Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I just watched Voices from the New American Schoolhouse trailer at YouTube after hearing about it at Boing Boing. The clip concerns a radial experiment in education taking place in Fairhaven. It’s a school where kids (of all ages) make the rules and decide what they want to learn and when.

Of course, I’ve heard about projects like this before, and we can find parallels in the history of universities (such as those of Bologna). Somehow, though, I’m skeptical. If I were 12 and allowed to “make my own lesson plan,” it would consist entirely of videogames and the occasional SF flick.

Here are links to the blogs I wrote on the second day of the confernce. I’m posting them past midnight — all this took place on March 23.

• Opening General Session
  
  

• Jay Wootten’s CCCC 2006 Address: ‘’Riding a One-Eyed House’’
  
  

• Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish?
  
  

• How Writing Centers Respond to Writers’ Needs

This fall, I took a job as an assistant professor at a university that is very serious about welcoming diversity. To that end, I’ve attended seminars addressing topics on racism, sexism, and so on, but this information (while useful) is, unfortunately, too general to be of much use in the particular problems I’m having in the classroom. However, thankfully I know I can count on all my wonderful friends and distinguished colleagues here at Knews to help me through these troubling times–please, take a moment to help me address my dilemma.

Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You is a quick read. It’s a few days’ worth of tub & toilet reading for folks like me who do 90% of their reading in the bathroom–the only room in their house without a computer or TV. EBiGfY is fun, well-written, and self-described as an “old-fashioned work of persuasion” (meaning that you’re not going to get the other side of the argument.) The basic idea is that popular culture media (television shows, videogames, films, the internet, etc.) have been steadily increasing in complexity (but not necessarily sophistication) since the 50s. He calls this “The Sleeper Curve,” a joke borrowed from a Woody Allen film. Johnson reveals that TV shows now have more characters, threads, and subplots. Games are so complicated you need a strategy guide just to beat them. Films haven’t changed as much as the rest of pop culture, but even there we can see how the LotR trilogy is far more complex than Star Wars. Not to put to find a point on it, kids and couch potatoes are sucking wholesome Vitamin D milk from their boob tubes.

Over at the Wisconsin Center of Education Research, they have a lot of working papers, some of which focus on technology-enhanced learning. The most recent one is “Video Games and the Future of Learning” by David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, and James P. Gee, all of the University of Wisconsin. Here’s the abstract:

Will video games change the way we learn? We argue here for a particular view of games—and of learning—as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate to an age marked by the power of new technologies. We argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look beyond schools to the emerging arena of video games. We suggest that video games matter because they present players with simulated worlds: worlds that, if well constructed, are not just about facts or isolated skills, but embody particular social practices. Video games thus make it possible for players to participate in valued communities of practice and as a result develop the ways of thinking that organize those practices. Most educational games to date have been produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research. We argue here for such a theory—and for research that addresses the important questions about this relatively new medium that such a theory implies.

More here.

A small plug for the new Games, Learning & Society program offered through the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Details here:

http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/index.htm

Areas of study include digital literacies, digital game-based learning environments, gender and gameplay, and MMOGs.

Today’s Tampa Tribune has a story, “Weaving Through the Tangled Web,” that might be of interest to Kairosnews readers.

The reporter, Gary Haber, briefly references the ETS Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment and the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among others, and intermingles student perspectives with faculty and administrator views.

One thing that always interests me personally is the notion of “authority” and how it’s constructed. I’d like my students to be able to think critically about what the encounter online, but I don’t know that I necessarily want them creating a sort of good/bad binary based only on publisher and currency.