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Project Noah: Taking Attendance on the Ark

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

by J. A. Ginsburg

on the inspirations of childhood, why many heads are better than one; the nature / tech connection; & visual learning and science

: a crowdsourced nature guide

When Project Noah’s, “Chief Leaf,” Yassar Ansari was a boy, he was fascinated by reptiles and amphibians, keeping many in his room—much to his mom’s dismay. “It kept her out,” he recalls with a laugh. Although wise enough to humor her nature-loving son’s penchant for the scaled, spined, slimy and cold-blooded, she never could have guessed where his interests would eventually lead.

Fast-forward a few decades and Ansari, now armed with degrees in molecular biology and bioinformatics, finds himself at a career crossroads after stints the Salk Institute’s genome analysis lab and at telcos Qualcomm and Kyocera (where he worked on everything from hand-held radiation detectors to mobile gaming apps). So it’s off to the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a.k.a.,“an Alice in Wonderland version of graduate school. It is the kind of place where Photocell 200K light sensors are stocked in the vending machine along with more traditional geek gorp. It is where techies go to dream.

“I took a class called ‘Social Activism Using Mobile Technology,’ where we were asked, ‘What are our causes?’ I really wanted to use mobile technology for a more meaningful purpose. I wanted to build something that was based on impact. Impact as the bottom line,” says Ansari.

His “big hairy audacious goal”? Creating a “common platform for recording all the world’s organisms.” Project Noah (Networked Organism and Habitats), the world’s biggest crowdsourced nature guide, was born. He had come full circle, determined to spark in others the same kind of wonder that his bedroom menagerie had sparked in him.

What began as a glimmer in Ansari’s eye in early 2010 is now available as a free app for smart phone (iPhone and Android), which has been downloaded over 100,000 times. While many use the site as a resource, nearly 24,000 photos have been uploaded by “citizen scientists” —including some from a class of second grader beta testers in Maine. And no less a “wow!” than National Geographic has come on board as an investor. Even more of a “wow!,” staff from the National Geographic regularly peruse the sight and about once a week choose a photograph to hare with five and half million Facebook fans.

Project Noah is still very much in its early stages (the search function on the website will, no doubt, improve), but the rallying cry of “No Child Left Inside!” is a siren song. This isn’t just about the world beyond the classroom: This is the world as a classroom. This is students as scientists, making observations in the field and sharing them in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Now, anyone anywhere can contribute data points of genuine value to researchers.

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(credit: PopTech / summer 2010)_____________________

Although envisioned as a mobile app, you actually don’t need a smart phone to contribute to Project Noah. Just sign on to the website and you can upload photos from computer files. You don’t even to know the name of what you’re looking at to contribute. Experts surf the site to help fill in the blanks. Just do your best to describe what something looks like, where it’s located, the time of day, the weather: Every details helps.

Also, unlike traditional field guides that focus solely on plant / animal identification, Project Noah can be used to analyze changes over time for specific species or areas. For example, a class could document all kinds of details about what’s “growing on” in a school garden or nearby park. Plants, of course, but also insects, worms, squirrels, rabbits, dogs and cats, too. When did the first bloom appear? When did the last leaf fall? Even in the middle of a city, it is possible to nurture a deep and textured relationships with Nature. Who knows? The next E.O. Wilson could be one of your students!

Select "Local" in the Field Guide section and see everything that's been tagged in your area. I uploaded a description of a daffodil near Northwestern University. Click on the photo and you can view a close-up. That's a LOT of data in your pocket!

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FISH, SCHOOLS, CROWDS & NETWORKS

One after another, the educator / presenters at TEDxNYED last month hammered home three messages about modern education:

To succeed, indeed survive, in the 21st century, students must learn how to collaborate and network, and to sift through, sort and connect-the-dots from gushers of information.

It is no longer about teaching children how to be taught, but teaching them how to be learners

Technology is not a gee-whiz add-on—digital frosting to the analog cake of basic learning—but part and parcel of daily life for nearly all 7 billion people on the planet, rich and poor, urban and rural. It is how we function, almost as basic as breathing.

They could just as well have been talking about scientists. Social network tools are not only changing the way they work, but in many cases turbocharging it.

When a team from the Smithsonian recently found themselves at the Guyana border with an urgent need to identify 5,000 specimen fish quickly in order to secure an export permit, they uploaded thousands of photographs and called on their ichthyologist Facebook friends for help:

In less than 24 hours, this approach identified approximately 90 percent of the posted specimens to at least the level of genus, revealed the presence of at least two likely undescribed species, indicated two new records for Guyana and generated several loan requests. The majority of people commenting held a Ph.D. in ichthyology or a related field, and hailed from a great diversity of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil.

Now there is even a special network, a “Facebook for scientists,” called ResearchGate. Boasting nearly a million users so far, it promises a new way to reach out beyond the lab cubicle to others working on similar issues around the globe. Scientists can post research papers and send out inquiries. Although it doesn’t replace the richness of conferences with old fashioned in-person networking, panel discussions and poster sessions, it makes it easier for researchers to connect with colleagues outside their fields. Biologists can reach out to chemists, and geologists to structural engineers. New paths for collaboration are possible.

