HW#5.a Random thoughts from today's Technology & Education class

a. What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

1. Multi-tasking
   
   @mickdc566 made an interesting point about teenagers who were able to multi-task while playing Halo on XBox Live. And I thought about how, as one learns to drive a motor vehicle, you gradually begin to look further and further ahead in time/space, until finally you are able to buy yourself enough dead time to multi-task while driving. That put multi-tasking in a new perspective for me.
   
   I also realized that I probably am just qualifying for my 10,000 hours as an active/involved parent. (3 1/2 years since I quit full-time work).
   
   Which fits in well with what @rangotti said - after 3 1/2 - 5 years of full-time teaching one should be able to multi-task in class. That does not seem so far away suddenly.
   
   


2. Where should the best teachers teach?
   
   Obviously where they are happy.
   
   But was talking to @tzouct about my theory that a place like MIT or Harvard is successful in large part because it can cherry-pick its intake. Just get good enough to have an acceptance rate of less than 25%, and then you no longer have to admit the very best applicants. You just have to remove the obvious incompatibilities from the bottom, and then take any handful from the rest and you are likely to be 'successful.' Which becomes self-fulfilling after that, because more and more people apply to your program.
   
   Public institutions (esp. schools) have it much harder because they cannot cherry pick. Which makes me wonder what would happen if MIT faculty and your local community college had an exchange program for faculty?
   
   


3. The art of fly-fishing
   
   The conversation with @edielie and @kiknudson really helped generalize the concept of 'window of opportunity'.
   
   E.g. You are in a book store, you pull a book off the shelf, and do or do not decide to turn it over. Then you do or do not decide to open the book. Now take that concept and expand it to every single learning opportunity a student has.
   
   As a teacher, if you are taking the trouble to construct a learning opportunity, you also have to pick/make your lure and cast it in a way that they will take it.
   
   


4. Technology and Education
   
   @outofusernames underlined the point that we all like our information to be visual. Historically, limited technology options in the classroom meant that it was a largely auditory environment.
   
   We have the opportunity to change that.
   
   


5. Cross-disciplinary collaboration
   
   @rangotti made the point that as engaged citizens (we, and our students) must be able to see data (wherever it comes from, e.g. news) and see a story in it that makes sense to us, and, ideally, makes us ask more questions. This is a point very close to my heart. But I generalize it to include logical arguments. Citizens should have a reason they support organic food, or stem-cell research, or global warming. In some cases there is data. In some cases it is a logical argument based on a set of premises rather than data-based.
   
   Today I realized that humanities' teachers do spend a good deal of time developing these 'critical thinking' skills. The way we then teach math, somehow conveys to the students that the math set of skills is something very different. That these are somehow not connected.
   
   Getting back to what I have said about teaching not being collaborative enough, .... This calls for working collaboratively with humanities teachers. Encourage the humanities to include more data in their work. As math/science teachers, accept that the arguments will lose their clarity when ethical/moral/subjective standards are over-laid.