XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.

Doug Belshaw provides his faithful service of keeping track of the previous week’s action in the edublogging space. This really is an insightful and useful weekly post and one of the best ways to keep up with things in a busy week!

If you haven’t been keeping up with David Warlick’s posts on “Flat Classrooms,” you can do so via this article on the TechLearning Blog.

“What about an education system that is challenged to prepare children for their
future, and it’s not their father’s future — and their classrooms are also
becoming flat. Traditional education has been an environment of hills and
slopes. The teacher could rely on gravity to support the flow of curriculum down
to the learners. But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no
longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone.”

Graham Wegner has a nice spin off on the topic as he tries to apply David’s thinking to the Aussie classroom.

Also, I failed to mention Wesley Fryer’s interesting article from last Friday titled “Censored for relevance.” The post starts off with a description of how his blog is censored in some schools because of his posts about MySpace (and MySpace is one of the topics “filtered” by some schools). What follows is a whole treatise on openness and globalization. Most interesting.

Finally, Harold Jarche add to Christian Long’s post on the use of PDAs by medical students.

“Learners need up to date information and access to knowledgeable people in their
own, as well as other, fields. Textbooks no longer meet that need. Unfortunately
for specialists and textbook writers, the digital medium is making many of them
redundant. The textbook is no longer the primary source of knowledge; instead
it’s the messy, disorganised worldwide web.”