by Henry Jenkins, Professor at USC. An important and timely discussion that explores the growing interdependence of learners with digital media and the need to examine how these media are working, what their influence is and how to teach in...
Recently in Learning Communities Category
These are difficult and challenging days for education. We are in the midst of a sea change which will affect many of the assumptions which we have about how students learn and how teachers, teach. Read on in the following...
I will call him Anthony. He arrived in Vancouver with a trunk full of DVD’s. He uses SMS and a variety of social networking tools to communicate with friends and family. He uses a small video camera to record his...
I am puzzled. Highly skilled artisans, artists, creators and designers are perhaps among the most sophisticated researchers our society produces. In order to succeed, they have to not only understand the context of their creative work, but also the impact...
This short piece is adapted from a lecture I gave some years ago about the way disciplines, in particular film studies, develop into departments within universities. How do disciplines stay alive and remain current and connected to the social and...
In my previous post, I talked about the new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as...
Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore’s work on education and learning (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.) is of great significance and is not as well known as it should be in the West. In...
I was privileged to attend and present at an amazing conference in Ottawa recently. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which was established by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and supports hundreds of students at post-secondary institutions in Canada hosts an annual meeting...
I began my career as a teacher in a two year college in Montreal. Vanier College was the second English language institution created as part of the CEGEP system in Quebec after Dawson College. (CEGEP means, College of General &...
Today, the violence of our times hit home quite personally with a terrible shooting at Dawson College. The link in the previous sentence summarizes a personal view of this tragedy. I know the college very well having started my teaching...
“Community suggests a place and a space of commonality — sharing. Community also suggests difference — characteristics which distinguish one group from another, one individual from another. As Anthony Cohen has put it, community expresses a “relational idea that allows...
Jaron Lanier, who is famous for having coined the term virtual reality and the concepts that go with it, wrote an essay in late May that has provoked discussion all over the internet. Here is a quote from the piece....
(Please refer to the previous four entries for this article.) My point here is that although computers are designed by humans, programmed by humans and then used by humans, this tells us only part of the story. The various dimensions...
(Please refer to Part 3 on June 19th for previous installments of this article.) So why explore the intersections of human thought and computer programming? My tentative answer would be that we have not understood the breadth and depth...
(Please refer to the June 17th entry for the first part of this article) Let me begin by quoting the head of IBM, Lou Gerstner in reference to Deep Blue, the computer developed to play chess at the grandmaster...
The context for learning, education and the arts has altered dramatically over the last few years as has the cultural environment for educators and artists/creators. Part of what I would like to do here is examine the intersection of a number of crucial developments that I think have transformed the terrain of technology, education, art and culture.
There is another term that I would like to introduce into this discussion and that is, counter-publics. Daniel Brouwer in a recent issue of Critical Studies in Media Communications uses the term to describe the impact of two “zines”? on...
Learning is a complex and challenging subject. The learning experience both within schools and outside of them has been an area of debate and contention for centuries and we still do not know that much about the optimum conditions for learning or even how humans internalize information and process knowledge. In this context, post-secondary and K-12 institutions are struggling to respond to sometimes-excessive expectations on the part of students and their communities, trying at one and the same time to create value and be valuable.
The notion of learning communities needs to be deepened through an analysis of institutions and how they function. If we are going to create a new model for learning, then it will have to stand the test of organizational restructuring...
There is a simple definition of learning community that says, “This phrase describes a vision and model where a community’s stakeholders come together and share resources? Another definition is, “A “learning community? is a deliberate restructuring of the curriculum to...
Jan responds to the previous entry: I think it is important not to limit the idea of learning community to that of ‘a community that cares for the institutions - such as schools - through which people learn,’ which seems...
The phrase “learning community? is suggestive of many things. It has become a catch-all for a variety of initiatives that link the learning experience to different notions of community. What are those notions? And why has it become so crucial...
I liked your idea regarding the obliteration of
classrooms as we know them today
Jan's comment
For those of you that may not know about the Web Site run by John Brockman, connect here to THE EDGE, which, as its title suggests is about "edgy" thinking. At the beginning of each year, Brockman invites readers to contribute to a debate through a question that he poses. This year's question goes as follows:
I have been an educator, administrator, writer and creative artist for over thirty-five years. During that time, most of the disciplines with which I have been involved have changed. For better or for worse, the very nature of disciplines (of...
Moments in time — is that what remains of each event that the media covers? There is no giant archive in the sky or database on earth that could possibly record, organize and present the extraordinary wealth of information that now processes itself through every day, every instant, in tandem with every breath that humans take (with all due respect to Google).
In an essay written in 1982, Shoshana Felman described some paradoxical statements made by Socrates and Freud on education and learning.
Recent Comments