A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part ... - 1 views
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Play is defined by a set of rules which form a bounded environment. But within those rules players have as much freedom as they like to create, innovate and experiment. Just think of all the amazing athletic feats that have emerged from a game like soccer, simply from the rule “you may not touch the ball with your hands.”
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Melissa Glenn on 23 May 13While I would love to let my students play and be creative, there also needs to be some time to explain some basic concepts before they can go out on their own and be creative. I think in a college environment, in higher level courses, you can allow the students to be more self-directed, but in more introductory courses, you need to work within a tighter set of rules until the students are aware of the basic concepts. Or, at the very least, some of the more self-directed learning may come towards the end of a semester, after the basic rules are understood. I know this is an issue in my online courses because I want to add more student-student interaction, but since they are newcomers in the area, it is hard to let them do that without a lot of instructor moderation. In later courses, they are much better at working through the concepts with each other instead of with the instructor.
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I think that this is a very interesting point. Like I said earlier, it amazes me at the number of young students who look for me to tell them what to do, what to believe, what is right. I want students to find their drive. To seek what they are interested in. How do we do this when the pressure of scores, evaluations, and effectiveness is all riding on test performance and the teaching of core curriculum?
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Our schools believe that teaching more, faster, with better technology is preparing our students for the 21st century.
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I think that this is a very interesting point! When reflecting on how my district views technology integration, I often think about the last few inservices we had. During those days, we sought video clips and websites to use in our lessons as activating strategies. Most of the time, these resources became extra visual aides in our lessons. The idea that we are using technology through this manner was expressed as the goal. After reading this, I see that the use of technology means something completely different!
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Marie, I agree with you. It reminds me of the reading assignment we had earlier in the semester where technology in classrooms were equated to fancier word processors. Often, the tool has changed but our purposes for the tools has not.
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Learning is happening everywhere, all the time
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One way that people need to change their thinking about the Internet is the idea that surfing around is inherently time wasting. Reading articles or posts can be just as educational as more traditional forms of learning. My Mom and Dad get their news from the newspaper, and I get mine from the Internet. We end up in the same place knowledge-wise, but we just get there differently.
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But we should be surprised when our students who go through the machine end up emerging looking like cogs.
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When education became more “mechanized” it began to lose that sense of play. After all, who wants “play” in their machinery? Play is not precise or efficient; it is messy.
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I was just reading about this period in educational history in the curriculum overview class, and what I thought of as a recent reform in schools of using corporate models is not recent at all. People were trying to use industrial priorities and methods to change education a hundred years ago! Maybe it's important to think of digital education as an evolution of mechanized education, just a computer is a digital evolution of a mechanical adding machine.
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Cultivation is a purposeful act, not something that just happens as a result of exposure or access,
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You don’t teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.