Teachers take to Twitter to improve craft and commiserate - The Washington Post - 3 views
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Chris Dede on 23 Jan 12Twitter as a means of professional community
transcranial direct current stimulation
Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution - 3 views
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I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."
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Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.
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Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.
iLearn II: An Analysis of the Education Category on Apple's App Store - 3 views
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The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop studied almost 200 education apps for Apple's app store. Good insight into what's in the market right now and what the current trends are.
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Thanks Chris! I am looking forward to reading this thoroughly. It covers so many important topics/questions from: creating standards for apps marketed as educational (right now the developers just need to say it is "educational") to a call to academia to dive into research and help design effective, high quality material for digital age learning.
Digital Learning: What Kids Really Want - 3 views
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Data from Project Tomorrow's Speak Up Survey outlining what kids really want when it comes to technology and digital learning
Zapping the brain into "expert" mode - Boing Boing - 3 views
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Thanks for the link, Jing Jing. The article makes an interesting conclusion that in addition to electrical stimulus, you can induce flow by focusing on an external object to "turn off conscious thought." From the New Scientist article: "When you have an external focus, you achieve a more automatic type of control," she says. "You don't think about what you are doing, you just focus on the outcome."
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Tying in with our conversation about flow, this article mentions a way to physically induce flow through "transcranial direct current stimulation".
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I have to say..I am a bit weirded out by this article. The days of Johnny Mnemonic are not far behind.
Solve for X: Adrien Treuille on collaborative science - YouTube - 3 views
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This ten-minute video uses the protein-folding game FoldIt and another crowdsourced science game called EteRNA as examples. Speaker Adrien Treuille (from CMU) talks about rewards in these types of crowdsourcing games starting around 5:50. He envisions scientific discovery, software development, product design, and societal change being "solved" in the future through a platform that allows for finding, engaging, and paying people at a very individual level: "Find Me, Engage Me, Pay Me."
Mattel's Apptivity iPad toys enhance Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, and Angry Birds gamepla... - 3 views
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the hybrid approach
Digital Comics - 3 views
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After dinner, when Tom Beasley is ready to take a break from his day job in the Yale classics department, he busts out the comic books. But it's all in the name of education, with a digital twist. Beasley, a seventh-year graduate student, is writing his dissertation on Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War. In his evening project, he turns from history to the mythology of the Trojan War - in particular, the comic book series Age of Bronze, written and illustrated by Eric Shanower. Beasley's task: produce a reader's guide to the richly detailed, 31-part (so far) comic series in preparation for its release as an iPad app, intended for classroom use. The digital version, called Age of Bronze "Seen," launches on October 15 and includes maps, genealogy charts, and other interactive features.
Business side of education technology - 3 views
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This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University.
Gamification And Self-Determination Theory - 3 views
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This article looks at how games incorporate three intrinsic motivation needs.
For Teachers, Shame Is No Solution - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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Bill Gates responds to NY ruling that teachers' performance assessments can be publicized. He calls for a rigorous and comprehensive teacher evaluation system that will provide educators with constructive feedback (not public humiliation) so they know what needs improvement.
Educational Apps | MindShift - 3 views
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MindSnacks leads the way in "Gamified" educational apps for learning new languages. Some of these look pretty cool...
Motivation - Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology - 3 views
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Here is an overview of several theories of motivation, with some tables and simple animations and games illustrating concepts. It addresses a mix of articles and ideas that have come up in class and ones we haven't touched on yet.
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Wow! Stephanie, what a fantastic resource! Thanks so much for sharing this with us.
What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - 3 views
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an interesting point from the article: "adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards-or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do."
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I really enjoyed this article, thank you. I find it very interesting to explore from a neurological perspective how some aspects of our modern world impact children and teens. So often parents say that the world is different today, but it is important to realize that the way we function does not change so quickly.
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I noticed this article as well - I think it's absolutely fascinating! Now I'm curious about the implications of these findings for designing educational technologies for adolescents: how can products take advantage of these proclivities? A more difficult question would be - is there any way that technologies can counteract these tendencies in order to bring more balance/rationality into a teenager's world?
