S/R » education

Matt Damon rocks :-)

José Mota — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:27:10 +0000

Matt Damon had some great things to say at the "Save our schools march".
Matt Damon's headliner speech at the Save Our Schools March in DC, 7/30/2011.

And watch the answer he gave in this short interview (at around 38 secs). Way to go Matt .
What We Saw at the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington D.C.

via @timbuckteeth and @kennypieper on Twitter.

Matt Damon's headliner speech at the Save Our Schools March in DC, 7/30/2011

Matt Damon's headliner speech at the Save Our Schools March in DC, 7/30/2011 — introduction fr

This was posted on Google+…

It helps us think about school today

José Mota — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:43:48 +0000

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education—and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

This was written by Ivan Illich in1970, in Deschooling Society, but seems like something that could have been written today: “educational webs” remind us of “personal learning networks” or “personal learning environments”, and the notion of learning as a continuous, global process throughout formal and informal contexts, embeded in the very life of people, in which experiences translate into learning, sharing and caring is rather contemporary.

As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s a good idea to have a school in which children and teenagers spend a part of their day, meet and socialize, share the essential experience of the physical world. But a school made more of workshops and conversations than of traditional classes, more for the individuals, their interests and competencies, than for the abstraction and arbitrarity that a class/cohort is, more a place of knowledge and culture to serve the students than a training environment to serve corporations and economical interests. With easy access to information and the technological tools we have today, it’s time to start thinking about a new school that replaces the one we have, resilient because of habit and tradition. Let’s be clear: the school we have today works to some extent, but it is far from the school we need for today and tomorrow’s society.

Information overload the the teacher’s work

José Mota — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:38:07 +0000

Significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential

Vannevar Bush wrote this in his famous 1945 essay, As we may think, where he talks about the Memex (or memory extender), the source in which much of the way we organize or conceptualize knowledge today is said to be inspired (hypertext, Internet, networked knowledge)

In a world soaked with information, which can be accessed and retrieved in various ways almost instantly, the work of the teacher cannot remain the same, lecturing what has been said countless times, but to show what is essential and significant, model ways of connecting/relating information and thinking it critically, so as to attain knowledge and become able to use it in the real world.

Children see, children do

José Mota — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:15:01 +0000

What examples do we, parents and teachers, give our children and students? What kind of role model are we?

School and creativity

José Mota — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:56:09 +0000

One of the great “Ted Talks”. Sir Ken Robinson talks about the way in whiich school can kill creativity and how that is, to a certain extent, to kill the future that matters.

Do schools kill creativity?