Kapp Notes: What are the Technology Goals of Higher Education?

Kapp Notes: What are the Technology Goals of Higher Education?:

Karl Kapp's excellent edutech blog.

Tom Haskins makes a comment and a suggestion about how we teach University students:

"3. Reverse the use of classroom/homework dichotomy so that the lectures get watched alone outside of class and the homework gets done together in class. Offer the presentations for download onto handhelds to then be watched anywhere."

I think that's a great idea!

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science: "This led Steinkuehler to a fascinating and provocative conclusion: Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today."

Games are not what people think. There are large misunderstandings in the educational community. If you are interested in educational games, Please read steinkuehler and her husband, Kurt Squire.

Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations: Might the best schools not be schools at all? Are summer camps a better starting place?

Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations: Might the best schools not be schools at all? Are summer camps a better starting place?

Great link from Clark Aldrich that inspired some good comments. Little known fact: I was a camp counselor this year in Cleveland. Based on that experience and my experience as a camper, camps are really a place to examine for student development.

I love Downes comment about little two month experiences ... and to add, why not mediated experiences via books, movies, and even games. This month we are all pretending to be Fire fighters - read about, write about, play as a firefighter. Might be a good idea

Water Cooler Games - Grinding on the Treadmill

Water Cooler Games - Grinding on the Treadmill: "Exercise really is much more similar to the MMO grind than to other kinds of games. It's something you have to do everyday, or every few days. It never really changes, but you do get better at it slowly, over time."

Watercooler games has had some interesting posts lately. They panned the Dogwood Alliance's pac man game (deservedly so, it's not a great game - but done with the right intentions). This post is about MMO games and exercise. He also points to an URL from Jonathan Blow who argues that MMOs are more like drugs than games.

I've heard people and repeated that I want to create addictive learning. That I want to use the research and application of addiction (it's all aroung us) for learning environments. Getting people addicted to thinking or sharing ideas or brainstorming doesn't seem wrong... or is it. Perhaps we need to clarify what is addiction. Also, what is play? and then finally what is learning?

Reality is Broken: GDC08 Rant by Jane McGonigal � SlideShare

Reality is Broken: GDC08 Rant by Jane McGonigal � SlideShare

Hey I found this link on Ralph Koster's site. For those who don't know Jane, she does the reality games, like the one where people blog about rising energy costs and she is a serious games designer and big thinker.

It reminded me of a talk at this year's TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) conference given by Laura Christopherson. Basically, she gave a detailed presentation about why World of Warcraft was relevant to education, but ... well one person in the audience, wanted to know how to use the actual game in the classroom - like, "Okay, class login to the game and let's all meet in Elwynn forest". hmmm - I would love that, but prolly not gonna happen. I asked my friend Lucas Gillispie about it and we agree that it's not "how to get education in games", but "how to get games in Education" ... Schools stifle so much happiness it's not funny. Games are happiness engines. How can we take some of the 'stuff' that runs that happy engine and mix it up with the classroom or other educational environment.

So, I'm really hoping that Laura will post her slides on slideshare for me to see.

Oh, and I saw this on slideshare as well - "What we can learn from game design?"

Wii wants to play ... and learn?

Wii + Second Life = New Training Simulator

The point, says Stone, is that "the ability to easily integrate a wide range of psychomotor activities with simulations running on standard computer platforms will change the ways people interact with computers."

I'm visiting my Sister's family in Cleveland this week. My brother-in-law was playing a Brain Builder type game when I arrived late a night after the long drive from North Carolina. The first thing I noticed was that the controller was wireless - He was just sitting on the couch. The next thing was that he was pointing and not using a joystick. As I played, the controller felt like a mouse instantly and I had no trouble using it to navigate the menus and select items on the screen. I quickly recognized the potential of the Wii remote and interface in a training environment. Game ideas came to us - fishing game, spear fishing and a javelin game, Dentistry, etc...

The article talks about training sims and games with the Wii remote. I belive we will see more controllers like the Wii for other consoles and the PC. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Doug Noon and Stephen Downes write about future education and classroom reform

Good Morning HiFives Readers...

Doug at Borderland pulls together and explains his thoughts after reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and others School 2.0 ideas and resistance to systemic change in schools. The spawn event was working on a committee to rewrite his school's mission statement. Where the idea for a Wiki to complete the work was shot down by a ... reactionary colleague.

I had a similar experience with a volunteer at a Non-Profit, where I volunteer. Without going into detail, when I suggested a blog and wiki to handle some of the admin communication and scheduling, this guy said "I've had this same conversation many times before." My Dad says this to me as well. I think that's a problem of over generalization and wrong headed. However, not being defensive and being very Edward de Bono, I took his perspective and tried to figure out what the real objection. I think I convinced him that, indeed, things have changed since 1999, when he had "the same conversation". The very next week, the org started a new schedule blog. Change happens.

Doug is great about spreading around the good links. He linked this Downes article and I found the following quote.


Half an Hour: To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates

We need to stop employing students as fast-food servers and sales clerks. They are capable of much better than that, and an exercise in corporate demeaning is probably not the best way to introduce them to society.

We should begin offering students full-time employment in certain fields as alternatives to their formal studies. Such a program should logically begin at the higher grades (grades 11 and 12) as well as being brought on-stream as an alternative to college and university.

Most such employment involves the creation of some sort of content or another. The ranges of possible employment are covered in my diagram:

- students could provide ultra-local news, entertainment and sports reporting
- students could provide up-to-date surveying and inventories of civic property
- students could conduct scientific field-research such as bird-counting, ecosystem sampling, pollution-measuring and the like
- students could help supervise younger children

and more - the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations.

I feel this is exactly what Sandra and Mr. Meador are trying to do with Topsail High School here in Pender Co. They are making a Project based curriculum around a school new production. And it reminds me of the project at St. Martin De Porres High school in Cleveland (Thanks Karen Nestor) ... And it is exactly what I want to do with the MIT program in UNCW.

The trick to making this attractive is to present it, not as the dog-eat-dog struggle for survival that characterizes our existing economy, but rather as a large and complex game, played partially on the computer and partially in RL, in which they play an increasingly important role.

Now here is the Edu-Gaming part - Thank you Stephen Downes. YES! This is what I think of when I play WoW (the famously popular World of Warcraft) hmmm... enough for now.. Thanks for the inspiration.