The Wikiness

Snaps to Dorit Elion for her Idart (not sure what the acronym stands for yet), a program leveraging social media to facilitate kids’ goal-setting.

Her proposal is currently up for voting at the Houghton-Mifflin Global Education Challenge page right now. Her program would work with students setting specific, measurable goals (perfect for my school’s need to focus on standards).

Dorit’s Idart sits atop other platforms and assists students in laying out and publicizing their learning goals. She bases it on research showing the technology of the group in goal-achievement. “People tend to stick to a commitment if they know friends, family, or teachers follow their progress.”  


She must have taught at least half my students, whose dependent, passive, and “tell me what to do” attitude wastes valuable time. Put the onus on students and we possibly engage them, and if so increase learning efficiency by huge factors.  Instead of facilitating impersonal learning activities for students,  teachers provide a true life-skill, helping students public perform a socially defining and exigent task. As Dorit puts it,

Effective learning is that students are in charge of their own learning and progress. A growing body of research indicates that when students are working on goals they themselves have set, they are more motivated and efficient, and they achieve more than they do when working on goals that have been set by the teacher.

I encourage wikiness readers to check out Dorit’s and the other exciting ideas on the HF page. We need more practical, research-based notions to deal with the larger numbers of unmotivated kids we’ll see this fall!