What Would Dewey Do?
Bernie Dodge – San Diego State University
I got in right before it started, so I was sitting in the back:
- Started by showing the video at the bottom of this page, with the speakers name entered in the boxes.
- This is an education conference, so this was not about Melvil Dewey, but about John Dewey.
- We read a lot about/by him in my ed. classes in library school.
- Deep belief: learning is done by doing; teachers should learn by teaching.
- Dodge learned to teach as a peace corp volunteer, with very little training.
- John Dewey came of a time of an agricultural environment; he was seeing the impact of industrialization. He wanted the world to be a better place, to create a small society within each school, where every child was part of a small democratic society.
- Currently learning is divorced from both home and from work. Dewey would not like this.
- Asked what kids will do when they grow up? Gave a bunch of stats about use of tech.
- Thought Dewey would like that there are groups related to work and/or learning in Facebook.
- Cited the World is Flat
- Talked about his web quest project.
- Demoed VoiceThread. I first heard about this from Intellagirl at the Duke CIT Showcase, and again at the Tri-IT Meeting. Must be pretty useful for so many educational technologists to recommend it.
- Showed animoto.
- Talked about Twitter. Gave the example of writing a story collaboratively on Twitter, then selling the book on Lulu.
- Played a podcast made by a 2nd grader.
- Showed a wiki-based idioms dictionary from a book; a museum of objects from a book; etc.
- Showed a teen Second Life experience, but admitted that this is still kindof a reach at this point in time.
- Brought the conversation back to teaching, rather than tools, with a discussion of attention.
- Talked about Bloom’s new taxonomy and talked about depth.
- Talked about efficiency in learning.
- Said that the content needs to be cognitively more challenging than the tech, or students will spend more time on the tool than the content (used Second Life as an example of a tech that is too cognitively challenging)
- Suggested we think of what we want to do to prepare our students to be full participants in the world and how we are doing that.