In 1805, if you listened to music, you heard it live. Every time. Today, perhaps 1% of all the music we hear is live, if that. In 1805, if you listened to a lecture for school or work, you heard it…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
In 1805, if you listened to music, you heard it live. Every time.
Today, perhaps 1% of all the music we hear is live, if that.
In 1805, if you listened to a lecture for school or work, you heard it live. Every time. Today, that’s still true.
That’s crazy.
Ten years ago, Sal Khan pointed out that thanks to the internet, we should have students watching best-in-class lectures at home, after school… and doing their homework together, with teachers, during the day. (HT to Alison King who wrote about this 26 years ago). That hasn’t happened yet, but it should.
If we’re going to persist in creating hyper-expensive live lectures for millions of people every day, perhaps it’s time to change the dynamic. Imagine that there’s an app (I’ll call it Backchannel) and that the lecturer or her assistant has a dashboard.
Every student already has a phone. Let’s put them to use.
The Backchannel app begins by blocking all other apps–by reporting student participation. If we’re going to do this expensive lecture process in real-time, at the very least you can stop checking Facebook.
Second, the lecturer can at any time ask for students to answer a simple question about what’s being discussed. If a lot of students can’t answer the question, time to slow down. On the other hand, the Backchannel app can also act as a tool for students to anonymously let the lecturer (and the system) know that they’re bored. It’s hard to embrace how obvious this is, and yet it doesn’t get done.
The app can show via the dashboard how active each student is, by percentage or even by name.
Questions can stream in from the app, so the lecturer can get a quick view of what needs to be covered.
Students can have a discussion with one another (no private chats, though) about the last few minutes of what was covered. It’s asynchronous and can lead to far more airtime for people who might not be brave enough to raise a hand.
And of course, just as the school is rating the students (that’s a core tenet of the education-industrial complex) the students can rate every lecture, every time. What a dramatic shift in power, in attention and in reporting.
If we ended up with a classroom where the lecturers were on their toes, where students were actively engaged at all times and where the interactions were far more in sync, wouldn’t that be worth the hassle of putting our devices to better use? We can build this and start using it right now, not someday.
If we insist on lectures being the way they’ve always been, which is a one-way recitation, then let’s simply have students watch best-in-class recordings instead of the wasteful act of recreating them live, every time. But if we’re going to do it live, then let’s actually do it live.
We live in circles, in tribal groups, whether analogue or digital.
Digital Delights-Digital Tribes is a compilation of articles, resources and points of references on Leadership, Education, Innovation, Creativity, Visual Information, Videos, Marketing, Blogging, Perspectives from Different Generations and more.
As agencies like UNESCO call for global citizen education, in an aim to create peaceful and sustainable societies, online education is bein
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
"As a result, the sources of knowledge production, especially digitally, lie in the West, and often promote dominant Euro-American epistemologies. This backdrop is essential in considering the role of technology in education for building peaceful and sustainable societies. And while empathy and compassion-building are essential for creating peaceful societies, I argue it is not enough. Past and present day injustices, and power imbalances, need to be acknowledged and addressed to constructively move forward."
Why do educated people too often fall for foolish scams and conspiracy theories? The problem is that no one taught us to understand. Instead, we are pushed to simply to memorize. To be educated eno…
What place does documentation play in our learning environments? What roles might it play? We probably should begin by considering what we mean by documentation. When we talk documentation, we are describing the process of capturing evidence both of the learning progress of our students a
Time travelers should prepare for tough sledding. If you went back to 1820 or even 1920, all the sudden changes would discombobulate you. And the same is true for someone who came forward to today.…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
Time travelers should prepare for tough sledding. If you went back to 1820 or even 1920, all the sudden changes would discombobulate you.
And the same is true for someone who came forward to today.
We’ve got a deep-seated desire for things to go back to normal, the way we were used to.
But this, this moment of ours is now normal.
For now.
And then, there will be another normal.
There is no “the new normal”. Because that’s definitive.
Education is the hustle for a credential. It exchanges compliance for certification. An institution can educate you. Learning can’t be done to you. It is a choice and it requires active parti…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
"Education is the hustle for a credential. It exchanges compliance for certification. An institution can educate you.
Learning can’t be done to you. It is a choice and it requires active participation, not simple adherence to metrics.
Learning is the only place to find resilience, possibility and contribution, because learning is a lifelong skill that isn’t domain dependent.
Most of the learning moments in our lives are accidental or random. A situation presents itself and if we’re lucky, we learn something from it."
