Royan and John

If you don't already subscribe to Royan Lee and John Spencer's blogs, give yourself an early Christmas present and get on that. These two continue to share unique, insightful, at times controversial topics and are more than willing to engage their readers in meaningful dialog. Here's a couple of recent examples:

8292046044_54dc6001f6_nHeadphones in the Classroom: Royan talks about his thinking around how and why he allows his students to listen to music in class. This is the type of thing most teacher have pondered but perhaps haven't articulated it well. The comments are equally as informative. 

Royan also does a great job of sharing tools and strategies that he uses with his middle school students. Some are quick ideas and his use of images and video are particularly appealing to me. Also the mix of personal and professional provide a wonderful picture of who Royan is as a teacher and parent. 

Other recent posts from Royan:

John Spencer has been a favorite read of my for several years. He's a prolific writer and has authored several books. I Read the rest

Your Research Matters

Cross posted at the Huffington Post

John Spencer is quickly becoming one of my favourite reads. He’s clever, succinct and more importantly works with kids everyday. His recent post about why he doesn’t believe in research comes to me after experiencing a few issues around research of late.

Much of my own feelings about research are a result of reading a lot of Dave Weinberger’s writings. Weinberger talks about the changing shape of knowledge and that network knowledge is negotiated as opposed to traditional knowledge which was more accepted. Print and books are designed to contain and be the final word on truth. You don’t ask questions to paper. Now with work being online, our reaction is always to want to have a discussion around ideas. Of course this is extremely liberating both also problematic when everything is questioned and conversations involved many perspectives. Welcome to democracy. 

While preparing for an upcoming presentation I came across a slide I’ve used citing that our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Sounds impressive and useful for convincing folks to use more images to help understanding. The problem is the research, as far as many can tell is not Read the rest