Mary Kalantzis
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Ideas Engine: What is The Geneva Learning Foundation’s insights mechanism?
It’s a cliché to claim that data is the “new oil”, a resource to be mined. We collect it from the field, refine it with experts, and utilize it for decision-making. However, we rarely ask what this extractive model does to the workers and communities that provide the raw materials. This is a summary of…
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Can analysis and critical thinking be taught online in the humanitarian context?
This is my presentation at the First International Forum on Humanitarian Online Training (IFHOLT) organized by the University of Geneva on 12 June 2015. I describe some early findings from research and practice that aim to go beyond “click-through” e-learning that stops at knowledge transmission. Such transmissive approaches replicate traditional training methods prevalent in the humanitarian context, but are…
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Experience and blended learning: two heads of the humanitarian training chimera
Experience is the best teacher, we say. This is a testament to our lack of applicable quality standards for training and its professionalization, our inability to act on what has consequently become the fairly empty mantra of 70-20-10, and the blinders that keep the economics (low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training with no measurable outcomes pays the…
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Education is the science of sciences
“We want to talk about science as a certain kind of ‘knowing’. Specifically, we want to use it to name those deeper forms of knowing that are the purpose of education. Science in this broader sense consists of things you do to know that are premeditated, things you set out to know in a carefully…
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Maybe old learning isn’t so bad, after all?
When I first saw Mary Kalantzis’s photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom in Greece, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the “communications and knowledge architecture” was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely “inside the box”. How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which…
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