Learning Science Through Computer Games and Simulations - 3 views
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This NRC book is freely available as a pdf.
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Pradeep, thanks for sharing this resource.
Raspberry Pi goes on general sale - 3 views
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Interesting article and video about a new way of teaching children to program. A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time. The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.
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I just heard about this from a friend and then stumbled across your link - and then wound up on the Raspberry Pi website to try to find out more about the education component of it (which is supposedly the whole motivation). Right now, the website is focused on showcasing the capabilities of the device and the hardware/software choices that they made. I was disappointed to find, when looking through their FAQ, that there is only one small blurb about educational material in which they vaguely state that support resources are currently under development. No doubt they are allowing a greater number of people access to a cheap Linux machine, but that does not mean those people are going to use it to learn to program. I'll be interested to see if the focus really does shift to education as the resources come together... right now it just seems like a cool new toy for a Linux geek (with the potential to be so much more!)
Broken STEM: A failure to teach Science, Technology, Engineering and Math | The Connect... - 3 views
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“It suddenly occurred to me that every idea I had memorized or learned or thought I understood in a textbook was actually the result of scientific investigation,
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“What was missing that it took me so long?”
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She thinks science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields aren’t taught the right way in the United States
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Thanks for sharing this, Chris. It's both interesting and relevant to my project for this course. A comment at the bottom suggested that really the companies need to change their unrealistic minimum criteria for job candidates. I've heard that argument before, and sometimes I do wonder when I see complaints from companies looking only for people with 5+ years of STEM work experience railing on the state of STEM education. What do you think?
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Thanks for sharing Chris! I can totally relate to this. I remember having to sit through those "weed out" intro biology and chemistry courses in undergrad. They were the antithesis of motivating but I pushed through because I knew without them I couldn't do the "cool science" I wanted to. I remember at the time thinking these courses were weeding out people who were entertaining the idea of a STEM career but just didn't want to put up with the cut throat nature of these courses. It seemed to me the classes were more concerned about weeding out people than by providing an environment that really fostered learning.
E-Books on Tablets Fight Digital Distractions - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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Good summary of the dilemma with iPads and tablets: are they good readers or do that make distractions too available?
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Great article. Since readers require a higher degree of motivation when reading any given book on a tablet (to actively ignore distractions), this puts more pressure on publishers/authors to make their content meaningful and engaging. Perhaps this might result in higher standards for books/fewer books being published?
When Gaming Is Good for You - WSJ.com - 3 views
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This type of research is very difficult to do - so without examining the actual research articles it is difficult to determine how valid these studies are
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The WSJ article makes strong causal claims based on observational studies. Classic confounding of correlation and causation. From what I could find of the Michigan-based research, for example, the "effect" of video game playing on behavior was a fixed-effect in a multiple regression analysis. It didn't (or shouldn't have) carried any causal implication. (Interestingly, the research also found that students with higher self-reported video game playing times over the school year also had lower GPAs...a finding conspicuously missing from the WSJ piece.) -
Thanks, Shane!
Game-based Learning: A Paradigm Shifting Opportunity For Innovation - 3 views
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One point not covered in the article is that there may be something inherently similar about "gamers" (such as a motivational, attentional, or perceptive profile) that makes them different types of learners than others. Yes, it's true that some people deeply enjoy the structured (some more/some less) challenges provided by games, both board and virtual...but others do not. The big question is, does it benefit a majority of learners (or, say, a majority of at-risk learners) to invest in curricula that leverages game-based-learning?
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It may stray a bit from the topic of motivation, but here's a neuroscience article (that I found quite interesting) that discusses how a difference in striatal volume appears to affect how one's performance improves in playing a game: Erickson, K. I., Boot, W. R., Basak, C., Neider, M. B., Prakash, R. S., Voss, M. W., Graybiel, A. M., et al. (2010). Striatal volume predicts level of video game skill acquisition. Cerebral Cortex, 20(11), 1-9. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp293
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