– a Singaporean teacher's storeroom 🖖
friends always ask what do I do at work@SCCL. this card more or less summarised a key activity – engaging CL teachers in deep conversation, and shifting their epistemology, one question at a time. 谢谢素娇 Doris for your kind words, and may your eyes be shining (Zander, 2012) for a long long time to come too (: #2017最有意义的教师节礼物 #throwback #2017TeachersDay #lifeOfaTeacherEducator
saw this TEDxPortland video shot last year only recently. while revisiting it that i noticed the opening words of the presenter:
“How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? … That’s most of you. I have some news for us creatives.”
what’s the significance of this short opening exchange?
i was quite surprised by some responses of people after they have watched the video, for example, “i feel scared”, “what if the machines are going to replace us”, “i admire those who are retiring soon”. but there again, these are quite normal too. however, i did not quite figure out the paradigm behind people with such responses. until, i revisited the video, and heard the opening exchange a second time.
my current hypothesis: people who produces such (downward spiral) responses are not knowledge creators. such words represent the mindset of industrial age production workers – routine, mass-production, clock-in-clock-out, predictability just to name a few. there’s no right or wrong judgment here. but in our business of preparing children for the knowledge age (or augmented age in the video), and where teachers’ beliefs influenced their actions, we need to think like and become a knowledge creator ourselves. what can we do to facilitate this shift in a major bulk of our teachers who learnt and grew up and laboured in the industrial age paradigm for a large part of their lives? how do we help teachers to shift into the creatives, designers, artists mode of thinking?
almost forget, here’s the video:
#enjoy
was reminded by fb feed of Professor Marc Levoy’s Digital Photography google site, could this be a next step for creating a variant to the online component in our blended learning courses?
first, an instructor (teacher educator) would make his/her contents freely online. teachers would be free (in terms of will) to browse and learn from the contents/videos freely (in terms of time and cost).
second, an instructor would conduct a blended Clinic course(s). teachers who perused the contents, and would like to deepen the learning through face-to-face engagement can sign up for the Clinic. during the f2f-online-f2f-online-f2f… cycle, the google site can become part of the resources upon which the conversations are anchored upon. likewise, in the blended Studio course(s), the google site can serve the same purpose as conversations are steered to incorporate the practice component.
just a 联想 (:
昨天12470课上，我们一起烧了一个下午的脑细胞，间中提到了“对 & 错” vs. “好 & 更好”的出发点和区别，过后我们也略微谈到了“批判性思维”一词。 “批判”一词在《现汉》（第5版）1034页是这样收录的：
(1) 对错误的思想、言论或行为做系统的分析，加以否定: ～虚无主义。
(2) 分析判别，评论好坏： ～地继承文学艺术遗产。
可见汉语对于批判的理解是对错鲜明的，甚至(1)里边就是针对错误出发。 难道我们在培养学生的critical thinking时只是在培养他们的挑毛病、找错误的能力？
有关批判性思维中文翻译的不恰当，可参考宋国明(2011)的这篇博文: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_631b937401013crx.html
英文中的Critical Thinking 呢？ “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” (取自CriticalThinking.Org) 。可见英文里的出发点不在找错，而是通过不同层次的思维，尤其是高阶思维的运用来对事物、事件、现象作分析，以得出个人的结论。 要了解 Critical Thinking 的原意，可前往以下网址：
https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766
我们可要把学生“教对了”哦 😛
Photo by theps.net 
have been relying on FastStone Capture 5.3 for many years but it started having compatible issues from windows 7 onwards. when it completely failed, have switched to using windows’ built-in snipping tool for a while. but the annotation part is troublesome.
found a great alternative this morning: greenshot.
it has all the functions of FastStone Capture, including upload to Dropbox support. and best part, it’s free, but we could always support the developer with a dollar or two if we like/can (:
#enjoy