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Ed Hitchcock
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5 hours ago
Yup: http://bipedalia.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/thought-of-the-day-2/ I find that I have a tendency to "default" to old habits. In teaching, surfing, cooking, anything. I have to actively choose to experiment with new things. I presume this is norm...
7 hours ago
Sigh is right... I am on this virtual teeter-totter between my total enthusiasm for what kind of learning CAN take place online and intense pessimism about the institutional obstacles that get put in our way....
9 hours ago
"but once you start going beyond that and venturing out onto the great ocean that is the Internet, great things can happen." Which brings me back to the original post... *Sigh*
11 hours ago
Ed, you are exactly right about the problems with maintaining content in Blackboard. Even worse, imagine what happens when you switch (and sooner or later everyone swtiches) to a new system. The course management systems do not let you ever have t...
12 hours ago
When we first introduced Blackboard, I got excited and created learning units and assignments and adaptive release materials for a progressive mastery approach to my courses. All courses were archived, but when I came back those courses after two ...
12 hours ago
I'm currently spending a little time pondering edu20.org. (Following a mention over on Classroom2.0) It looks to include a swarm of course maangement tools, grades and so on - but it also has a variety of 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, forums, groups, ...
12 hours ago
Hi Ed, I spent several unhappy years using Blackboard; now we use Desire2Learn which is only marginally better. Increasingly I'm convinced that course management systems are the worst thing that has happened to online learning, since it promises t...
13 hours ago

Profile Information

Tell about your involvement in education, and your ideals for collegial sharing
Part of my role as an administrator is to oversee the curriculum, including improvement to the existing curriculum and implementation of new curriculum. Change does not always come easy in a school, and the only way it can happen is through collaboration, and buy-in by the frontline educators who will be implementing it. This means not only ensuring the necessary tools are in place, but also being able to listen to concerns, and help work towards solutions. In short, I love hashing out ideas with other teachers.
About Me:
I am an educator from a family of educators. My background is in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, and I teach General Science, Biology and Physics (these latter up to and including AP level). I have also taught Math and Computers, but not in the last several years. I am also Director of Academics (like a VP, sort of) for a an independent school in Toronto.
My escapism is Astronomy. I am a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) and host the Budget Astronomer website.
Website:
http://www.budgetastronomer.ca

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Ed Hitchcock

A Pointless War

There is a battle waging, one that we cannot possibly win. The "enemy" is too resourceful, and we are battling on their home ground. I am not talking of the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in our own halls and classrooms. I am speaking of the war to block the internet...
A few years ago the decision was made to go laptop, and it was a decision I supported, because it gives every student a complete library and multimedia production studio at their fingertips. The catch-phrases being used we… Continue

Posted on November 11, 2009 at 11:49am — 10 Comments

Ed Hitchcock

A quick analogy

I like analogies. I find they are one of the quickest ways to get students to latch onto an idea.
This morning I was going back over the "first day advice" discussion, and another analogy occured to me. You know the old practical joke where students (typically engineers) disassemble a car and reassemble it in a dorm room (or the Dean's office)? Well, as a teacher, that is in a sense what I do. I take ideas, disassemble them into their component parts, and reasemble them inside my student's heads… Continue

Posted on August 13, 2009 at 9:32am — 2 Comments

Ed Hitchcock

Experiment, part I

As part of our comittment to public outreach, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada runs a series of lectures for the general public (free, but signup required) called NOVA (New Observers to Visual Astronomy). I had never done one of these before, but I was in the right place at the right time - having coffee with the organizer when he got the call that one of the speakers had to cancel - and agreed to fill the gap.

As I was preparing my talk it occurred to me that a one-shot deal for a few… Continue

Posted on July 26, 2009 at 1:55pm — 5 Comments

Ed Hitchcock

Taking stock, introspection and taking a leap

I have been an educator for almost two decades now, and have been an administrator, in one form or another, for most of the last decade. Over the past year, I have been reflecting on what I do and how I do it. I have come to the conclusion that although I am good at what I do as an administrator, I really don't enjoy it. At least, not in its current form, and not at my present school. Perhaps one day I will again find an admin position that I do enjoy, but until that time I have decided to step… Continue

Posted on March 29, 2009 at 4:16pm — 4 Comments

Ed Hitchcock

Freedom is Good. Right?

