Group items tagged

Following up on yesterday's section discussion on connections and barriers between educational game development and "mainstream" gaming, here is an interesting white paper released by MIT's Education Arcade last year that explores obstacles and opportunities in great depth.

Digital Media Conference 2011 is happening at Irvine CA! and they've invited proposals for papers

White paper outlines the existing structures that constrict the development of 21st century skills, various tools, e.g. through including badging, personalization, adult learning, etc.

A set of workshops in DC about transformations in education. Papers about the topics will be released next week (Sept 27), for those of us who can't be in DC. One paper will be about "Harnessing Technology to Improve K-12 Education," so it will be interesting to see what the authors say. Though both authors are business school professors, so I'm not sure how they got chosen to write on this topic? Must be a good business to be in Ed Tech right now...

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other settings.

The authors are very misleading in their claim that this study is the first on live versus internet. There is a huge literature on this topic stretching back decades. The claims about the generalizability of the study are also very suspect.

Chris, I think the authors are claiming it is the first experimental trial where participants were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition. They contrast their study with the DOE meta-analysis, which I don't think includes experimental studies--at least as experiments are defined within econometrics. My problem with the study is that they are aren't really comparing live vs. internet so much as live vs. recorded video. They are very careful to not take advantage of any of the potential affordances of internet mediated instruction, except broadcasting a lecture, to preserve the "purity" of their experiment. Of course, that's not a terribly interesting experiment. The more interesting experiments, which they deride as "not apples-to-apples," is to compare a traditional lecture format with an online course that takes full advantage of the affordances of the internet. These studies would confound the carefully balanced design of an apples-to-apples comparison, but no serious education technologist thinks we should just record all the lectures and post them...

American Library Association details how tech must be employed in conjunction with common core standards

What happens when online tutoring goes to school?

Educational Arcade paper from MIT focusing on: "the background and affordances of Simulations, Digital Games, and Social Networking, the cognitive implications of these technologies, specific challenges with using these tools in the classroom, as well as strategies for overcoming these challenges in order to achieve successful learning experiences, and the future of these technologies and their impact and learning and teaching."

This blog entry is about a paper written on how digital learning enhances deeper learning.

A point of view challenging the rapid transition to digital textbooks. 

These op-eds and blogs keep popping up, but I have yet to read one that is at all compelling. It was particularly entertaining when this author referenced how digital photography put Polaroid out of business. Hard to understand why one would use that reference when defending the textbook. The funny thing is that textbooks were never a fantastic learning tool to begin with. The real danger is that digital textbooks will not not make the dramatic improvements that they may be capable of when it comes to teaching the material.

Paper from the Brookings Institute addressing the status-quo, challenges, opportunities and concerns of embracing tech in K-12 education in the United States

This is a link to a paper that Chris mentioned earlier today. It proposes six types of involvement with digital games: tactical, affective, narrative, shared, performative, and spatial.

For the first time, Amazon's digital books had outsold paper books. While many popular consumer books have successfully made the switch into the new format, textbooks are still widely read on paper. However, textbooks as e-books ought to be seen as a stepping stone to the future. And we need to design devices that are specifically made to support academic reading.

Samsung establishes "smart classroom" which moves class study from pen and paper style learning to tablet based learning, but also allows schools in remote island, that lack educational infrastructure, connect students through electronic dashboards and share ideas and information.

Opinion

This reminds me of the article on the no-tech school in California where techie parents send their kids to school.

A white paper on connecting digital learning and deeper learning by Tom Vander Ark, who used to be at HGSE. I haven't read it, but I'm excited to!