When a man acts in anger, we step aside, but a woman gets labelled ‘crazy bitch’. In a personal, ferocious treatise, the author says we need to change the script
Since no single definition of critical thinking prevails (Dummett & Hughes, 2019: 2), discussions of the topic invariably begin with attempts to provide a definition. Lai (2011) offers an accessible summary of a range of possible meanings, but points out that, in educational contexts, its meaning is often rather vague and encompasses other concepts (such…
With the development of technology creating easily accessible information, learning how to think for yourself is crucial. This article should be read by every young adult.
Back in July, I wrote an uncharacteristically clickbait-y post about the possibility that Elon Musk's Space-X Starlink might deliver rural broadband everywhere in North America this year. I got m
Instructional design is more than packaging content with a simple quiz. Let's look at how people learn and use resources today to build better courses.
What an accurate and horrible term. It’s hard to imagine that most people would look forward to taking lessons. In the piano or arithmetic or anything else. You take medicine. You take your p…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
What an accurate and horrible term.
It’s hard to imagine that most people would look forward to taking lessons. In the piano or arithmetic or anything else.
You take medicine. You take your punishment. It’s unwanted but grudgingly accepted.
The term gives away the intent behind it.
Learning is different. Learning is something we get to do, it’s a dance, an embrace, a chance to turn on some lights.
As schools and organisations move to remote education, there are potential gaps in our professional learning of which we should be aware. While many of us are discovering fresh opportunities for online and remote professional learning through podcasts, webinars and online courses, one of the most si
Even better than buying a new bicycle is adjusting the seat on your existing bike properly. That’s because the height of the seat changes your power. It’s the point of maximum leverage,…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
Even better than buying a new bicycle is adjusting the seat on your existing bike properly.
That’s because the height of the seat changes your power. It’s the point of maximum leverage, responsible for aligning all of the forces you bring to bear on the process.
When we begin to think about our work, we tend to focus on the largest structures–what it looks like from the outside. But as we engage with the problem at hand, it turns out that our impact changes based on how we stand, what we believe and the ways we interact with the systems right in front of us.
Get the strategy right, then implement small changes, repeated with persistence and generosity.
Most meals are defined by the spices that flavor them. Who could mistake a fiery Indian curry for a coconut-infused Thai Green or confuse a Mexican meal with Chinese? Each has its own identity but you must know how to mix your spices or you’ll confound the diners.
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In 1805, if you listened to music, you heard it live. Every time.
Today, perhaps 1% of all the music we hear is live, if that.
In 1805, if you listened to a lecture for school or work, you heard it live. Every time. Today, that’s still true.
That’s crazy.
Ten years ago, Sal Khan pointed out that thanks to the internet, we should have students watching best-in-class lectures at home, after school… and doing their homework together, with teachers, during the day. (HT to Alison King who wrote about this 26 years ago). That hasn’t happened yet, but it should.
If we’re going to persist in creating hyper-expensive live lectures for millions of people every day, perhaps it’s time to change the dynamic. Imagine that there’s an app (I’ll call it Backchannel) and that the lecturer or her assistant has a dashboard.
Every student already has a phone. Let’s put them to use.
The Backchannel app begins by blocking all other apps–by reporting student participation. If we’re going to do this expensive lecture process in real-time, at the very least you can stop checking Facebook.
Second, the lecturer can at any time ask for students to answer a simple question about what’s being discussed. If a lot of students can’t answer the question, time to slow down. On the other hand, the Backchannel app can also act as a tool for students to anonymously let the lecturer (and the system) know that they’re bored. It’s hard to embrace how obvious this is, and yet it doesn’t get done.
The app can show via the dashboard how active each student is, by percentage or even by name.
Questions can stream in from the app, so the lecturer can get a quick view of what needs to be covered.
Students can have a discussion with one another (no private chats, though) about the last few minutes of what was covered. It’s asynchronous and can lead to far more airtime for people who might not be brave enough to raise a hand.
And of course, just as the school is rating the students (that’s a core tenet of the education-industrial complex) the students can rate every lecture, every time. What a dramatic shift in power, in attention and in reporting.
If we ended up with a classroom where the lecturers were on their toes, where students were actively engaged at all times and where the interactions were far more in sync, wouldn’t that be worth the hassle of putting our devices to better use? We can build this and start using it right now, not someday.
If we insist on lectures being the way they’ve always been, which is a one-way recitation, then let’s simply have students watch best-in-class recordings instead of the wasteful act of recreating them live, every time. But if we’re going to do it live, then let’s actually do it live.