XplanaZine

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

Jeff Utecht posts this article about the challenges and opportunities involved with getting faculty to do new things. “If teachers knew about blogs, understood how they could be using and how to
integrate them, would they become as popular as PowerPoint? What if teachers had
as much training on blogs, wikis, and web 2.0 as they have had over the last 5
years in PowerPoint. Would we see the same use?”

Albert Ip links to this demonstration by Ric Canale on converting Harvard Business case studies into role-playing simulations. As Ric points out, role-playing simulations have grown more popular in education over recent years and an increasing amount of study is being conducted on their pedagogical effectiveness. This presentation, while somewhat specific in its application, provides a nice overview of some of the possibilities related to this online teaching form.

And, Wesley Fryer writes about school governance and what it will take to change the way school administrations view new ideas and threatening concepts. This is in line with Stephen Downes response to Albert Ip’s post “What if Everything We Think About School Is Wrong?” Stephen writes, “Albert Ip also quotes some comments - this one struck me: “The world is not run by democratic process, and you usually CAN’T do what you want to do…” Well, yes, most of the world is undemocratic. But this is the problem. And we will not counter this by silently acquiescing to authoritarianism, either in our schools or in our lives. ”