To paraphrase Ratatouille’s wise if ghostly chef Gusteau: Anyone can do science. Observe. Recognize. Interpret. Perceive. Express Ideas. Again and again and again. Visual learning skills are science skills (which delights us no end here at vizlearning…). The collective power of millions of new smart phone and digital camera “eyes,” connected by new digital platforms and social networks, means we can know more about more and faster than ever before.

So what are you waiting for? It’s Spring. Earth Day week, in fact. Go out there and pay attention!

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TEDxNYED: Innovation & the Future in an Era of Cutbacks

Monday, March 7th, 2011

"Empowering Innovation in Education"

by J. A. Ginsburg

On rethinking school, digitally transcending (crumbling) walls and preparing 21st century students for a collaborative, networked world

The official theme of TEDxNYED 2011 was “Empowering Innovation in Education,” but it just as easily could have been the “The Best of Times / The Worst of Times.” On the 40th floor, in the gleaming glass aerie of the New York Academy of Sciences, a group of passionate, endlessly creative and deeply concerned educators gathered to talk about tech revolutions and tight budgets, boundary-blind collaborations and soaring drop-out rates, of potential and potential throttled.

Clocking in at 17 speakers, one folksinger, a few hundred attendees and over 5,000 watching via livestream (last year, that was me, a whole Saturday spent unexpectedly tethered to a laptop after serendipitously catching an early morning tweet tip…), the day-long event was packed and intense. Perhaps a bit too packed. There’s comes a point—somewhere near 3 in the afternoon, when brains top-off for the day, the bell should ring and golly, isn’t it time for recess? What starts out as a bright-eyed idea-fest morphs into a marathon of determined paying attention. But by that time, you’re hooked, addicted, need—really need—to know what the next speaker has to say because, well, it could be great…

This morning—the morning after—my brain having now diced and sliced its dreamy way to synthesized thought, and armed with a stack of just-shy of indecipherable scribbled notes, it is striking how many of the speakers delivered theme and variation on tha same core message:

To succeed, indeed survive, in the 21st century, students must learn how to collaborate and network, and to sift through, sort and connect-the-dots from gushers of information.

It is no longer about teaching children how to be taught, but teaching them how to be learners

Technology is not a gee-whiz add-on—digital frosting to the analog cake of basic learning—but part and parcel of daily life for nearly all 7 billion people on the planet, rich and poor, urban and rural. It is how we function, almost as basic as breathing.

BETTER / DIFFERENT

Curriculum designer Heidi Hayes Jacobs wryly notes most schools are preparing kids for 1991, perhaps because “we were happier then.” But tech as a stand alone isn’t the answer. “We can do dumb things with a smartboard.” Rather than school reform, which only tweaks things, Jacobs proposes a new form of school, a complete rethink not only of what is being taught and how, but also how it is assessed. “Students should be futurists, now.”

Jacobs is a veritable volcano of assignment ideas that sound like so much fun, I’d like to give them a try myself:

Put “geo” in front of everything you teach: geo-history, geo-science, geo-literature. Now tag, map and go!

Ask “What does a quality fill-in-the-blank look like? (a quality blog? a quality podcast?) Create one.

Pretend you’re Ben Franklin and it’s the night before the start of the Revolutionary War. What would you tweet? (h’mmmm, isn’t that Wael Ghonim?)

Create a Facebook page for Julius Caesar complete with status updates and wall posts (“Get out of town in March…”)

Build an app

In short, enough with oral reports and pen-to-paper multiple choice tests. Use digital media for all the new ways it allows us to learn, understand, communicate and share.

CURRICULUM SHIFT

As education consultant Alan November points out, children are going off the curricular script on their own already, in all kinds of impressively imaginative ways. He tells the story of a gifted, prolific young fan-fiction author writing Harry Potter riffs in the style of J.K Rowling, only eeking by in school. When he asks her about the disconnect, she responds with a mix of practicality and mission: She can either write for her teacher or publish for the world. Smart girl. No doubt her impressive digital portfolio of well-written stories and impressive social network will take her further than an good grade in a soon-forgotten class. She didn’t fail school. She “failed” her school for failing her.

Citing Daniel Pink’s book Drive, November notes, “Purpose is everything.” When children—and adults for that matter—feel they are creating content that adds value, they work harder, longer and produce better work.

So basic is this need, it is hard to believe it needs to be stated. Yet it has become an epiphanous meme of modern educational research. Kids—no surprise—can smell a boring there’s-45-minutes-I’m-never-getting-back lesson from miles away, seizing the opportunity to master the fine art of zoning out. Give them a challenge that plays to their interests and brilliance almost predictably ensues. The projects become catalysts to learning: All roads leads to math…and science, reading, history, literature and art.

Consultant Gary Stager tells of a juvenile detention center in Maine where a collection of boys considered to be hopeless cases, many with learning disabilities, thrive in a constructivist learning setting. One boy wants to build a guitar. Five-hundred hours and considerable collaboration later, the hand-crafted, meticulously engineered guitars are used to create music. Another child, declared a non-reader ADHD-package-of-trouble by age 7, finds his way through a combination of the internet, NASA and tinkering with electronics, and writes a 13,000 word autobiography.

