These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.
When students use facts and information to solve problems they both gain the facts and information and learn to solve problems. Games are one good way to do this, because a video game is problem solving with lots of practice, feedback, and assessment (e.g., boss battles). But this style of learning can and should be done in many different ways.
Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.
one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,
As Mr. Share says in the signature file at the bottom of every e-mail he sends: “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
Do American students have too much homework or too little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether. What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The last 15 Web-frenzied years have upended the basic premise of school. The idea that content and knowledge and teachers are scarce and have to be collected into a local classroom during a certain time period in order to educate our children is no longer true.