Miguel Adrover |
Science Teacher
Writer Blogger |
I've taught teens for almost a decade...smartphones in classrooms; whiteboard snapshots that remain binary, rarely transformed to graphite signs. My students don't know that it was necessary to spin a wheel 9 times to call someone; "rewind doesn't mean much to them. They ignore that films were actual films; they can't imagine a 20-minute wait--at 56kbps--for a new song.
My generation was the last one to have a childhood without Internet; I can inform my students about how it all was. Values from slower times remain; when our answers rested on analogous, low bandwidth, means. I can tell them about how our world is shrinking -- and becoming almost superluminal. Hopefully, my students will see how information technology is shaping our lives in unprecedented ways -- especially when talking about science.
I can't think about education without considering that I'm a teacher at the dawn of a new century; it promises technocratic solutions for almost everything. Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Biotech, etc., are just a few of the emerging disciplines embedded in this scary and amazing zeitgeist...I'm cautiously optimistic about the future; and I expect my students to use this caution as well.
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"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." -- Carl Sagan, almost 20 years before the advent of the Web 2.0.
I want my students to consider the ethics behind XXIst century Science. My aim is to develop scientifically literate citizens, much more so than potential doctors that do not know--or care--about stuff like history, art, ethics, philosophy, etc. I want this to happen within learning community:
“The zone of reflective capacity is constructed through the interaction between participants engaged in a common activity and expands when it is mediated by positive interactions with other participants, exactly along the same lines as the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky), as Wells (1999) described. It is possible to measure the learner’s ZPD as an individual trait showing certain stability across instructional settings. The second perspective draws on work on interactive formative assessment integrated in classroom instruction. In this approach, assessment intervenes in the ZPD created by a learner’s on-going interactions with a given instructional setting.” (Allal, Ducrey, 2000)
My generation was the last one to have a childhood without Internet; I can inform my students about how it all was. Values from slower times remain; when our answers rested on analogous, low bandwidth, means. I can tell them about how our world is shrinking -- and becoming almost superluminal. Hopefully, my students will see how information technology is shaping our lives in unprecedented ways -- especially when talking about science.
I can't think about education without considering that I'm a teacher at the dawn of a new century; it promises technocratic solutions for almost everything. Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Biotech, etc., are just a few of the emerging disciplines embedded in this scary and amazing zeitgeist...I'm cautiously optimistic about the future; and I expect my students to use this caution as well.
[][][][]
"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." -- Carl Sagan, almost 20 years before the advent of the Web 2.0.
I want my students to consider the ethics behind XXIst century Science. My aim is to develop scientifically literate citizens, much more so than potential doctors that do not know--or care--about stuff like history, art, ethics, philosophy, etc. I want this to happen within learning community:
“The zone of reflective capacity is constructed through the interaction between participants engaged in a common activity and expands when it is mediated by positive interactions with other participants, exactly along the same lines as the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky), as Wells (1999) described. It is possible to measure the learner’s ZPD as an individual trait showing certain stability across instructional settings. The second perspective draws on work on interactive formative assessment integrated in classroom instruction. In this approach, assessment intervenes in the ZPD created by a learner’s on-going interactions with a given instructional setting.” (Allal, Ducrey, 2000)