EdTech

In OS X you can set up a routine to batch-rename files using Apple's Automator program, where you can make a service plug-in that will offer you options to change names to collecitons of files.

When your workflow is complete, saving it will automatically place it in the /username/Library/Services/ folder, which will make it available via the OS X contextual menu. Now when you go to the Finder, you can select a group of files or folders, and then right-click them and select your workflow from the Services submenu of the contextual menu.

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.

One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share.

One of the things I have come to value most highly is choice.  I have offered my students as much choice in how they learn and in how they demonstrate their learning as I can. The iPads have given my students so many more opportunities for choice.

the iPads have given us a rich variety of options that were just not available before

the ability for a game to teach multiple skills simultaneously

does not build video games to ‘teach mathematics.’ Rather, we build instruments which you can play, and we design them so that when you play them, you cannot fail to learn about mathematics. Moreover, each single game can be used to deliver mathematical challenges of increasing sophistication.

I love the instrument analogy because I’m often explaining to my students why the Ancient Greeks saw math and music as part of the same realm–that area of experience that belonged to the god Apollo. Of course, the relationship has to do with intervals. But both math and music are also related to Apollo’s other domains, such as light, prophecy, healing, etc. The connection has been hard to understand from the rigidly measured viewpoint that has dominated Western thinking since Nietzsche inadvertently cemented the Apollonian into strict opposition with the Dionysian in The Birth Of Tragedy.