Blurts

This opportunity requires immediate action if it sounds interesting. Justin Reich, author of “Failure to disrupt” (a book about why technology has not played a larger role in education) is offering a free presentation entitled – What the History of Education Technology Teaches us about Pandemic Teaching. You must have a ticket (free) available at EventBrite.

September 22,2020 at 3:30PM – 4:30 PM EST

I have participated in several of these presentations in recent months typically associated with a book. There is no requirement to purchase the book before or after, but the presentation may interest you in a deeper investigation of a topic.

The challenge and the inequity of child care has become quite visible during the pandemic. The issue has been there in the past few decades but not widely discussed. It is now obvious how important child care is to the general economy as working parents struggle to find a way to care for their children with many schools not engaged in full-time face to face education. The inequity has always been there because of the cost of care and the dilemma faced by poor parents, particularly poor single parents, in both working and finding a way to provide appropriate care for their children. So many complain naively about the work ethic of such parents. The pandemic has only made this situation worse.

We have seven grandchildren within easy driving distance. We have never been involved in full-time care for our grandkids while parents worked, but we have provided some help when a special circumstance such as illness or the temporary closure of a normal childcare option required help. As seventy year olds it is now necessary to be a little selfish. We can help with equipment, but risking personal health with families already asked to quarantine a couple of times because of known exposure. Expecting the elderly to provide coverage with parents working and thus exposed and kids sometimes in and sometimes out of school would be unwise and selfish.

Parents of means have sometimes organized themselves into small groups to take care of their children and assist in remote education. It is not just the differences in family income making this possible, but also the likelihood these parents have the opportunity to schedule their work more flexibly and often because they can work from home. This practice is often described as a child care pod.

One of our daughters involved in such a pod and recognizing how such opportunities are not possible for all happened across a kick starter project for partially funding similar approach for the benefit of families not able to provide it for themselves. She brought this to our attention and we all contributed. This seems a possible alternative approach when governments on multiple levels often seem unable to provide a solution.

This is a continuation of my series on data literacy

Probes provide a way to collect information from the environment and summarize it numerically. You use a probe when you check someone’s temperature with a medical thermometer or a thermometer that reports the temperature outside of your window. Our textbook devotes considerable space to the classroom use of probes as allowing student participation in authentic activities. Probes were a category of digital tool we emphasized in our expansion of the core ideas we first found in Jonassen’s description of mindtools. We describe an authentic task as mimicking the behavior of practitioners. There is a theoretical explanation for the benefits of contextualizing learning through the use of authentic tasks, but this is type of thing I explain in our textbook and not here.

Probes play an essential role in most sciences and engineering and the data generated are important inputs to mathematical and statistical calculations. Probes have long been promoted for classroom use. I used to see multiple booths at education conferences displaying the probes companies had available and demonstrating some of the types of information these probes could collect.  Student use of probes to conduct authentic investigations just seems such a logical fit with STEM initiatives and yet I don’t see the frequent use I expected when these devices first became available for classroom use. Again, probes represent another of the mysteries of why some ideas catch on in education and others do not. 

My recent example of the multi-function power consumption monitor would be the last example of a probe I have used. Here is another example of a probe (heart rate monitor) that you may have used personally applied to a novel investigation. The links at the end of this example offer access to some of the companies providing probes for classroom use. 

Probes = another opportunity for student data collection.

Wikipedia has a challenger in the category of user created encyclopedia content. Everipedia (the encyclopedia of everything) is based on a blockchain model. The new platform is being promoted by notables including the cofounder of wikipedia. I am not certain I understand the logic of why a blockchain approaches offers an advantage or why a competitor is necessary. I guess this venture promises benefits to contributors beyond the satisfaction of sharing their knowledge. This is not an endorsement, but I do think it is worth a look.