Corona virus: Silver lining? For learning?

by | Saturday, March 21, 2020

A week or so ago, Yong Zhao reached out to Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Scott McLeod and me with the question:

What would happen to our global and local educational systems, if the Corona virus outbreak lasted for a year?

We met a week ago (via zoom, what else) to discuss this and that has led to a a website and a live broadcast under the broad heading: Silver Lining for Learning. The show will be broadcast live on YouTube Live from 5:30 to 6:30pm US EDT on Saturdays and archived on the website silverliningforlearning.org. As we describe it on the website:

The “dark cloud” of the coronavirus crisis continues to cause havoc worldwide and seems a generation-defining event. In education, this crisis has forced schools and universities to close, pushing often unprepared institutions to move teaching and learning online. The already stressed educational ecosystem now faces unprecedented difficulties that will fall disproportionately on students of low socioeconomic status and marginalized groups. This situation continues to worsen and is expected to persist for months or even years before normalcy occurs.

This disruption, however, provides us with an opportunity to reimagine learning and teaching so as to create an equitable and humanistic learning ecosystem for all. Barriers and structures that have resisted much needed change are now in disarray, offering the chance for transformative improvements.

We seek to begin this reimagining through a series of interactive conversations of emerging trends, disruptive policies, programs, initiatives, and often controversial, murky, and unspoken topics.

The first episode is now done and dusted. We had great participation from people who logged on via YouTube, who were running a parallel discussion on that channel, as well as on Twitter. Scott somehow managed to participate in all three—while I stuck to two: the Zoom discussion and the YouTube chat. Anyway, the video is now available (minus some truncated introductory bits at the beginning).

Watch out for the next edition, coming up on Saturday 5:30 ET.

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Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. For instance this page (a story about ipods being used by the army) contains a set of banner ads that seek...

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Peer review in the science classroom

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Sanjay Patel is an animator at Pixar and has come up with a beautifully designed book about Indian gods and goddesses. Check it out at his website, whimsically called GheeHappy. [You will need to go to the site FAQ to understand what that means.] The illustrations are...

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Tipping point for online learning: The interview

I had written a blog post towards the beginning of the pandemic (Tipping point for online learning, OR the postman always rings twice). In this piece, I built on something Neil Postman had written back in 1998 to try and better understand the current context....

TPACK handbook review

Matt Koehler just pointed out a hilarious review of the TPACK handbook on Amazon.com. It is short, pithy and completely unconnected to the book. The review, apparently written by Richard Delgado at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, in its entirety is: ...a...

Photoshopping in the cloud

Cloud computing maybe the next big thing. Google Apps and Chrome, gmail and flickr, YouTube and Yahoo Groups, I am moving more and more of what I do online. Even this blog in some way is an example of how I archive my work on the net. And today I discovered Pixlr....

Recreating D-Day…

... on a shoe-string budget. Three designers and a big empty beach, see the results! http://www.youtube.com/v/WRS9cpOMYv0

21st Century Learning, one school’s ongoing story

Recently I had been invited to the Birmingham School District to speak to the administrators, teachers and broader community about their recent initiatives on 21st Century Learning. I had a wonderful visit - which I was reminded of by this article (On the Front Lines...

1 Comment

  1. Geoffrey Lautenbach

    I posted this on the YouTube feed but thought I would duplicate here… A few things I took from this talk… Firstly, “never waste a good crisis!” Spot on there… At a time of crisis we take certain decisions… and the decisions we make today will lay the foundation for the Post Covid-19 era. Luckily as educators we can guide those decisions.

    Looking forward to discussion in future talks on issues of “equity” – hot topic here at the moment in South Africa for example. On this point I loved the question posed by Punya “are we going to accept the lowest common denominator… of what online learning can be?” You are also quite correct in saying that “suddenly teacher expertise is only now being valued worldwide…” – evidenced in all of the memes out there related to parents doing home schooling turning to alcohol and expelling the kids on day 3 🙂 (and in all of the scientific illiteracy you mentioned – can you believe some of the rubbish that has been posted by some “experts”?) Many parents over here only now see that schools have become the center of too much… “the world’s problems”… (like teaching relationships, morals and values, appropriate behavior, to name only a few). We do need to get back to a focus on learning in schools and parents need to play their own part in the education of their kids.

    Seeing the rush by our schools (both government and private) to move everything online and “replicate the formal timetable” I totally agree that it is a good time to give kids a break. Time to step back and see what other issues are important. Regarding your comments on socio-emotional learning – it is true… parents are NOT “present” enough at the moment to ensure this learning (well in our context for sure!). Family backgrounds (and opinions on learning) differ greatly over here but like you said… there are positive opportunities for all of us in education… I am going to ask our students tonight if they have any ideas on this issue… (we are dealing with issues related to assessment at the moment) and hopefully I can share them with you later?

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