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They arrange activities in the forest to boost children's creativity, and develop and manage their social and physical skills.

Children learn to manage the risk! It is very important for us as humans surviving through nature. Therefore it sounds good because it contains decision making as well. However preparing such an environments can be so much risky!! Preparation and implementation should be carried carefully.

Many of the approaches implemented in Nordic countries focus on child's development as a responsible individual of himself/herself and of the environment. This is a great example that connects children to nature.

By this classroom, students work and learn naturally by communicating with each other and with the teacher actively in real time. Interactive tablets, computers and the board provide students work with groups using technology, while natural learning happens.

summerize where the technology will be in 10 years in schools. But what can we say about our schools? Even people are paying big amount of money for private schools, they still not have such a technology in their class. Technology getting cheaper and cheaper everyday but still I wonder how many years we need to wait to see these kind of technlogies in our school?

This is great example to CSCL but when I thought about Kutay's question according to our country; my answer get upset me :/ Because while we cannot use the smartboards at our clasroom, that kind of usage is just a dream :/

You've surely heard the slogans: "Our educational games will give your brain a workout!" Or how about, "Give your students the cognitive muscles they need to build brain fitness." And then there's the program that "builds, enhances, and restores natural neural pathways to assist natural learning."

Fischer's ideas are really interesting. I was most confused about his idea of left-right brained.

As far as I see, this link was shared in this group a long time ago, but I've wanted to make it visible again so that you don't miss it. This is the last post coming from me for this week :).

A short funny video about situated learning. A teacher takes students to the supermarket so that they naturally learn basic subtraction in Math.

When I read about situated cognition, I saw that cognitive constructivism, social constructivism and situated cognition are the same in manner that all reject objectivist point of view to teaching. However, since they are three different theories, I wonder what makes them different from each other.  I encountered this article in which differences are well emphasized. According to the article: Cognitive constructivism says that people learn by building on their previous experiences with the environment. Since individuals have different history of experiences, same type of didactic teaching is not effective. Cognitive constructivism focuses on mainly individual. Social constructivism purports that knowledge are co-constructed by members of groups from different cultural backgrounds and learning environments should foster collaborative learning. Social constructivism mainly focuses on groups rather than individuals. Situated cognition, on the other hand, suggests that regardless of the fact that concepts are handled as individuals or as groups, if those concepts are not taught within their actual-natural context, learning of those concepts are meaningless and inert. Situated cognition mainly focuses on the context.

it seems that we will try to go to some Chinese Universities in ten years time, instead of Europe or States.

In my opinion education policy of the countries do not be planned based on the students' academic achievement. Real achievement of an education system could be observed as individuals' adaptation to life. For example the main vision of the elementary science curriculum defined by Ministry of National Education of Turkey [MONE] (2005) is that regardless of the individual differences of students, they are educated to become scientifically literate, the uniqueness nature of the learner; background and culture of the learners and motivation of the learners were taken into consideration in the development of the curriculum (MONE, 2005), but putting those in the practice is very difficult.

Also, as mentioned in the text "… those results come at the cost of one of the highest levels of student anxiety in the world." Anxiety is very important and big research area in educational psychology also the news in the link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/10/content_9710997.htm exemplifies its importance in Chinese case.

"If a decision were to be made by the minister of education or the government to move in a new direction, then the orientations, the value system and the commitment of design-based researchers would be a natural way because it is an engineering field approach applied in education,"

Hocam, it would be nice to build a DBR team, we desperately need such an innovation in our field. Maybe, there can be DBR schools where researchers can work with voluntary teachers. If some incentives are provided for the teachers by MONE, they will work eagerly in the projects. Just an example: nowadays, lots of English teachers are doing really good Comenius projects and the motive behind their hard work is going abroad:)

+1 for DBR team & DBR Schools. I can try to find some support from MONE side.

This is a book by Geoff Colvin which talks about the importance of deliberate practice. Mr. Colvin's primary message in this book is that people are not born with all the natural talent and abilities that will make them great it life. He asserts that, aside from some physical atributes that may give an athlete an advantage in a particular sport, everyone can achieve world-class performance through "deliberate practice" in his or her chosen field - business, music, sports, etc.

Thank you for the link, I am curious in finding more sources on the effect of deliberate practice and its effects. As I have searched Geoff Colvin is from the field of economics so it can be interesting to hear from people of different fields.

