Streaming Thoughts

I’ve moved this blog over to http://briancsmith.org.  I will no longer be using EduBlogs.org for hosting my blog.  Thanks for the memories, I just wanted a little more control.  Now, I need to write more.
If you’ve been subscribing, thank you and change your subscriptions to this new feed… http://feeds2.feedburner.com/bcsmith.  If you haven’t please consider doing [...]

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I’m cynical. Pessimistic.  A nay-sayer among nay-sayers… and I’m sorry.
In conversation with a small group of teachers today I realized that I’m not giving educators enough credit for being learners. Deep down I know they learn, we all learn.  So why am I generalizing them to a lot that, as I sometimes see, cannot [...]

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I took a recent trip to Wikipedia to search for “21st Century Learning” and “21st Century Skills“.  As of this posting, there isn’t an article for either. 
So many are sharing and preaching 21st century learning and skills for our schools and yet neither is documented on one of the best examples of collaboration for [...]

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It has taken quite awhile for me to really piece together my experience at NECC. I’ll be honest, I’ll still be piecing it together for sometime to come. I went into the conference expecting to meet new people and meet face to face with those I’ve connected with on-line over the past year [...]

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I often receive rolling eyes when I mention
conversations I’ve had with others. Well, NECC is here and a lot of
it is about conversation. Conversations in the halls of the conference
center, the Blogger’s Cafe, before, during and after concurrent
sessions or at dinner. Tonight’s conference kicked off well for
conversation with Brian Crosby, Bud [...]

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Today, I woke up, grabbed some coffee and settled into my ritual of reading my daily feeds of news and blog posts. First in my aggregator as this post by Sylvia Martinez related to gaming and education. My comments on her post were from the perspective of professional development and how sometimes [...]

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I’m currently reading Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger and as I began a question popped into my head. Do most educators knowingly base their practice within a particular theory or approach?

A web search for theories of learning turned up a site that categorized learning theories into Paradigms:

Behaviorism – Based on stimulus-response [...]

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I’ve been tagged by Sylvia for the Passion Quilt Meme.  I’ve decided to pull from my personal collection for this photo meme.  The photo above is of our daughter after helping me to find a geocache almost 3 years ago.
Often times when we go geocaching we don’t find a cache because we see something more [...]

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I’ve been thinking more and more about the networks/communities we build using technology. My experience at Educon had me thinking even more about it as several of the attendees discussed building global networks vs. local networks. Reading about the Science Leadership Academy’s culture you’ll see that local communities of learners (educators included) without the [...]

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I’m not the strongest blogger. I honestly struggle with writing posts. Most times they just seem, to me, to be so thin and inconsequential. I’ve been told that some of my best posts/comments take place in a few Ning networks that are supporting some local initiatives that I am a part of. [...]

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