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The More Things Change, the More They Change . . .


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Are students maturing without adequate social skills? Apparentlysocial scientists and psychologists have had enough time to research behaviorsof young people using social media to determine that the face (or that would belack of face) of social contact is changing in our world.

Students who grow up with social media tools and participatein continuous digital multi-tasking are missing important social skills. Thinkabout it - you can’t learn to “read” a person’s expression if all you see arewacko photos on Facebook and short text messages and Tweets.

Are the components that make us human changing? StanfordUniversity surveyed over 3,000 American girls, ages 8-12, and found that thosewho spent the most time using digital devices had the most difficulty withsocial interaction.

So what would a society be like if people communicateddigitally, rather than face-to-face? I see a YA trilogy in the making.


Thing Four


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There is a great deal of buzz in the education community about 21stCentury Learning, social media and connectivity. Perhaps we should be lookingat one of the world’s most successful (though not perfect) companies to learntheir guiding principles.

Google, Inc. wrote “10 Things” and corporate leaders revisit theseideas every couple of years to see if they still hold true. (There’s arefreshing concept for educators as well.)

Principle NumberFour: Democracy on theweb works.
Google believes that its searchfunction work s because users get to “vote” each time they land on a page. Atcorporate headquarters their hard drives are crunching numbers to determinewhich sites offer the greatest content value to customers. And we are allcustomers.
They also innovatethrough open source software development, thereby making more programs “free.”  
How about democracyin the classroom? Do your students perform better when they make choices abouthow to present what they are learning? Must everyone make a poster? Please sayit isn’t so!
How do you offer democraticchoices to your students?

Best Practice Makes Perfect

I’ve thought about "practice makes perfect" since I readMalcolm Gladwell’s chapter on 10,000 hours in his book, Outliers.Gladwell contends that people who are really good at what they do havepracticed for more than 10,000 hours. It’s hard to disagree. He includes stories about TheBeatles and Bill Gates in his list of practitioners.


Now there is more research on practice, specifically whatkind of practice makes perfect - it's deliberate practice. There is no betterexample of this than the way my husband and I play golf. He goes to a practicerange weekly and hits 100 or more balls, carefully making adjustments to hisstance and swing. He also plays 18 holes once or twice a week. I, on the otherhand, play nine holes twice a month. I sometimes go to the practice rangebefore play, but not often. I have a good time - sometimes. It’s not worthkeeping score. My husband improves his game steadily.

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According to the research of improvement comes from the laborious process of determiningwhere we are erring and self-correcting until our achievement is up tostandard.

See the full article by Annie Murphy Paul, author of Origins.Paul is currently working on a book about the science of learning, practicinguntil it’s perfect.

http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-practice-makes-perfect/