Group items tagged

Interesting article in Educational Psychologist 50(4), 313-334, 2015 Constructivist Gaming: Understanding the Benefits of Making Games for Learning by Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke. Although the research is about k-12, there are implications in this article for all learners.They used existing research (using specific criteria to choose appropriate research) about gaming use and principles, and then used constructivist theory to posit a new way of gaming design. Gaming is very effective in building coding and computational concepts, practices, and perspectives as identified by other researchers, but the authors go further in applying the constructivist theory of personal, social, and cultural tenets to these categories. They argue that student-designed gaming is an effective way to build social networks around a work purpose, and that iterative processes are going to be the norm.

An amazing project that utilizes gaming, social media, digital badging, and virtual worlds as methods to promote digital literacy to youth in high risk areas. These after-school programs are designed to "Global Kids believes that youth be not merely critical consumers but active producers of digital media". Kids produce games on social issues impacting them (such as neighborhood violence or racial intolerance) that are designed to teach others about not just about the issue but how it feels to be impacted by the issue.

The Global Kids definition of leadership is very in tune with what we have been trying to convey, I think. Here is there goal statement: "The Global Kids Online Leadership Program (OLP) integrates international and public policy issues into digital media programs to encourage digital literacy and technical competency, foster global awareness, promote civic participation and develop 21st Century skills. OLP was created in 2000 to bring new media into Global Kids' after school programs, introduce these programs into online communities, and explore how the combination of the two could develop 21st Century Learning Skills. Through programs utilizing video games, virtual worlds, social media, and other forms of participatory media, youth involved in our programs now have the opportunity to have their voices heard and make a global impact in ways that were previously unimaginable."

page of spinning game wheels

Interview with Carol Dweck on the role of motivation in learning, Education World

Great TED talk on interactive design and why MoMA has acquired and is displaying video games.

Great TED talk and good thoughts about interactive design. Just to spark our thinking about online interaction

Article by Beth Kanter in LinkedIn on The Failure Bow, 1.23.13

Blog, June 19, 2013, Scoop.it, on how Most Popular leads into reading more in a webiste can be quite distorted to direct reads. Advocates for human curation. "The solution: Human curation. We need to provide readers with lists and collections of content that are popular within a certain field because they are genuinely popular to those who know about or are interested in that field. Most Popular lists on websites are generated by algorithms, making them extremely easy to game (by clicking the same content repeatedly, for instance) which in turn leads readers to believe they've found good content when they oftentimes haven't. It's the job of the curator, as a human, to let other humans know what they (the curator) are finding to be the best pieces of content on a topic - as someone who knows about a specific subject or interest."

great article by Jane Bozarth in Learning Solutions Magazine on social learning around new products; she uses Pokemon Go to show how people help each other master the game with shared tips

Blog post by Stephen Downes exploring what a MOOC does and does not do--it does not replicate or build on past failed educational pathways where a person--adult or child--is not motivated enough to invest time in his/her own learning path. He mentions that online gaming is the best pre-MOOC and equivalent to MOOC for young people. Makes me wonder about my addiction to WordsFree and Scrabble on my iphone and desire to beat the computer again and again. Or enrolling in a MOOC where the opportunity to connect with smart, similarly-quested learners/achievers/doers must motivate me to overcome challenges of schedule, technology, serendipitous approach to learning, self-expression, etc. The MOOC is simply a much bigger playground where my motivation and my two feet (or eyes!) rule my behavior .

An interesting assessment of how stage fright was picked up and reported in thousands of tweets elevating a single appearance into an epic disastrous event, and how absence from Twitter by the presenter, compounded the error. If anyone thinks that social media can be ignored, they need to read this blog post. Love the quote below from Chris Taylor about how the communications game has changed: It's Twitter, the Internet's first responder, that is primarily responsible for changing the laws of media physics. There are just too many witty things to be said in the space of 140 characters, especially with a moment as shadenfreude-filled as this. Thousands got the Bay-bashing bug, and I certainly wasn't immune. (Hey, it's not every day that a parody of that Aerosmith tune from Armageddon pops up complete in your head.)

post by Meghan M. Biro, July 28, 2013 on collaboration success. Excerpt: The fact is there is nothing more important to leadership and organizational success than collaboration. It exponentially increases the odds of amazing things happening. But it can be tough to achieve. Bringing people together and then igniting and nurturing a collaborative effort is a key test of leadership and workplace culture. Technology provides amazing tools to make this happen. It is nothing short of a game-changing community-builder. 1. Build an online infrastructure for social learning and networking 2. Set limits 3. Get it off your chest 4. Ignite inspiration 5. Be yourself

Interview with Vera Michalchik published by DML Research Hub, funded by the McArthur Foundation. Michalchick heads up research on Informal Learning Environments in SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning. "I'm paraphrasing Richard Feynman who said that the more that we have a monoculture of learning, the less chance we have of producing creative, innovative, capable thinkers. We really want diverse learning environments, and assessment is always the tail that wags the dog. People are beholden to systems of accountability, and what knowledge is valued and how that knowledge is valued really shows up in an assessment system. Besides reducing the diversity of learning environments by having common metrics, we short-change a natural process. This is what we mention in the Naturalizing Assessment article. " Offers pros and cons on badging system (is disinclined but open-minded about their usage) and suggests various kinds of informal learning assessments that do not following the standardized testing model such as: continual monitoring of where kids are in the program, for when kids are "getting it", "minimally invasive studies of behavior and performance" to support documentation of participation and capacity building, ethnology, video documentation, data mining methods of video archives, embedded assessment in learning games, etc.

Quote that Jane Hart found from Jane Bozarth, 12/6/14, rest of Jane Hart's post is just as interesting. well worth reading. "The thing that is going to change the game is - the learners …. They are changing the concept of training, and we are increasingly moving toward an age in which the adult worker will not sit still for training that just looks like more "school". They're becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of how learning looks and how it happens. We're going to have to figure out how to provide better performance support, in smaller bites, in places easy for them to access. And we'll need to offer time and space and support so they can create the user-generated help that others need. And if we don't? They won't wait for us. They'll find the means to do it anyway.""

Curtis--comic strip on why his father cannot connect to a network. "Simple." "Thank you for simplifying that." January 22, 2015

Curtis comic strip on whether father should pay son for helping him solve a computer problem after saying "I don't know why you old people can't understand how a computer works!", January 23, 2015

Very good article by Glenn Llopis in Forbes, 6/13/2011, on importance of authenticity in diversity management. Not a numbers or compliance game but a real effort to get the most from everyone in an organization in order to serve/sell/reach out effectively to markets, communities, customers, and clients.

By Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of FlexJobs.com. Her take on the status of Job Boards today. She has 3 observations: Boards have changed, job postings haven't and need to be updated; big box job boards focus on volume, smaller niche job boards on a refined pool of potential applicants; ATS/RMS keep candidates and hiring managers apart. New technologies such as gaming used by Marriott may erase this.

Mashable on internet has gone as far as it can with free news, entertainment, services, etc.

blog post by Marilyn Achiron citing Tyler Cowen, economist at George Mason University in VA on teaching yourself to learn, July 29, 2015. We have cited Cowen in our blog posts at least once. He is a Uber fan and favors marketplace economics for settling competitive battles. He also embraces ongoing, online learning that people set up for themselves.

Interesting assessment of the value of volunteer moderators, July 7, 2015, by Ernie Smith on Reddit