Doug Holton's blog

I'm excited to be chairing a session for the Learning Sciences SIG at next year's AERA conference in Denver.  The session is titled "Embodied and Enactive Approaches to Instruction: Implications and Innovations."  Quite a few prestigious researchers from math education, cognitive science, and educational technology will be participating including James Paul Gee (video games & literacy), Robert Goldstone (cognitive science) & David Landy, Dor Abrahamson (math education) & MaClick here to read more »

So far half of the class has picked the cell phone banning issue to blog about.  I should have figured this since it is such a hot button issue.  Folks who haven't blogged yet I'd appreciate it if you could pick another issue/controversy to blog about (you can always comment on the posts of those who did blog about cell phones).

My own thoughts on the issue of banning cell phones - I've seen educational researchers (such as Elliot Soloway) explore potential educational uses of cell phones (earlier he plugged for PDAs).  But I agree with most of those who have blogged that (right now anyway), cell phones do not have much value in the classroom, they are more of a distraction.  I have noticed a contradiction though that the teachers themselves have and use cellphones.  Perhaps a compromise is to allow students to bring in cell phones but they must keep the ringer off and can only use them during breaks.

I posted some recent draft papers and presentations on my homepage.

I posted tips for when creating or editing content on this site here.

Make sure you choose the right group to send your blog post or wiki page to, don't paste from Word (or use the 'Paste from Word' button to clean it up first), and other tips on how to insert images and create hyperlinks.

This website was upgraded to drupal 6, and you will notice some visual glitches and broken links while we are still working on it over the course of the next week or two.

I'll post more details about the site's new and forthcoming features at a later date.