HGSET561

Title says it all.

A look at how some classrooms are leveraging gaming like Minecraft to teach some of the foundations of digital citizenship.

Game Developers recognizing learning opportunities within their games and building a platform that allows students to create their own worlds and test them.

This page contains a bio for Tom Vander Ark, a leader in didigtal learning. There is a link to a TEDx talk he gave at the bottom of the page about the power of digital learning. He provides very good visuals and paints a very vivid picture of how digital learning can change education.

Education Week does a little neuroscience research and gives some take-away advice for classroom practice.

For those a bit hesitant about jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. 

1. Connectedness matters 2. Vision 3. Value 4. Support 5. Professional development 6. Embracement

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing emphasis on girls and information and communication technology in the development sector. Large government donors, NGOs and the private sector believe girls could play a big role in resolving poverty and making development gains through ICT.

Sacramento, CA, November 26, 2012- They had a simple idea: Find a brilliant mix of innovative people from different professions. Get them together in one space for a day. Invite teachers, EdTech visionaries, hackers and entrepreneurs and encourage them to work on ideas, partnerships, networks, even businesses with the goal of jump starting the economy and revolutionizing education. This should be an interesting conference to monitor - maybe a new educational disruptive design will emerge!

November 26, 2012, 11:00 am This month Google's Niantic Labs quietly released a location-based game called Ingress that plays with data on multiple levels. The game, currently in invite-only beta, invites players to join either the Enlightenment or the Resistance and move through the physical world hunting "Exotic Matter", and coincidentally generating data and pictures for Google on the way. This looks similar to EcoMobile!

Dr. Saxberg's blog on an interesting research finding about teachers' misconceptions about how learning works. He also mentions (towards the end) his upcoming book. As you would recall Professor Dede had mentioned Dr. Saxberg in the context of EdX a few weeks ago.

Another article about MOOCs and some general criticisms. I haven't heard the "groupthink" argument before (if everyone took the same MOOC on economics, we would all have the same opinion of economics instead of generating healthy debates), so that was interesting to see.

An interesting, critical appraisal of MOOCs' transformative potential by education historian Larry Cuban. Includes some hilarious graphics, in addition to good insights...

Interested in researching more what we talked about in class today, I found that some universities are actively trying to promote civic engagement in youth. Illinois State University students created a documentary to help them reflect on their learning. This is not at K-12, and maybe shows that (as we talked about in class), districts have less freedom to implement things like this...

A growing number of online universities are redefining education. But what will that mean for traditional institutions?

Part II.