Education: January 2003 Archive Page

"The problem may be that they are simply bored with the conventional curriculum, says the study, titled Morphing Literacy: Boys Reshaping Their Literacy. The study found it is a myth that boys do not read. While they are less interested in fiction or traditional literature than girls are, they read more on the Internet and memorize vast amounts of detailed material from games or stories they read in the newspaper, the research showed." Julie Smyth summarizes an academic report, but doesn't say where it was published.

--Study says boys do read, they just don't read booksNational Post)

Another telling quote, which reminds me of Sugata Mitra's minimally invasive teaching philosophy: " The researchers found boys are becoming literate "in spite of school instruction," and may end up better prepared for a career because their skills are more useful than being able to write a narrative or analyze a work of fiction....They found boys spend large amounts of time on chat sites and Web sites to get tips on how to "cheat" or compete at video games, read books about animals, sports and fantasy, and will pick up magazines and newspapers to read hockey scores, entertainment stories or news about things relevant to their lives, such as the death of Napster.

Minimally Invasive Education: "This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley." Sugata Mitra put a computer with a high-seed Internet access into the wall of a filthy slum. Almost instantly, slum children were using the computer to surf the Internet, paint pictures, and play music. "If computer literacy is defined as turning a computer on and off and doing the basic functions, then this method allows that kind of computer literacy to be achieved with no formal instruction. Therefore any formal instruction for that kind of education is a waste of time and money. You can use that time and money to have a teacher teach something else that children cannot learn on their own."

--India: Hole in the WallGreenstar)

The children didn't know what a "File" means, but they knew that if you clicked it, you could save and load your pictures. Some didn't even know what a "computer" is, but their creativity and curiousity more than made up for it. Another interesting quote from Mitra: "only reaction we got from adults was, 'What on earth is this for? Why is there no one here to teach us something? How are we ever going to use this?' I contend that by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers."

"From an educator's perspective, games may be the most fully realized educational technology produced to date. Tom Malone (1981) showed how games use challenge, fantasy, player control, and curiosity invoking designs to create intrinsically motivating environments. More recently, Lloyd Rieber (1996) has argued that digital games engage players in productive play -- learning that occurs through building microworlds, manipulating simulations, and playing games. Rieber argues that historically, educational games have relied heavily on exogenuous game formulas, meaning that content is inserted into a generic gaming template, like hangman, rather than seamlessly integrated with gaming mechanisms as in SimCity .(He calls this endogenuous game design)." Kurt Squire --Games-to-Teach ResearchMIT)

The artificial world of the college campus is, itself, a kind of simulation of real life. Via thinking with my fingers.

"An act of reading electronic language involves:

1. Setting up an electronic language environment;
2. Selecting particular input into the electronic text;
3. Receiving the output;
4. Analyzing what the electronic text does."

--Someone Writing about Their Reading of GoogleTechnacy Weblog)

I'm reminded of Espen Aarseth's definition of Cybertext -- a system that includes not only the array of bits in memory or phosophors on a screen, but the whole thing -- including the software used to create and view the text, the hardware (keyboard, mouse, monitor), the power grid that runs the whole system, and even (without stretching the point too much) the whole system of laws, guidelines and practices that control what sort of text gets created, distributed, rewarded, penalized, etc.

According to Jenkins, "Technacy primarily is about a new consciousness, an extended consciousness beyond oracy and literacy that encompasses the problems posed by a new language order - electronic language." I'm very happy I found this website. As soon as I get my course syllabi set up next week I'm goint to spend more time here.