Collective Intelligence: Online Democracy or a Digital Wasteland?

Abstract from Dr. Maryanne Berry’s EDCT 552 Educational Technology Praxis Course Wikipedia and Crowdsourcing are what Henry Jenkins calls “Collective Intelligence” in his MacArthur Foundation report “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” about the participatory culture of today’s youth. Collective intelligence is “the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.” These two phenomena represent how the democratization of the internet has changed the way...

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A Philosophical look at the Common Core

The backlash to the Common Core State Standards movement is quite ironic. It’s interesting that the CCSS, which was developed to promote education, has produced such anger-based ignorance. Just like any good teacher or parent those of us who support the common core and understand the spirt of the movement must continue to find ways to explain it to those that don’t get it or maybe they do but are ideologically opposed to it. I think a quick look at basic western philosophy and the four educational philosophies that have emerged from it might...

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Education Technology – A Primer

This article is an abstract from SSU EDUC 571, Dr. Paula Lane, Capstone Research Assignment  Education Technology  What is education technology? Quite simply it’s the use of technology to educate. Not to be confused with technology education, which teaches the use of technology, education technology is the infrastructure, both hardware and software, that’s used in today’s modern classroom to facilitate the education of students. This included both in class (synchronistic) and distance (asynchronistic) learning.  Any technology cannot be...

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Evolution of the Common Core

Evolution of the Common Core This article is an abstract of Final Reflective Paper EDUC 570, 6/26/14, Sonoma State University The purpose of schooling in the United States has taken many shapes since the American Revolution. Originally public schools were established to serve the public good and not necessarily individual desires. Thomas Jefferson saw public schooling as a way to find the best politicians while Horace Mann, often called the father of public schools, thought the purpose of schooling was to instill a common political creed, the...

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Teachers, Tenure and Pay

A lot has been written about K-12 teacher tenure since the education-equity case, Vergara v. California, June 10 ruling. Judge Rolf M. Treu essentially agreed with the plaintiffs—nine California students—that the state’s laws governing teacher tenure and dismissal unfairly saddle disadvantaged and minority students with weaker teachers. Ironically, this lawsuit isn’t about teacher tenure per say. It is about teacher equity, or rather teacher equity distribution, a subject that has been a focal point of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002....

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