Group items tagged

"It's amazing what you can do with boxes and junk," he says. That could almost be the slogan of the New York Coalition for Play, which provided the boxes and junk. The nonprofit association ran one of the two dozen booths at the Ultimate Block Party, an event last fall that brought together companies like Disney, Crayola, and Lego, along with researchers from Columbia and MIT, and attracted thousands of parents and children. The goal was to "celebrate the science of play" and to push back against the notion that education happens only when students are seated at their desks, staring at chalkboards, and scribbling furiously in their notebooks.

Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional classroom instruction.

Frameworks like SAMR and RAT are incredibly helpful here, but we still need a framework to assist with the top levels of redefinition/transformation of learning through effective uses of digital technologies.

what are the transformative, unique affordances of digital technologies?

Point 3: This depends whether you have a static or evolutionary view of language. Neologisms are always uncomfortable until familiarity breeds acceptance. In English, we've been verbing nouns for centuries. If you don't like it then you must reject Shakespeare and most other great writers who indulged in the creation of new verbs this way. Caution, self-awareness and a hint of irony can make this practice more acceptable.

Point 8: Providing simple frameworks to help people more easily structure and remember complex knowledge can be useful as long as one acknowledges the flaws and limitations of any model. 'It's only a model'