Education as an Abstraction: Teaching with Real Things

When teaching becomes an abstraction and not something real, the learning doesn’t stick in the student very well.  Imagination must first be grounded in a hard reality.

As we move closer into living in a 24/7 virtual world, it is important for all of us to keep in mind that learning is best fostered using real things, in real-time, in the same, real, room with each other getting real.  That is important in all human interactions, not just the classroom.  We’re always trying to learn from each other and doing it with real objects is a powerful experience that binds.

When you’re teaching about a flower — is it better to show a computer image of a flower, or hand out a flower printed on a piece of paper, or is it best to share a real flower plucked from a garden in your alive hand?

A real flower authentically engages every bodily sense and creates a sensation in the mind.

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Why a Sack and a Bag are Synonymous

I never get tired of the “Ye Olde Sack and Bag” comedy routine routinely — for some reason — acted out in my life at least every couple of months and I fall prey to the skit every single time.

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How to Make a Paper Indian

It is always a fascination learning what materials artists use for creating their inspiration.  Allen and Patty Eckman live in South Dakota and since 1987, they have been making life-sized paper sculptures of Native American Indians.  This artistry has, so far, netted them a cool $5 million USD.

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Mind Manager or Paper Pusher?

When you elect a national leader — do you want a Mind Manager or a Paper Pusher?

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Kindle Makes Authors Publishers!

Kindle is Amazon’s new amazing e-book reader and it is a tremendous boon to authors everywhere because we can now, through Amazon’s network, directly publish our work for purchase.

You need to buy a Kindle — RIGHT NOW! — if you haven’t already to help build the device niche and to help propel the buying habits of your readers into the electronic age of virtual ink.

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Cheating to Get Ahead

There is no greater harm to intellect or the education process than plagiarizing.
When you steal or purchase the thoughts of others and claim them as your own — the entire salvation of the world crumbles to ash.

We were thrilled to learn this week that Google have refused to accept advertising from Paper Mills as reported by Chronicle.com:

Term-paper and essay-writing services join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google’s forbidden-advertising zone, the company announced yesterday. Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the
“sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page. (Links to those sites could still be found among the results on the main part of the page, however.)

The paper mills, which offer buyers papers written to order for a fee, have been the subject of sharp complaints from universities, which view them as sources of plagiarism. But the companies themselves have a different view.

It is only in the free discussion of ideas that thought gains purpose over emotion and instinct.

We are humanized by our minds and the facts of our shared human memory.

PowerPoint Pins Penned Paper

In the past month I have had three Thank You “notes” emailed to me as a single-slide PowerPoint presentation.
Have you ever received a PowerPoint “Thank You” or have you created one?

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