Education: July 2007 Archive Page

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is "this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn?t work for 'my subject.'" Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include "thought experiments" where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt --on the spot -- to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler's List. It's just dumb (and lazy) of educators -- not to mention ineffective -- to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives' "language" is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea. --Marc Prensky --Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (marcprensky.com)

Extremely relevant when it was written in 2001, and still important now. When I recently gave a talk about simulations in Holocaust education, I didn't mention this passage, but I probably should have.

Until the eigth school in the list, they've only included schools with a few students which means that any large percentage drops or gains are not strange at all, but expected. To put them on the "Biggest Metro Math Losers" (what kind of name for a table is that anyway?!) is simply poor reporting.

I'm sure the editors would think a reporter insane for doing the same thing for the baseball box scores: "Mauer was 2 for 4 on Tuesday, but only 1 for 5 on Wednesday. That's a 30% drop!" --IB --Newspaper Reporting (Three Standard Deviations to the Left)

The big problem here, as IB notes, is that the article in question deals with a very small pool of students, so that normal fluctuations in the numbers look like huge drops and gains. (Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

Statistics collected over two decades show an alarming decline in the performance of America's boys--in some respects, a virtual free fall. Boys were doing poorly in school, abusing drugs, committing violent crimes and engaging in promiscuous sex. Young males lost ground by many behavioral indicators at some point in the 1980s and '90s: sharp plunges on some scales, long erosions on others. I was forced to confront a fact that I had secretly known all along: that teens of 30 years ago--my generation--were the leading edge of an epidemic of thugs, dolts and cads.

No wonder so many writers began calling for change in the late 1990s. Reliable social-science data often lag a couple of years behind the calendar; it takes time to gather and compile a nation's worth of numbers. Stories about social trends that you read today may be describing the reality of 2004 or 2005. The groundbreaking boy books were a response to statistics portraying the worst of a physical, mental and moral health crisis.

There's more to the story, however. That downward slide has leveled off--and in many cases, turned around. Boys today look pretty good compared with their dads and older cousins. By some measures, our boys are doing better than ever. --David Von Drehle --The Boys are All Right (Time)

I've blogged about the "boy crisis" before, and this is a thoughtful, moderating rebuttal.

Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen. --Queen guitarist to complete doctorate (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

This brightened my day.

--Statetris (mapmsg.com)

Like Tetris, but with American states.

Confusing ''b'' and ''d'' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hold your hands like this, and imagine an "e" in between them, and you've got the word "bed".

My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ''b'' and ''d'' that my wife urged me to look up dyslexia on the internet. Along the way, I came across several sites selling stickers or posters showing the word "bed" superimposed over the image of a bed, but Carolyn's thumbs worked just fine for her. When she's guessing, I sometimes have to remind her to "do the thumbs," but she often does it on her own.

We're still working on getting her 5s and 3s to face the right way, but the b and d problem seems to be solved.

Taylor Mali Poetry Slams (''What Do Teachers Really Make?'' and ''The Impotence of Proofreading'')YouTube)

Wow. I needed that.

The summer's more than half over, and I've got to start focusing on getting things off of my summer "to-do" list.

Not knowing what they could and should do to plan for the future was a constant refrain among the undergrads. Whether or not college faculties and administrators are comfortable acknowledging that a majority of students have enrolled because of their belief that a college degree will lead to an attractive and secure career, the fact remains: Some professional level of advisement is an expectation by virtually all young people on campuses today. --Howard and Matthew Greene --The Next (Real) World: Are you preparing your students for it? (University Business)

Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

* User-Created Content. It's all about the audience, and the "audience" is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.

* Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.

* Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.

* Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world--or diverge wildly from it--present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.

* The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like--and how new scholars might work.

* Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones. --The Horizon Report 2007 Edition (PDF) (New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative)

I'm glad to have found this document, as I start to pull together materials for my tenure bid.

If I'm working on a project, it's my dream. I'm not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else's pyramid. If you're going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession - and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism - I say to you this: make it mean something. Spend your life making meaning. Create things that excite you, which get you out of bed early in the morning and keep you up late at night. Create experiences that will set minds on fire and inspire, in turn, to create experiences for others. We all have a reason for wanting to create games and, at some level, it boils down to an experience we had playing someone else's creation, their dream. What was that game for you? --Swink --The Teaching Game: Part One - Transitioning (Game Career Guide)

An interesting feature from a games industry professional who got tired of the grind and gave it up. I'm a little worried that Swink is romanticizing the teaching profession as much as he had previously romanticized the games industry, but this is still a good read.