Category: <span>Learning</span>

The Best Video Essays of All Time (IMO)

The video essay is not a brand new art form and it wasn’t created from scratch by YouTube’s algorithmic interest in long-form video that increases “watch time.” People have been constructing commentaries on popular culture and on “important works of art” since there was culture popular enough to be commented …

Parents vs. Teachers?

I am not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point in the last 50 years, teachers became “Other.” They became people who come from outside of the community in which they teach. Teachers became antagonists in a war for our nation’s soul. They became masters of indoctrination as …

Why I left Public Education (and then came back).

In November of 2010, I became the first ever Online Community Manager for Edmodo. I was the 13th employee at a startup that was barely two years old. It was my first remote position, and also my first role outside of public education. This is how I framed it to …

For the Kids

COVID and Vaccination politics are making for some very strange communication coming from my children’s school district, Littleton Public Schools. This week, every parent with at least one student in the district received a notice that Littleton was discontinuing the use of school buildings as community vaccination clinics. On the …

#DigPINS Week 3: Where does your Pedagogical Authority come from?

Let’s set the record straight: I do not have a Masters or PhD in Instructional Design. So, how can I claim Pedagogical Authority with faculty members or my peers who do? That’s what I would like to reflect upon during Week 3 of #DigPINS. Yesterday, I was a part of …

#DigPINS Week 2: I Cannot See My Network

As I have been cultivating my personal and professional learning networks online since the 2004-05 school year, I struggle with actually seeing online spaces as anything other than a learning network. The 15 years in the interim have so deeply engrained how I interact with connected learning, it has ceased …

An Extraordinary Gift

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the structures that support us and those that hold us back. Something that has been helping this thinking along is reading a book on Holacracy (a distributed, rather than hierarchical, structure for organizations): http://a.co/d4TrGE0. I have a feeling that I will …