Author Archives: Steve Pauls
What Part Does Technology Have to Play in the Future of Education? (Part III)
This blog post is the third in a series concerning technology in education stemming from the Jean Piaget Society Conference I attended in June. The theme of this year’s conference was “Technology and Human Development.” It provided a venue to discuss technology through a variety of different academic disciplines and research frames of reference all… Continue Reading
What Part Does Technology Have to Play in the Future of Education? (Part II)
I have been exploring the idea of technology in education since attending the Jean Piaget Society (JPS) Conference in San Francisco in early June. The theme for the 2017 conference was Technology and Human Development. In my last blog post, I reflected on the increasing rate of change in technology and how that exponential change… Continue Reading
What Part Does Technology have to Play in the Future of Education? (Part I)
The major theme of the Jean Piaget Society annual conference in June was Technology and Human Development. Since attending the conference, I have been part of several fascinating discussions that I would like to explore concerning the future advance of technology within education. In his book Singularity, Ray Kurtzweil talks about how human beings are… Continue Reading
Attending a Jean Piaget Society (JPS) Conference
A few weeks ago, I was privileged to attend the 47th Jean Piaget Society (JPS) Conference held in San Francisco. This annual conference brings together an intriguingly diverse group of individuals interested in the psychologist Jean Piaget and his prolific work in the area of constructivism and childhood cognitive development. At this conference, you can… Continue Reading
The Importance of the Maker Movement to Education
A couple of weeks ago, my family and I made our annual spring trek to San Mateo, California to attend the Granddaddy of all Maker Faires. This faire, in its eleventh year, is the flagship of the Maker movement. In 2006, much to everyone’s surprise, 22,000 people gathered to participate in the inaugural event. Now,… Continue Reading
Personal Perception of Reality
Teaching science I often wonder how my students perceive the physical world as they delve deeply into science concepts. It is often assumed that our personal perception of the world around us is the same from one person to the next. Yet current cognitive research indicates that we have far more “senses” than the five… Continue Reading
Papert’s Idea of Play in the Classroom
The power of play is a foundational idea in education, especially in regards to young children. It is something I have been thinking about a lot lately within the context of spatial learning. Seymour Papert, who passed away in 2016, was a visionary in the field of education and was a huge proponent of the… Continue Reading
Musings on the 2017 NARST Conference
Last week I attended the conference of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching or NARST in San Antonio, Texas. This is an annual conference that brings together researchers in science education from around the world. I am always surprised at the international aspect of this conference. A person is just as likely to… Continue Reading
Piaget’s Water Level Task
While it might seem obvious that living in a three-dimensional world would require a certain amount of innate spatial abilities, it is less obvious in how this spatial ability informs science and math learning. Current research in visuospatial ability does show that children who have an understanding of how shapes fit together, and can see… Continue Reading
Technology and its Relationship to Education
As humans, we tend to think of change as slow and plodding within a historic context. We can look back at our history and see the culmination of events over time and from that infer systemic cultural change. Pick a topic, it doesn’t matter which, history will show us the inevitable change that marks it… Continue Reading
