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critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed

young children are capable of thinking critically about subjects they know a great deal about, whereas trained scientists can fail to think critically in areas where they are less knowledgeable

not all knowledge is created equal. We need to differentiate between knowledge and information. Much of the information stored on the Internet is pictures of kittens or videos of people singing sea shanties. This can keep increasing exponentially without any need for school children to become acquainted with it

Media Literacy … provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet.

any media literacy strategy requires sustained attention, resources and commitment

are video games art? The short – and long – answer is yes. While it’s impossible to categorize all games easily (just as it is impossible to categorize all fiction, let along writing), there’s no question that gaming is a thriving form of participatory creative expression.

Ironically – and tellingly – people such as Schultz are repeating the same sorts of criticisms that dog all forms of popular culture in their early stages of developments. As novels became increasingly available to non-aristocratic readers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they were frequently criticized for impairing the morals of their then-mostly female readers by allowing them to imagine themselves in new and exciting worlds. Movies, comic books, and rock and roll – which like novels are often drenched in sex and violence – came in for exactly the same opprobrium. What good can come of allowing large numbers of people to imagine themselves transgressing conventional morality and playing different social roles for themelves, critics have asked for centuries.

a way to help computer scientists think more logically about data analysis

at its core, computational thinking is simply a way to process information using higher-order or critical thinking

Social media and online gameplay are the most common digital venues for meeting friends

Along with texting, teens are incorporating a number of other devices, communication platforms and online venues into their interactions with friends

Video games play a critical role in the development and maintenance of boys’ friendships

[Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.

We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.

I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.

game-based learning seems to be a misnomer, as the learning is not based on games, but enhanced by them. Commercial games are repurposed and modified to support curricular goals, as opposed to driving them. Of course, learning can and should also be based on games, as they are valid texts that can be studied in and of themselves, but it is important to see video games as elastic tools whose potential uses exceed their intended purpose.

It’s important that video games are regarded as useful and engaging learning tools in their own right.” To that end, he uses popular commercial games that would not outwardly seem suitable for the classroom.

the game gives students a different perspective on the laws of physics, where mechanics are simulated by a computer to create a realistic gaming environment. It can also be a great source of discussion when the laws of physics are broken!” Students think about how the simulation deviates from reality and transform what might be perceived as a game’s shortcoming into a critical thinking opportunity.

Girls should play more video games.

spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements

spatial skills can be improved by training; these improvements persist over time; and they “transfer” to tasks that are different from the tasks used in the training

he hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence

In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then.

To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

Well into the nineteenth century, British and American writers, critics and religious leaders regarded novel-reading with a great deal of skepticism.

If our concerns about the enfeebling impact of the Internet and social media aren’t quite as gendered, they’re still grounded in a world view that regards the cultivation of individual morality, intellect, and productivity as a matter of public interest—and that regards shifts in personal media consumption as potentially inimical to the production of smart, informed, and upstanding citizens. But the history of the novel shows that it’s possible for us to move beyond this suspicion—though it took two centuries for novels to move from objects of derision to an accepted part of the modern reader’s diet.

Novel-reading was once regarded as an idle occupation, just as Internet use is now.

The claim that the students who didn’t use tablets performed better academically is based upon exam scores, which were only one-third of a standard deviation higher for the non-tablet crowd than the others. Some might see this as a large difference; I do not, and I doubt a majority of statisticians would either. But hey–why let the fact that this was a superficial study conducted with a small sample size of atypical students examining only one type of technology deter you from claiming that all technology in the classroom is bad? This is what people in the psych business call “confirmation bias,” I believe.

no mention of pedagogy at all

They don’t even acknowledge, much less control for, pedagogy.

we might be overlooking the “educational and psychological benefits of using social media sites,” such as developing critical thinking and perspective-taking skills

parents and educators have been led to demonize what could simply be an evolving means of social connection

a constant stream of interruptions

the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.

It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information

the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.