The Miracle Cart

A Whole New Mind - Chapters 1-3

Daniel Pink is an effective writer. I like how he repeats himself in various different ways to get a point across. The first three chapters,"Right Brain Rising", "Abundance, Asia, and Automation", and "High Concept, High Touch" made interesting points. One highlight for me was how he explained the progress from the agricultural age to today's conceptual age. He gave clear examples of each and included wonderful graphics to help illustrate his point. Another impressive fact was that IQ only accounts for 4-10 percent of career success! This would be a great statistic to show parents who don't allow their children to participate in activities to develop their right brain because it's "not as important". How often I heard the mantra, "Study hard so you can become a lawyer, doctor, or an accountant." What a breath of fresh air to see that the Conceptual Age will look to develop different abilities in students, a whole new mind. I look forward to finding out about the "how" of developing R-directed thinking in the next few chapters.

Mobile Learning and Location Based Learning

Mark van't Hoof's article on mobile learning put into words what I have been grateful to have taken advantage of for the last few years of teaching technology in education: data and services that are device-independent and platform agnostic! I remember coming across so many issues of limited storage space on our school server and programs not functioning cross platforms. Now with cloud computing, we can store massive amounts of information retrievable from any device with internet access.

Adam Greenfield needs a lesson on explaining location-based and context aware education IN PLAIN ENGLISH!!! That article was so difficult to understand! What I understood from it was that "context-aware" systems would never be able to take the place of the sensitivity of human beings and our ability to sense the context of a situation and react appropriately.

Leslie's presentation tonight on Locative Media brought up lots of different feelings. I went through the digital storytelling process with the staff at my school and LOVED what I learned from my colleagues through their stories! The depth with which the stories were told really helped me get to know each person better, or differently. Now I am excited to also see where our teachers and students can go with locative media. It was great to hear the possibilities shared around the room.

21st Century Learning