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To what extent should videogames be used in classrooms, and what is the research support for this?

Note the author characterizes the National Educational Technology Plan as a "manifesto." Quoting this article, "... in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet "aggressive goals" and "grand" challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a "new kind of R.& D."

A bunch of especially interesting quotes toward the end: "This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise...refers to as 'failure-based learning,' in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary... According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita...children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal.... 'They'll fail until they win.' He adds: 'Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It's completely aspirational.' It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today's public schools. 'If you think about kids in school - especially in our testing regime - both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,' he says. 'That's pretty much a guarantee that you'll never get to truly deep learning.'"

The author's top 5 keys to successful education technology... do you agree? Is it missing anything?

One of the more powerful messages I have learned in Stone's class is when you are designing an educational intervention you have to know WHEN to ask the question: what technology, if any, will improve our educational problem? Before you ask this question, the problem should be clearly identified, and the steps to assess if the problem is improving should be laid out. When you have this information, you can then tailor the technology to specifically meet the needs of your current problem. In this way, technology is sort of the means (not the ends!) towards improving education. So, in addition to the author's 5 key factors for educational technology, I would like to add: Is the technology a good fit for addressing our clearly defined educational problem?

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...

Big money for games that help young children learn STEM

Maybe you or someone could comment on what this has in common with the Tesla project (or what is different). Would love to hear more. As a future middle school teacher, this inspires me. The contest geared toward middle school age validates my conviction that middle schoolers can and should be learning technology ... yes, even in BPS there's got to be a way.

TESLA is studying both how we can make math education more effective and what types of motivational inductions appeal to various types of students in grades 5-9. The emphasis in engagement is on building intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in math, rather than using external motivation to "sugar-coat" math as yucky, but necessary. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is often ignored by game designers,and as a result kids who are momentarily engaged in STEM can actually be demotivated longer term. TESLA is trying to established a more nuanced view of how to build this type of game.

Definitely want to read some of the books mentioned in this Q&A.

The author makes a case for mobile learning for professionals with the Android App - Google Goggles... are there other uses that people see of the app in the k-12 sector?

Slate has asked for people to submit ideas on what the 21st century 5th grade classroom should look like. It will be interesting to see what suggestions show up on this website.

Interactive tv Perhaps educators could have an impact if they coordinated?

This is a really interesting and cool idea. I know that Disney's intense storyboarding model in its 'golden age' relied on months and sometimes years of collaborative, co-creation of a story between 10s-100s of people. And their decline in quality is often attributed to adopting a one-author/screenwriter process (The book: The Illusion of Life, Disney Animation; by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston talks about the company's process with lots of beautiful illustrations, how-to advice, and historical narratives..). What will happen when the general public, with potentially 1000s to millions of viewers put their minds together to evolve the best story?

Online college M State is offering 3D interactive instructional content

Virginia Tech's L2Ork, the world's first Linux-based laptop orchestra. With its affordable design and support from the Linux community, L2Ork hopes to bring laptop orchestras to K-12 education and beyond.

Lots of pomp and circumstance about new initiatives -- but how much funding and political clout is really behind them.

Are you speaking of Digital Promise? It reminds me of whatworks.ed.gov but it looks like it might be designed better. I don't believe whatworks.ed.gov ever got much traction.

Relevant and looks very interesting. Especially the sessions on game design: one of them is a TIE alum Cheers Pradeep

This caught my attention - "systems must be designed not just to show how much children have improved, but also to provide guidance so that ineffective teachers get better."

This sounds like an interesting competition for students to be involved in. I think this would serve as a great tool that teachers can design their lessons around in order to make the learning relevant

very interesting Kinga. To throw in another STEM-related competition, the National STEM Video Game Challenge is about to begin its second year. Open to middle school, high school, and college/graduate students, the contest challenges students to create innovative video games that promote STEM learning while being accessible to underserved populations: main website: http://www.stemchallenge.org

Tablets' potential for learning, as seen by apple. Thoughts?

I personally see a lot of potential for the use of tablets in education, but I find it interesting that Apple is heavily promoting the ipad for educational uses on its web site, but doesn't offer the educational discount for the iPad.

Tying into discussions this week about bringing access to mobile devices to all via non-prohibitive costs, while still reaching a set of bare-minmum technical specs for actual use: India's "$35 tablet" has been a pipedream in the tech blog-o-sphere for awhile now, but it's finally available (though for a price of roughly $60). Still though, as an actual Android color touch tablet, with WiFi and cellular data capability - I'm curious to see how it's received and if it's adopted in any sort of large scale

I had heard months ago that India was creating this, but was not going to offer it commercially - rather, just for its own country. Just like the Little Professor (Prof Dede) calculator, when tablets get this affordable, educational systems can afford classroom sets of them and then use them regularly. But to Prof Dede's point - can they do everything that more expensive tablets can do? Or better yet - do they HAVE to?

I think this is what they're aiming to do - all classrooms/students across the country having this particular tablet. They won't be able to do everything today's expensive tablets can do, but I think they'll still be able too to do plenty. This $35 tablet's specs are comparable to the mobile devices we had here in the US in 2008/2009. Even back then, we were able to web browse, check email, use social networking (sharing pics and video too), watching streaming online video, and play basic 2D games. But even beyond those basic features, I think this tablet will be able to do more than we expect from something at this price point and basic hardware, for 2 reasons: 1. Wide-spread adoption of a single hardware. If this thing truly does become THE tablet for India's students, it will have such a massive userbase that software developers and designers who create educational software will have to cater to it. They will have to study this tablet and learn the ins-and-outs of its hardware in order to deliver content for it. "Underpowered" hardware is able to deliver experiences well beyond what would normally be expected from it when developers are able to optimize heavily for that particular set of components. This is why software for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and games for video game consoles (xbox, PS3, wii) are so polished. For the consoles especially, all the users have the same exact hardware, with the same features and components. Developers are able to create software that is very specialized for that hardware- opposed to spending their resources and time making sure the software works on a wide variety of hardware (like in the PC world). With this development style in mind, and with a fixed hardware model remaining widely used in the market for many years- the resultant software is very polished and goes beyond what users expect from it. This is why today's game consoles, which have been around since 2005/6, produce visuals that are still really impressive and sta

Let's not forget the hand that Professional Development offerings, or lack there of, around Ed Tech played in this "failure," too. Just because we put a Smart or Promethean board in every school doesn't mean that it won't get written on with a dry erase marker or used only as an LCD projector instead of as the interactive device that it was designed to be...teacher training is essential in the success of ed tech integration.