Discovery News: Earth, Space, Tech, Animals, Dinosaurs, History.

Read all about it. This is a great channel from the Discovery Channel bringing news about science, technology & human history. There’s great reading here and food for thought that can spark real interest, discussion and more learning.  Beats includes space, archeology, humans, earth, history, technology & animals, including dinosaurs.

Sept 14, 2009: The Washington Post Blog: The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk.

Learning styles gets a lot of attention in current teacher education. Daniel Willingham, guest blogger. cognitive scientiest and author of Why Students Don’t Like School, “It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.”  He goes on to state that, “Suggesting that teachers cater to learning styles—when teachers must already do some differentiation based on what students know—makes a teacher’s job much more difficult with no benefit to students.”

But the bottom line seems to be that categorizing students within the framework of auditory, visual and kinesthetic is meaningless. I would comment, however, that varying delivery methods can make for a more engaging classes. Learning often involves repeated exposure and actual use of information; doing that in different ways is certainly more interesting than doing it the same way all the time.

“I propose that there is a multiple intelligence for students that related directly to technology. I call it Multiple Technology Intelligences (MTI).”

• Animation Intelligence: Student learn by creating drawings and animations.
• Gaming Intelligence: Students learn through simulation, whether creating or playing.
• Video Intelligence: Students learn through the creation of multimedia video content such as digital storytelling.
• Music Intelligence: Student learn through the creation of music, ringtones, jungles, etc.
• Podcasting Intelligence: Student learn through the creation of audio narratives.
• Office Intelligence: Students learn best through the use of traditional office-style programs.
  
• Connecting Intelligence: Students learn best through the use of social networking. This also includes video conferencing.”

In creating assignments for students, it is important to allow them a choice of avenues for learning and presenting.This list of multiple technologies is an exceptionally great way to look at it and compare it to Gardner’s categories. Go to the post for some insightful comments. I particularly like adding Programming to the Gaming category.

Traditional semantics is the science of meaning in a language. But on the WWW it’s got new meaning. Perhaps you’ve heard the term Semantic Web and wondered what that’s all about. There’s a non-technical keynote speech from the Breakthrough ‘09 conference, a iMedia marketing summit, by Linguist David Crystal which explains this concept rather well (March 22-25, 2009). You can watch the video here. For a written summary, visit this page.

Although this conference is about marketing, advances in the semantic web could be important for education, too. One of the issues teachers have using the Internet in classrooms center around filtering and blocking so that inappropriate sites and ads aren’t viewable to students.  The main idea about the semantic web is to provide contextually appropriate material (ads) to viewers.

Perhaps this can also be applied to searching, and a coding entry  (XML) can be inserted to prevent inappropriate web pages and ads from appearing in schools more accurately. I also thought it interesting that he has identified about 3,000 knowledge base categories for classifying data.

David Crystal has written many books and articles. An interesting one is txtng the gr8 db8 and his article The joy of txt. Spotlight, November, 16-21addresses concerns about texting and language usage: “The more children text, the more they’re reading and writing.” From his Biography “David Crystal is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the UK National Literacy Association, and an honorary vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the Institute of Linguists, and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.” He’s also got a blog at http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/.

Click here to visit the download page.

“WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back – and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer.”

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?ex=1348891200&en=6c28466b3eb78d2f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink