Articles Tagged with learning

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chinamorningAs the delegation returned to our hotel in smoggy dusk a lime green rickshaw was playing chicken with a big tan BMW 7 sedan. Some unseen signal passed between the cyclist and driver and the tangle resolved itself smoothly; the perfect metaphor for my adventures in China last week.

The country is a fascinating jumble of the old and new, the Chinese are inventing new ways of working together on the fly in the midst of unprecedented growth and change. The whole country smells of wet concrete. Construction is everywhere.

In the spirit of “Beginners Eyes” I’ve captured in this post a few of the things that caught my attention over my 6 day visit. We’ll be making an announcement soon about the business venture we worked on, but in this initial post I’ll focus on my personal experiences.

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level-32-nerdThere are bad ideas that become iconic for every era because they were popular fads. Pet Rocks, the Pacer, Supply Side Economics, and .com groceries all come to mind.

Looking back we all scratch our heads and wonder – why?

Gamification, ripping the reward and recognition systems out of video games and applying them to behavioral modification is likely to stand in for our current times in the future.

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1254880_shiny_brain_Is the Internet making us dumber or are we just using our brains in new ways? The BBC posted a great overview of a new study which makes the case for a neat trick the brain is pulling now that we have 24/7 access to the web.

The article notes:

“When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

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Deadrising_boxartMy 17 year old son is in the other room using a kayak paddle with chain saws attached at either end to slice zombies in half. I’m sitting here minding my own business when out of the blue he says “Dad, this game is great for teaching time management skills.”

In Dead Rising you have 72 hours in a zombie infested town to build a bike, rescue your daughter, and escape the military. Along the way anything you find can be weaponized against the slow moving brain noshers. Shovels, gasoline, saw blades, pitchforks, shotguns, drills, buckets, are among the things that can be combined in new and amazing ways. Yes, even a stuffed moose head.

Call me a proud papa – this concept was coming from a teen who is wrestling with time management (i.e. he gets A’s when does the damn work which isn’t often enough). The fact that he was metacogizant of this while playing astounded and pleased me.

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56u6u6uEd Note: One of my favorite thinkers and practitioners on engaging kids deeply with Math and Science is Jim Bower. Jim is that rare combination of theorist and practitioner who is successful in both realms. He is both a Professor of Neuroscience at UTSA and the Founder/CEO of Whyville.net, arguably the stickiest web destination for learning ever created.

Jim has strong opinions, but he has earned the right to hold them through deep thinking and risk taking that applies his theories successfully in the real/virtual world.

Please invest the time to read Jim’s post where he challenges us to see why the web is making us smarter, not dumber. The TEDx video then answers the question of exactly how you do this.

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WindowsAlbumSetWhen textbooks go fully digital what will schools buy? Will they buy individual lessons, units of 2-3 weeks length, or full curriculum that span a year the way they do today? This is the $5 billion question facing our industry.

Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on this topic over at The Shatzkin Files. His framing is concise and revealing for those of us mapping out strategy for the analog to digital transition in instructional materials.

He was on a working group preparing for a talk about copyright across different publishing markets:

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game-zenRichard Carey points to an outstanding article by Shane Snow on using game mechanics to power your business over at Mashable.

This rings true in my personal use of social media (see here re Foursquare) as well as in a lot of the thinking that has gone into what will happen to learning materials as they migrate from print to digital.

The one thing missing from the article that I think is a critical element is narrative thread. Here are some comments of on how that applies to education.

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IMG_0070.jpgIt’s been four weeks and my iPad still has that new computer smell. Now that I’ve been using it in my workflow I wanted to post some additional comments on it’s utility in an educational setting.

In general I think my original take holds up well – this is fantastic tool for consuming content, is extremely useful as an outboard content manager, and passable in a pinch as a creation tool (this whole post was written on it).

On a meta level it is truly amazing how natural the “point and do” nature of the touch interface feels. Once you understand the grammar of the device it all just flows. A mouse now feels clunky for most operations other than image processing or massive spreadsheets.

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Today’s hotlinks include Pearson’s take on publishing for the iPad, designing playful experiences, the coolest marketing program I’ve seen in a while, a new augmented reality game to promote social change in Africa, and Photoshop disasters.

John Makinson of Pearson Penguin gave an interesting talk on the future of publishing in an iPad world. Textbook publishers take note – he specifically cites one as part of his examples. This isn’t just for Penguin.

Pearson gets it – mostly. But they can’t escape the book metaphor. Essentially this is the sidescroller stage of evolution. Beyond Pong, but no further than Mario Brothers. Do something interactive, flip a “page.” 3D, embedded social connections (“who else in the world is looking at this page that i could talk too…”) etc. is still in the future and will require some radically different ways of constructing and navigating content. Hopefully they are working on that in the back of the back room. Hat tip to personanondata.

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