Neil Charness is also a scholar on psychology from Florida State University. He has some thoughts on expert performance. You can also check his works. :)

A nice book enjoyable to read, which includes interesting ideas about thinking, computers and cognitive sciences

Yes, now I have reached the book:) thank you for sharing this with us. Reading on such creative people and getting to know them more is great.

Thanks. In my reading list now.

How can it be possible to have more than %50 percent of possiblity to have the same birthday among 23 people?

This discussion paper examines co-regulation of learning in CSCL environments extending research on self-regulated learning in computerbased environments. The discussion employs a socio-cognitive perspective focusing on social and collective views of learning to examine how students co-regulate and collaborate in computer-supported inquiry. Future research directions include examining the theoretical nature of collective regulation and social metacognition in building models of co-regulated learning.

Here I share a report on informal science learning. The report synthesizes research on science learning across three primary venues--everyday/family life, designed experiences in informal institutions, and out-of-school programs. The evidence presented suggests that learners' informal experiences with science, from museum visits to television shows to observations in nature, contribute strongly scientific knowledge and engagement. I agree with the fact that such informal experiences boost learning, especially science and additionally language learning.

I am now convinced of the opportunities of learning that can be provided by games after reading the following quote: "While commercial video games often offer worlds in which players prepare for the actions of soldiers or thieves, the question arises as to whether other types of games could let players prepare for action from different perspectives or identities such as a particular type of scientist, political activist, or global citizen, for instance. "

Yelda, honestly, I also used to question the contribution of video games to learning and nowadays, as seeing more examples like the one you shared, I guess yes perspective are changing:) I believe as we also discussed in the forum, the most critical thing is how the material, video or something else is presented to the learners and used, not the material itself.

The same material in two differnt hands may serve to two differnt ideologies , beliefs, subject areas hence I do definitely agree with Canan the mentality of the minds who are using those plays the important role.

This document demostrates Skinner's view of learning. I think is an essential reading for learners of learning..:) Certain basic assumptions, essential to any scientific activity, are sometimes called theories. That nature is orderly rather than capricious is an example. Certain statements are also theories simply to the extent that they are not yet facts. A scientist may guess at the result of an experiment before the experiment is carried out.

For those interested in the science of babies.

Hocam I cannot believe the results of the study. It is really amazing. The babies are smarter that adults and knows statistics. The saying of lean mean machine to adult brain is interesting. Now I am looking for the study is about babies and statistics, I really wonder this one. Thanks for your sharing. And I found another video of Dr. Alison Gopnik about baby thinking as a scientists..:) http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think.html

This video made me question the role of education in children's life again.I think formal education is the biggest barrier for children who have natural abilities to learn. The education system is limiting children's potential and killing their imagination and curiostiy which make them excellent learners indeed. Do you think the school provides them proper opportunities to explore and to learn? I don't think students can learn in our "boring" classes where they are grouped on their ages rather than their abilities.

In human-interaction, 55% of affective information is carried by the body whilst 38% by the voice tone and volume, and only 7% person by the words spoken [1]. Ekman [2] further suggests that non-verbal behaviours are the primary vehicles for expressing emotion. With the availability of computational power, and great advances in the fields of computer vision and speech recognition, it is now possible to create systems that can detect facial expressions, gestures and body postures from video and audio feed. Furthermore, systems that can integrate different modalities can offer powerful and much more pleasant computer experiences as they would be embracing users' natural behaviour.

In the paper it says "According to Wolcott teachers rely on nonverbal means such as eye contact, facial expressions and body language to determine the cognitive states of students, which indicate the degree of success in the instructional transaction". I really wonder what is your opinion about it and would it be succesful to implement affect recognition (after voice-recognition) in intelligent tutoring systems.

Naturally, there are some disadvantages of cognitive intelligent tutroring systems.

Thank you İbrahim, I think the con about distraction is very important (It requires more discipline, Your child would have to keep his focus on the screen without getting distracted by emails, IM's or Facebook.) Any ideas to prevent getting distracted?

For me it is important to be aware of that in foreign language instruction, the movement of your mouth can be really important in getting pronunciation right. That's harder to teach online. If the subject or homework assignment specifically requires the child to write on paper, it's much harder for an online tutor to read along with the student. So it works better for some subjects