learning

The Center for Urban Schools Improvement in Chicago is an after-school drop in space for Chicago public school kids on the Southside, a community center, a cafe, an art space, a technology space, a science-lab, a library, a video studio, a recording studio, a teacher-training space, a teacher-support space, a parent-kid meeting space, all of that, alive with energy and thought and creativity and inspiration.   Here's the photo journal.

I thought I could go the three days of the TechnoTravels HASTAC II conference without blogging, but I have to add to the terrific liveblogging of others here just to say thank you to the organizers, to the presenters, and for two days that inspire what John Seely Brown, in the videoclip we saw, said should be the goal of all educational enterprises: awe. I, my dear HASTAC friends, am in awe of the conversations, the insights, the excitement, the debate, the engagement, and the passion for learning and education I'm seeing everywhere, on every level.

When I lectutred last week in Italy on digital youth, someone asked me how I made the connection between digitality and neuroscience. That's an easy question and an extremely difficult one and the path from one to the other is: learning.

I've blogged a lot about this new project I'm doing on how we know the world, on cognition and change . . . well, some days, learning isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Instead of seeing "teaching" as the polar opposite of "research," we should be thinking of our classrooms as the place to test out all of the skills necessary to translate research into scholarship. Isaac de Waal says teaching is what makes us distinctively human. Why not consider that complex, interactive act as the theoretical grounding for all communication?

How does learning art, music, or dance impact our cognitive abilities?  

Here is a reposting from my TechPsych blog:

We hate it that the magnitude of the Competition overwhelmed our tiny crew (and our heroic, overworked judges) and that we cannot provide comments. But we hope to offer some general comments that might be useful to those writing a grant for the first time and we're exploring tools for allowing people to comment on one another's proposals, peer-to-peer. Stay tuned!

Travel, courage, learning . . . a koan of mistakes and not falling.

Virtual worlds such as Club Penguin are designed for young children--and Disney and others are aiming younger and younger. To my mind, this opens the door even more for a Vygotskian v. Piagetian theory of knowledge acquisition.

Irvine Welsh (author of TRAINSPOTTING) has a new book of short stories coming out next month. I've ordered with my Amazon one-click because who can resist this title: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work