Fitzroynthps

Lately I have been thinking a lot about thinking. More specifically, I have been thinking hard about the absence of thought in education. The absence of thought in students, teachers, administrators and policy-makers. This year's political discourse is a wider-world reminder of the ubiquitous lack of thought on the part of otherwise educated adults. We know more but are oddly - increasingly? - thoughtless. Why? Thinking, in the sense in which I am interested, is not mere mental work (or idle mental noodling). There is certainly lots of that going on everywhere. Thinking in the educational sense is not about doing one's work. Little thought need go into a typical course pacing guide or by a student in filling in a Venn diagram. Those are mental tasks. Such work cannot by itself yield a truly thinking person.

I was even more intrigued when he made reference to the work of Bernard Suits that claims there are three constituent parts that make up games: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

Great list of tools for creative thinking. Tools for creating ideas. From the usual suspects like brainstorming and mind mapping through to less discussed notions like incubation and morphological analysis. 

Great getting started and how to for edmodo: Edmodo is a 'walled garden' social networking tool designed by teachers for teachers and students. 

I was even more intrigued when he made reference to the work of Bernard Suits that claims there are three constituent parts that make up games: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

A+ Click is a free site full of online mathematics games for students at all grade levels. You can find games on A+ Click by selecting a grade level then selecting a topic. Alternatively, you select just a topic or just a grade level and browse through all of the games. Students do not need to register in order to play the games.

Everyone loves paper planes. These are ace! Says my 3 year old. It was a great morning of paper plane making and testing. 

Now, American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others. Instead, these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property. Now, creative works may indeed be kind of like property, but it's property that we're all building on, and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared.

For years, almost no-one wanted to talk about education policy. Suddenly everyone is. Of course, just because you can invoke the name of "Gonski" doesn't mean you've read the Sydney businessman's talismanic report on schools funding reform, much less understood it. Schools funding is a complex topic. There's an alphabet soup of abstract acronyms (SES, AGSRC) and a spaghetti diagram of administrative structures. Funding for a particular school could include money from parents, from a major church, from a state or territory, and from Canberra. The formula is set with a bewildering array of equations, fed by the demographic chance of Census data.

It disturbs me to read this and how familiar it is to what the LNP have been spruiking. Is this the future of Australian Ed?

Pisa Sample Questions for those interested in some of the finer details of what makes up a PISA test. 

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

a place where anyone can teach and anyone can take a lesson

Dr. Yong Zhao is an internationally known scholar, author, and speaker. His works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. He has designed schools that cultivate global competence, developed computer games for language learning, and founded research and develop institutions to explore innovative education models. He has published over 100 articles and 20 books, including Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization and World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Student

As games, particularly virtual worlds, become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in the spaces of these massively multiplayer online games is fundamentally different than what we have come to consider as standard pedagogical practice. The distinction the authors make is that traditional paradigms of instruction have addressed learning as "learning about," while these new forms of learning deal with knowledge through the dynamic of "learning to be." It is the authors' contention that the experiences offered within virtual worlds provide a fundamentally different way of thinking about

Nearly 1 in 5 gamers play social network games and 1 in 10 massively  multiplayer games. Growing social and online play is driving interest in online content. One in five gamers say they would either be "motivated" or "very motivated" to sign up to a faster broadband  service for game downloads and online play.

This is way cool. A map of the Internet done graphically to look like a universe. The visual learner will get a lot from this one.