Picture Credit: Flickr/Stanford Center for Internet and Society, CC BY-NC-SA Looking for a deeper understanding The effect of digital media on learning is the pervasive power behind the current revolution in education. Ranging from Open Educational Resources (OER) to Blended Learning Models, media profoundly transform key topics of education. Subjects such as media literacy, media education, media pedagogy, the acquisition of digital competences, the digital divide, media socialization, and e-learning, among many others, dominate educational…
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Why I left Facebook: A Letter to My Friends
Dear Friends, When I joined Facebook about eight years ago, the more tragic consequences of social networks had not arrived yet. There were no Russian trolls, there was no US voter manipulation, rigging the system for a complete madman, no Cambridge Analytica, no support of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and no tolerating of other hate-groups since political echo chambers had not visibly arrived yet. Mark Zuckerberg never realized how he had been living in…
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John Hattie: Invisible Learning – Visible Amateur Science
A critical review on John Hatties work on 'Visual Learning'
The TPCK Model of Technological Education: Explaining Everything, Achieving Little
A critical discussion about the usefulness of the TPACK model for digital education
Why Solidarity? Notes on Social Justice
Our Natural Sense of Solidarity is Both Necessary and Compromised Our natural sense of solidarity with others is situationally compromised, no matter how self-glorifying we perceive ourselves. While we generally feel great empathy for the suffering of others such as e.g., on TV as we see children ripped apart by bombs in war zones or scrapping for food on third-world garbage landfills, we also close our eyes with ease once we are asked to pay…
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What the OECD Findings on Students’ Collaborative Problem-Solving Skills Tell Us … And What Not
Congratulations, Singapore! As one of the pioneers that have championed Problem-Based learning (PBL) in Singapore, I was delighted to see Singapore on the No.1 spot in collaborative problem-solving when the OECD (OECD, 2017) presented its results on November 21, 2017. Many years of hard work by consultants like myself and government investment into a more student-centered pedagogy have, obviously, paid off. Still, we need to be prudent on how to interpret the results since there…
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About the Methodology of Social Change
The limitations of traditional empirical research and the prospect of participatory study design
The Creative Mind: Kant, Hegel and the Complexity of Life in the 21st Century
Artwork: Through spirit’s gaze by Andrew James Campbell. Acrylic on torn paper. A4 1982. With kind permission of the artist. The source of the title is “The Spirit shall look out through matters gaze, and matter shall reveal the Spirits face” Sri Aurobindo Kant and Hegel, 2.0 When Kant postulated in a Cartesian manner that we are the children of two distinct worlds, the cognitive and the empirical, and that we can derive clear-cut conclusions…
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Metacognition (Part 2): What Makes Us Truly Human? A Literature Review
To learn is to create: Educational robotics are a very recent trend that requires children and adolescents to plan, reason, experiment, create, play and learn from failure. In the process, they acquire and apply new knowledge. As in most such technology-based scenarios, students learn in teams. Photograph by Alain Herzog, 2015 The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old…
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Metacognition (Part1): What or How We Think is Not Quite as Important as How We Can Govern Our Reasoning
Photograph: Al Gore explaining data findings on global warming for his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (Picture Credit: The Hollywood Reporter) Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to progress gradually from one level of insight to another.…
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