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I’ve been grinding my teeth the past few months, irritable, exhausted, struggling to maintain a positive outlook. Not sure what it is, but I think it’s partly due to a rush to get done with things and not making the progress needed to get there. But the past few days have been getting clearer. I […]

I went to an AERA 2006 session on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and saw a presentation by Gail Richardson on “Measure Up” — a 120 hour Davydovian (student of Vygotsky) -style math curriculum. She’s in the Steinhardt School of Education (NYU) Russian Math Curriculum and works in New Jersey.
Anyway, as she was talking about how […]

I met with a fabulous editor at AERA who gave me more thorough feedback than I’ve had since peer edits in my MA in English. He’s a Comp & Rhet person, so I suppose…

you write well, but you over-write. Strive for much greater economy and precision and a more direct writing style. Speak to your […]

Below (posted previously), I’ve basically thrown my notes from the AERA (American Education Research Association) conference that I spent 6 days at. It was utterly mind-saturating for me — to the point where Saturday afternoon I could even not recall how many sessions I’d been to in the morning (it was one), much less who […]

Here I am in my local coffee shop, putting up my notes from AERA, and a few tables down a woman is complaining to the director of her son’s camp that the son was given a bad rating and not invited back to be a counselor this year because “he was a bad influence”.
OMG! she’s […]

Richard Lesh, Indiana University “Complex Systems Overview”

• Almost everything we study is a complex system (an ill-defined term covering a broad range of stuff).
• The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
• The action is in the interaction.
• Feedback […]

April 10, 2006: Developing Methodological Rigor in Design Research in education
www.rochester.edu/warner/aera
John Beck, George Mason “Handbook Design Research Methods”
Sasha Barab, IU “Illuminating “ILF”

• Web-supported community
• (Barab & Duffy) (Barab & Squire 2004 p3)
• traditional DBR: theory, design, and problem it addresses
• iteration #2 changes […]

Social Justice
Jill Andrea Pinkney Pastrana UW-Eau Claire
Shattering the myths of neoliberalism through challenging ideologies

• White student’s Discourse of resistance is a discourse/ideology of Empire
• Living in the matrix
• They don’t see the way the rest of the world lives, or what connection it has to them, […]

Cultural Historical Activity Theory
Teatro, Play and Imagination: The Creative engagement of Social Life
Shirin Vossoughi, Octovio Estrella (UCLA)
Theater of the Oppressed

Play, imagination, social analysis

Vygotskian notions of play
“children can become a head taller than themselves in play” - Vygotsky (?)
how do we re-invoke a sense of play in highschool student
Can Teatro humanize the world?
Form theater

Creating space, setting […]

NSF Update - www.cra.orgFederal (John Chirenesky)
• Cyber Infrastructure: 600 Teraflop conglomeration of connected super-computing centers 10Gb per second connection.
• National Virtual Observatory: data-mining applicatio for K-12 to use to search through various images of the Universe through assorted wavelengths.
• CyberCorp — like americorp, but after school, students spend two years protecting America’s networks.
takeaway: cybercorp is […]

DBR: A methodological Toolkit for the Learning Sciences
DBR came out of Learning Sciences and has developed along with it. Moves away from the lab and into the classroom, where there’s more messiness, but more authenticity.

Tweaks design to better
Cobb, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble (”Prototypically, design experiments….”) is becoming the defacto definition of DBR.
Within Quest Atlantis, […]

Writing the Doctorate; Writing the Scholar
Barbara Kamler and Pat Lorna Thompson
When students sketch out the nature of the field relevant to their inquiry, they are mapping a field of knowledge production.
Doctoral students might butt up against the published “experts”
• find that they drwon in the literature,
• he says; she says (a list) — student […]

Industrial Designers and 10 year olds making furniture
University of Alberta in Edmonton (30,000 undergrads +6-7000 grads)
Brenda Gustofson, Dougal A G MacDonald,
Design Technology is based on identifying a need and potential solutions to that need.
- design technology is value laden
“Can studying children as they work with adult, novice designers provide insight into how to facilitate children’s […]