Breaking down artificial boundaries in the world of Education emerged as a theme today at EdNet in Chicago. This applies to the curriculum, but it also applies to how schools are managed – it may be a new overarching meme for education. Chuck House from Media X at Standford kicked…
Mike Morhaime, President & Co-Founder of Blizzard Entertainment kicked off the Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) this morning. Blizzard produces the wildly successful World of Warcraft on-line multiplayer behemouth (9 million+ players worldwide). AGDC is focusing on on-line games this year and a packed auditorium was eager to pick up…
Textbook publishers have a checkered history with developing technology products – which I’ve already commented on here and here. Yesterday Richard Carey sent me a link to Rockets, Cars, and Gardens, which does a very elegant job of explaining different software development paradigms. One of the concepts that jumped out…
Homing is the foundation skill for the 21st Century. Homing is the ability to circle in on key information, untangle it, filter it, order it, and ultimately make sense of it. A middle schooler writing a report on Madame Curie in the mid ‘80’s typically went to an encyclopedia and…
I’m assuming this is just a rhetorical device but Wesley Fryer over at Infinite Thinking Machine is calling for a textbook moratorium so we can get laptops and digital curriculum in everywhere. I don’t disagree with his urge to shake things up and increase the rate of change in the…
Collective writing is a critical 21st Century Skill. Wikis are the primary tool for teaching this skill today. What resources exist to help teachers use wikis in the classroom? Recently this issue has been bubbling up on several places. The Wall Street Journal had an article on the discussions behind…
Yesterday I commented on Granof’s Op-Ed – Course Requirement: Extortion. The New York Times Op-Ed made the case for reforming textbook pricing in higher education. Granof was kind enought to respond with some feedback on my piece. Below I’ve included the parts he responded to, his comments, and my clarifications/additions/agreements.…
An idea for reforming the textbook market in higher education was floated on the editorial page of the New York Times this past Sunday. Fellow Austinite Michael Granof proposed converting the textbook market to a site license approach used in the software world. His ideas, while thought provoking, fail the…
Input has become infinite while our individual output is still quite finite. What does this mean for teaching and learning in our schools? “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. This level of information is clearly impossible to handle by present means. Uncontrolled and unorganized information is no…
Statewide Web 2.0 applications for education are a growing force in the market. This has huge implications for how schools will organize and manage information. Education Enterprise Software has always played a critical role in the adoption of new technologies. For example, when web applications first debuted in schools many…