blended learning

Robin Good: Must-read article on ClutterMuseum.com by Leslie M-B, exploring in depth the opportunity to have students master their selected topics by "curating" them, rather than by reading and memorizing facts about them.

 

"Critical and creative thinking should be prioritized over remembering content"

 

"That students should learn to think for themselves may seem like a no-brainer to many readers, but if you look at the textbook packages put out by publishers, you’ll find that the texts and accompanying materials (for both teachers and students) assume students are expected to read and retain content—and then be tested on it.

 

Instead, between middle school (if not earlier) and college graduation, students should practice—if not master—how to question, critique, research, and construct an argument like an historian."

 

This is indeed the critical point. Moving education from an effort to memorize things on which then to be tested, to a collaborative exercise in creating new knowledge and value by pulling and editing together individual pieces of content, resources and tools that allow the explanation/illustration of a topic from a specific viewpoint/for a specific need.

 

And I can't avoid to rejoice and second her next proposition: "What if we shifted the standards’ primary emphasis from content, and not to just the development of traditional skills—basic knowledge recall, document interpretation, research, and essay-writing—but to the cultivation of skills that challenge students to make unconventional connections, skills that are essential for thriving in the 21st century?"

 

What are these skills, you may ask. Here is a good reference where to look them up: http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf (put together by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills)

 

 

Recommended. Good stuff. 9/10

 

Full article: www.cluttermuseum.com/make-students-curators/

 

(Image credit: Behance.net)

 

 

Via Robin Good, Paul Thielen

Robin Good: What does curation mean from an educational viewpoint? And what is the key difference between "collecting" and "curating".

Nancy White (@NancyW), a 21st Century Learning & Innovation Specialist and the author of Innovations in Education blog, has written an excellent article, dissecting the key characterizing traits of curation, as a valuable resource to create and share knowledge. 

 

She truly distills some key traits of curation in a way that is clear and comprehensible to anyone.

 

She writes: "The first thing I realized is that in order to have value-added benefits to curating information, the collector needs to move beyond just classifying the objects under a certain theme to deeper thinking through a) synthesis and b) evaluation of the collected items.

 

How are they connected?"

 

Excellent definition. 

 

And then she also frames perfectly the relevance of "context" for any meaningful curation project by writing: "I believe when we curate, organization moves beyond thematic to contextual – as we start to build knowledge and understanding with each new resource that we curate.

 

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.”

 

Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important.

 

So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard."

 

But there's a lot more insight distilled in this article as Nancy captures with elegance the difference between collecting for a personal interest and curating for a specific audience. 

 

She finally steals my full endorsement for this article by discretely inquirying how great a value it would be to allow students to "curate" the domains of interest they need to master.

 

Excellent. Highly recommended. 9/10

 

Full article: http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/ ;

Via Robin Good, Gust MEES