' argument: Ethnographic theory building is about developing conceptual structures applicable to other settings in order to understand and analyze culture (human life, symbolic action, and beliefs). Thick description and its interpretation provides the framework for making theoretical distinctions.

    2. conceptualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogent interpre­tations of) realities past; it has also to survive-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep­raiding after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of continuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view

      Cultural theory is not predictive but interpretative. Thick description helps to determine whether a theory can be further elaborated or is no longer useful for describing/interpreting behavior.

    3. The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the requirements of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily great and essentially irremovable.

      Challenges of theory development about cultural understandings. The tension between semiotic/symbolic approaches that require interpretation (grasp) versus methods that are grounded in analysis.

      "...the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them."

  12. Dec 2017
  13. Jul 2017
    1. As the institutional balance breaks, the person becomes more available to and interested in a kind of sharing and intimacy with others. But intimacy in the next balance is the self’s aim, rather than its source. It involves a self that travels between systems, or exists in the dynamism between them, not in the dynamism between individuals.

      The self exists in the dynamism between systems, not between individuals