From Bipedalia:

Freedom is important. The Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought over it. The First and Second World Wars were fought to defend it. The United States was founded with the Charters of Freedom, and Freedom of Speech is entrenched in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So freedom is always a good thing, right?

Right?

No. Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom are terms that have been misused and co-opted for the purpose of i… Continue

Posted on February 22, 2009 at 8:30pm — 33 Comments

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At 12:39am on November 12, 2009, Ian Carmichael said…
Ed, one of the great intrigues in my early physics education was the course on (Terrestrial) infra-red astronomy - where the discussion and action is about the noise-to-signal ratio (I don't recall the figure, but I think it was 10 or 100-1) and the cute solution of subtracting a neighbouring section of sky to get some signal! (Well, such was the story in '72: days are different now.)
At 2:23am on October 30, 2009, Or-Tal Kiriati said…
Hi,what grades do you teach physics to?
At 1:12pm on August 15, 2009, Connie Weber said…
Hi Ed,
Want to put up some information and links for the Perseids Meteor Shower?
At 9:30am on February 5, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…
The planetarium on campus is GREAT - they have this giant sundial outside! My husband worked in the camera shop across from campus back in the 60s and loves to tell about the astronauts who came to Chapel Hill to learn celestial navigation! :-)
At 8:59am on February 5, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…
How exciting, Ed! So you don't have lots of childhood memories of Chapel Hill then! My husbands talks a lot about how it has grown grown grown and changed so much. My parents go to Vancouver every summer so I've been up there a few times - what a fantastic place! It is the only part of Canada I have visited. :-)
At 12:09am on February 5, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…
SMALL WORLD! My husband was born in Chapel Hill which is why we moved back here; his dad is still here, and not so long ago widowed, so when my husband retired, we decided to move here (so far, Univ. of Oklahoma is letting me keep on teaching at a distance) - I can't remember if that is our spring break time or not, but if we are in town, we could meet at the Brewery hoping for the FUNKY MONK (great Belgian beer they sometimes make)... but all kinds of other delights are available too. Keep me posted on your plans - how did you end up in Toronto??? :-)
At 7:11pm on February 4, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…
Hi Ed, if you are ever in Durham-Raleigh-ChapelHill, we will have to rendezvous at the Chapel Hill Brewery!!! North Carolina is a great state for micro-breweries and local beers! :-)
At 10:41am on January 29, 2008, Connie Weber said…
I love the whole ACOS idea. Last night I was thinking of the various ways to do it: on Google Docs, on a wiki, on a ning. Decided it'd be best to keep within the ning, at least for a try. Can you imagine it, sequentially? Would it be forum after forum for a response, with out of character comments? Could you proved an example (such as copying a bit of your son's) for the class to see?
At 6:30am on January 22, 2008, Connie Weber said…
How about you choose a post that goes with any teaching/learning/systems/science theme? (most of them do, really.) I think it'd be good to get a strong nature-science stream going here. Also, this is my thing, but I really want to talk about information ecology, systems-approach, emergent pedagogy, distributed leadership, the relationship between networking and systems in biology.
Seems you've talked about some of those things--any articles you could place here in your blog?
What did you mean about this: "really need to find the right niche for that blog - the combination of observation log and thoughts on pedagogy is just not quite working for me :-)" Is it that you haven't found the right niche for those posts yet? Or are you saying that combination of thoughts isn't working...
Please consider yourself encouraged to get some of your essays on Fireside!
At 4:57pm on January 19, 2008, Connie Weber said…
Well, there's budgetastronomer, and also commun-IT that I've read--I'd go with the reflective comments from the latter first, and then get the cosmology blog going too. It'll enrich this site; and probably will bring some new feedback for you. They're great posts.
Somewhere I read one about finding analogies from nature, about what I call emergent pedagogy and you call something like producing information (as distinguished from consuming information).
Or, write a new one right now...there's always more time in a day, right?
Anyhow, nice writing, please share.
 
 

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