Group items tagged

One of the few uses of advanced technologies in the history curriculum

As delivery of history teaching to students becomes more and more realistic, it is more important than ever to ensure that we have in place a robust and diverse oversight network to ensure that the narrative being suggested is an accurate representation of the time and place, as opposed to a history-as-written-by-the-winners narrative, which is pervasive throughout many textbooks. For many students, this sort of immersion will overwhelm any alternative streams of knowledge coming from Harlem in the 20s, so it is vital that the VR be constructed in a way that captures the context of why it was such a dynamic time in New York. As for the creators of this technology having to turn to the porn industry for technical support, that should not come as a surprise, as many claim that porn has revolutionized, or at least been instrumental in, the emergence of many new industries from VHS to the internet.

Do videogames increase students' interest in history?

Interesting take on the history of Behavioral Psychology in relation to Technology

A history class created Facebook Timelines for Magellan's voyage, fashion 1950-present, and 20th century inventions.

Articles on media literacy -  an excerpt from their newsletter:  Here's how George Mason history professor Mills Kelly teaches media literacy. "'We will work together as a group to create an online historical hoax that we will then turn loose on the internet to see if we can actually fool anyone.'" His students have created stories that have fooled Wikipedia (but not Reddit) and provoked the ire of Jimmy Wales himself. We're delightedly amused at this intriguing piece from Brendan Fitzgerald, which examines the tradition of published hoaxes within the larger discussion over media transparency and credibility. While we agree that planting deliberate lies makes our job a little tougher, there's definitely value in its effort to challenge the largely assumed reliability of Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing efforts. It begs the question: are today's kids digital natives or "digital naives?"

"This case study debunks some of the misconceptions around what happened to edutainment in the '90s, and shares lessons learned from one of the most important periods in the history of games and learning."

This article reminds of what Professor Dede said in the class, that we are at the inflection point in the history of of educational technologies. The author confirms that with eleven marked changes.

This is a very exciting time but I noticed that the author cited evidence that I believe will only contribute to the achievement gap. He cites that poverty is increasing and every new educational effort requires money or families with time to spend with their children. The adults who focus on children in poverty are the teachers. Where are they in the list?

I agree overall about 2011 being an inflection point, but I also remember that IBM 360 and TV were supposed to revolutionalize education too.

Interesting visual history on the evolution of classroom technology. Particularly like that they used a slightly interactive interface in designing this. It's intriguing to see how far we've come--and at the same time how similar some things are.

A history and forecast of the internet

Here is an online learning module about innovation. I have not run through the course, but I might do it just to get an online learning experience

An interesting article on how resistant to change different types of organizations are. Educational institutions rank pretty highly resistant. Though it is interesting to note that businesses rank the most adaptive (non resistant)--so the education technology and startup trend may be a good sign!

Interesting. from where I am from (=Japan), business organizations with long history with the majority of employees committed until retirement age of 60 (slowly this is changing though), maybe NPO and even government (with so much shuffling going on) would rank higher...

The author makes a good point that heightened market competition seems to contribute to reduced resistance. I noticed that the more-resistant organizations operate in more highly regulated markets, which would seem to create internal cultures more oriented to compliance and, thus, resistance.

Thoughtful piece about keeping a grounded historical perspective when analyzing edtech innovations.

Hard to resist such a title ! Lives at war is a online virtual reality game designed to teach world war 2 history to British pupils. The use of archival videos in the game within the context of objects is a creative blend of videos and VW for education. Another interesting example of a VW that exemplifies situated learning.

Founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Atari played a central role in the early history of video games, going on to create what are still some of the most recognizable arcade games on the planet, like Pac-Man and Pong, to name a few.

very interesting. With the rise and widepsread adoption of mobile devices as the gateway of choice for gaming, more and more game companies are jumping on the mobile app bandwagon. With Atari shifting its focus like this, it instantly makes me think what other founding game company have or will need to do. Sega, another big name in the early gaming days, eventually had to drop out of the hardware game because it couldn't compete. It now produces game content for its former competitor's gaming hardware. And Sega now even ports lots of its classic video games from the 80s and 90s to mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. Nintendo is still in the hardware game, but it's portable gaming hardware is now competing with directly mobile devices (& apps) head on. Nintendo's revenue and userbase is shrinking, and most analysts and observers are pointing to the rise of iOS and other mobile devices as substitutes to dedicated gaming devices. Will Nintendo still stick around using its current model- making its own gaming hardware to sell its own (highly regarded) 1st-party properties, like Mario, Zelda etc? Lots are predicting (or even encouraging) Nintendo to drop making its own hardware, and to produce content with its prized properties onto mobile devices.

The headline promises more than the article delivers. It mainly identifies the limited effectiveness that the federal government can have. There are no specific "how to's" here and no mention of technology whatsoever, perhaps because that would be too specific a focus for the scope of the article. These are prominent figures in a prominent publication having a conversation that could have taken place in 1980. How do we change that? The absence of real civic engagement on issues about education is the missing link in education reform. I wonder if we can organize public discourse on the internet more effectively to have formal impact on civic activism and administration.

Two interesting point about poor schools with the potential to access rich library resources and also the myth about multi-tasking (resonates with part of Sherry Turkle's message in this week's video.

A Sketch of world history. Click on each figure for biographical information. Who put Karl Mark next to Leonardo Da Vinci?

Provides a nice overview and timeline of MOOC history since last summer.