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Digital Life & Learning

Digital technologies offer exciting opportunities for learning, civic engagement, and intercultural exchange, among other vital areas of life. Virtual worlds and mobile devices offer new ways of learning and transfer of learning beyond the classroom. Online communities can connect young people from diverse backgrounds to exchange perspectives, while informal learning and civic engagement opportunities abound on social media sites, blogs, and other online spaces. Yet, the internet can also present distractions, misinformation, and negative interactions. It’s vital that educators leverage the positive affordances of digital media and support youth to use them in reflective, positive ways.

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Book

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking. ISBN-13: 978-1138240407

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Tool

Ethical Dilemmas and Value-Based Decisions

A resource from The Good Project

Ethical Dilemmas and Value-Based Decisions

A resource from The Good Project

All of us encounter challenges in our lives. Sometimes they are quickly or easily resolved, but other times, it is not clear what to do, and there is no right or wrong answer. This is a dilemma. When we are faced with a dilemma, it is important to stop and consider our choices carefully and recognize how our values will influence our decision. We must also think about how our decisions will affect others. Ethics is a word for the sense of right and wrong we have about our actions and their consequences.

This interactive online unit from The Good Project is intended for a teenage audience and is based on the project’s GoodWork Toolkit curriculum. It includes two animated videos in which young people encounter ethical dilemmas, which are paired with reflective values-based activities and questions. Through this unit, students will learn to recognize how personal values influence decision-making and also come to understand what it means to make an ethical decision.

View the Module

Article

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

An initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Out of Eden

Learn is an online learning community that connects school-age students from

around the world to engage together in “learning journeys” of cross-cultural inquiry

and exchange. These learning journeys invite young people to do several things: to

slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; to

exchange stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; and to reflect

on how their individual lives connect to bigger human stories. Out of Eden Learn

accompanies Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul

Salopek’s epic Out of Eden Walk: his multi-year journey on foot around the world

along the migratory pathways of our ancient human ancestors and experiment in

“slow journalism.”

This white paper is intended to explain the underlying philosophy and model of Out of

Eden Learn.

Use the link under Resource Links to download the entire white paper.

Download White Paper

Article

Howard Gardner on Good Work for Lawyers

A resource from The Good Project

Howard Gardner on Good Work for Lawyers

A resource from The Good Project

Article Sample via Harvard Law School's periodical The Practice.

Article Sample

David B. Wilkins: Your recent work focuses heavily on conceptions of “the good.” So I’d like to begin with the most basic question that you address in your work: Who is the “good worker,” and what are the profiles of “the good” that you’ve been writing about?

Howard Gardner: Let’s start with the good professional—the good worker. At the Good Project, we’ve looked at nine different professions, and we’ve conducted and analyzed close to 1,500 interviews. Over a 10-year period we determined that being a good worker had three components—the Three Es: Excellence, Engagement, andEthics. We produced a visual of the three intertwined Es and somewhat whimsically dubbed it the “Triple Helix” or “ENA.” If you want to be a good worker, you can’t just be excellent, you can’t just be engaged, and you can’t just be ethical. You need to have those intertwined strands of ENA.

The Triple Helix of being a good worker.

Let’s take the law as an example. You could be very well informed and an expert (hence, excellent), but you could be bored or alienated (hence, disengaged). Lawyers report more unhappiness—including depression—than almost any other profession, so clearly many lawyers are not fully engaged. As we well know from the press, lots of lawyers skate on thin ethical ice and test how far they can push limits before falling into a chilly pond! On the other hand, you are also going to have people who are highly ethical but aren’t up-to-date. So the Triple Helix—the achievement of all three Es—is aspirational.

This is exactly where John Bliss’s work (see “The Professional Identity Formation of Lawyers”) is so illuminating, because you see these strands competing with one another. Nobody would say that corporate lawyers don’t try to achieve excellence, but often engagement is more a role they seek to fill rather than a genuine intrinsic enthusiasm about the work they perform every day. I would add, however, that I don’t think any branch of law has a corner on being ethical or on testing limits.

We would all like the professionals with whom we are involved to be excellent and engaged and ethical. That’s what we’d like of our doctor, our accountant, the architect of our home. And most of us would like to realize that combination in our own work lives. When you look at the tensions experienced by “drifters” (see “The Professional Identity Formation of Lawyers”), they prefer to think of themselves in one way—doing God’s work—but feel they’re being pulled in ways that don’t make them happy. That pull risks making them less engaged. They also worry that when they have to look in the “ethical looking glass” or the “moral mirror,” they’re not going to be happy with what they see.

But it’s complicated. You’ve got people who do public interest law who are very unethical. You’ve got people who are doing high-end corporate work and are very ethical. It’s not a necessary correlation or lack of correlation, but it’s probably not random either.

Download the full article in the Resource Links section to the right.

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