Larry Tinnerman

Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Event planner, Global soul, Idea generator, Life mentor, Musician, Technologist, Writer/Editor

Dr. Larry Tinnerman is a professor of Curriculum studies at Indiana State University. His primary research interest involves an examination of how people learn and the impact of social media upon this process. He builds on the theories of Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey and Benjamin Bloom. HIs new theoretical perspective is titled Synergetic Collaborative Learning and uses the Internet to explain the development of synergies and how they related to student learning. His process involves the integration of social media tools into the classroom to expedite learning, student to student as well as instructor to student. Each learning unit is authentic and project based, with students becoming the seeker of their own answers to the big questions on a topic. His personal blog dedicated to this approach can be found at http://larrytinnerman.org/Blogs

Helping shape the educational future of our young students, always with the attitude "It's about the students, not me!"

Students, when placed in a social environment and effectively motivated, become learning sponges. It is the educational systems that often inhibit these social environments, reducing learning to memorization and losing about 65% of the students in the process. Teaching is more than content, although content is important. An acoustic engineer may be able to build an exquisite musical instrument, explain how the acoustics works, describe all the inner nuances, and while this is important... it takes a musician to play the piano and bring all its magnificence to life. Content experts are the engineers, teachers are the musicians. What are truly needed in education today are musicians who are also engineers. Teachers must always ask, from the student point of view, “So What?”

chi gong, Collaboration, eastern philosophy, Educational Technologies, Pedagogy / Education

I use TED videos in my graduate level classes and part of the University Collaborative (http://sycamorecollaboration.org) to inspire discussion points and open dialogue. I am fairly new to TED.com, but would love to participate as either an attendant or speaker at one of the events.

I can be very funny and have a dry and sometimes sarcastic sense of humor. I love to exploit irony! I also tend to see the world in a very different manner than most of my colleagues.