This is a mashup of a blog post and a retweet. I'm basically retweeting (Twitter users' term for reposting someone else's tweet because you think it's worth your own followers' attention) educator and author Will Richardson's March 2011 TEDxNYED talk in case you missed it. At about 1:30 into Will's 14-min. talk, he mentions 17-year-old professional cinematographer Mark Klassen in Ontario. Here's … [Read more...] about To bring learning back into school
James Paul Gee
No ‘God complex’ in Net safety, please
In his TED Talk, author Tim Harford tells the story of World War II prisoner of war Dr. Archie Cochrane and the start of his life-long observation about "the God complex" – the idea some people have that, no matter how complex the problem or conditions, they understand the way it all works and are "infallibly right" in what the solution should be. Problematic, if not dangerous in this … [Read more...] about No ‘God complex’ in Net safety, please
Why videogames are good for learners
As a gamer – to some extent, not entirely, but enough – you're master of your own fate, and when you're not, you can find help. You're not only in an environment, you're in an experience too – one that changes as you work and conquer problems and keep getting better. So it's progressive but self-paced – but also social, so less boring than purely self-paced. There are rules, but they're like … [Read more...] about Why videogames are good for learners
PBS Frontline’s ‘Digital Nation’: Presenting our generation with a crucial choice
Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about … [Read more...] about PBS Frontline’s ‘Digital Nation’: Presenting our generation with a crucial choice
Net safety: How social networks can be protective
Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, MD, discovered and presented at medical conferences – as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf … [Read more...] about Net safety: How social networks can be protective