Discipline problems, a once-daily occurrence, dropped to near-zero. The boys had context, purpose, focus. They were simply too engaged to cause trouble. The take-away, says Stager, is that education needs to be “less us, more them.”

IN THE CLASSROOM

Following and nurturing a child’s interests is, of course, music to the ears of Dennis Littky, who has made it his life’s work, founding schools designed to do just that (Big Picture Learning, The Met School and College Unbound). Littky starts his 15-minutes in the TEDx spotlight flinging little pieces of green paper from a bag onto the stage. Each piece represents a student who has given up and dropped out. As an aggregate, the the confetti on the floor represents the number of kids who had dropped out just that morning: one every 13 seconds for a total of 800 (and counting…). Each a private tragedy. Collectively, a public catastrophe.

While Littky starts by asking kids about their interests, Steve Bergen, a veteran math teacher-turned-edu-activist, CIO (Chief Information Officer) and computer teacher at The Children’s Storefront, an independent Pre-K – 8 school in Harlem, focuses on the mix of hardware, software and “humanware.” Skills are key, including such hands-on practical skills learned through reconditioning old computers (also see Tech Saturdays and the Summercore program). His is really another door to the same house: learning by doing. Bergen also wants children to develop “Plan B” skills,” so they know what do when they get stuck.”

Given the incredible ever-shrinking school district budget, we could all use some “Plan B” skills. Brian Crosby, a grade school teacher from the small city of Sparks, Nevada, near Reno, has plenty, and is happy to share. Technology, notes Crosby, can make all sorts of things possible, but it is the pedagogy that provides substance. No longer must students passively sit at their desks, watching the teacher. They are active learners, using the web for research, skyping with classrooms all over the world, collaborating on projects via Google docs, documenting progress via video and blogging, blogging, blogging. They are reading and writing more, networking and collaborating more effectively and globally, thinking more deeply and “learning how to be learners.”

“What if school was the best seven hours of a kid’s day?” asks Stager. In Crosby’s classroom, they just may be.

ASSESSING ASSESSMENTS

At this point, making sure kids have web access is “almost a moral imperative,” says consultant and author Will Richardson. “In this moment, kids can learn what they want, pretty much whenever they want to.” Richardson’s daughter downloads a video to a rock song to help her learn how to play it on the piano. A teenager in Toronto learns about video editing via the web, his videos develop a following and a promising career begins.”Kids are not waiting for curriculum. …There are billion potential teachers out there.”

Yet assessments still rule when it comes to the nuts and bolts of American public education. Funding, and sometimes teachers’ salaries, rise and fall based on test scores. The eternal quest for standards, says Richardson, is fast turning teaching into test prep.

It is time to stop trying to do schools “better” and do schools “different.” …None of this is the stuff of test prep. It is the stuff of life prep.”

Luyen Chou, a former private school teacher and administrator now focused on working with public schools, thinks the problem isn’t so much assessments per se, but rather what is being assessed. He envisions project-based assessments (a la Heidi Hayes Jacobs), coupled with Google-style analytics. In fact, he says, assessments could help the cause, showing how a constructivist approach to teaching leads to students with better critical thinking skills and better test scores.

Don’t see assessment as the enemy. Embrace it. If you do it right, we’re in a position to tell a story no one has. Viva la Revolucion!

ON A THRESHOLD

With those stirring words, my thoughts drifted to Wisconsin, where exactly one week earlier I had been in Madison at a massive rally of teachers and other state employees protesting legislation threatening their rights to collective bargaining. Yet even if they win what has shaped up to be long and bruising battle, municipalities—and their school districts—throughout the state face draconian budget cuts: an estimated 20% in Madison itself. Whether such severe cuts are the start of a nationwide trend remains to be seen, but it is doubtful that there are very many places where school budgets are increasing.

Beyond all the finger-pointing (Bill Gates’ TED talk last week, which singled out states’ wacky accounting practices and ballooning pension and health insurance obligations, received a notably mixed-to-sharply-negative reviews from the TEDxNYED crowd), the economic reality for teachers is stark: Lower or stagnant salaries. Higher expenses. Often working in buildings in need of repair or upgrading. In some states, no right to strike and limited input. College debt. The teacher “churn” rate is currently 25% at three years, which means that 1 out of every 4 teachers drops out of the profession just as they are starting to get the hang of it. At the other end of the career arc, experienced Baby Boom-generation teachers are retiring. And caught in between are mid-career teachers, now faced with the specter of annual lay-offs.

So we are poised between two trends. The first, tech-driven, brimming with innovation, imagination and possibility. The second, a crumbling bricks-and-mortar analog infrastructure. How these two weave together, perhaps creating a better third answer, remains to be seen.

But the times, most definitely, are a’changing.

TEDxNYED 2011 Videos: Direct Links to Speakers Referenced in this Post:

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Alan November

Gary Stager

Dennis Littky

Steve Bergen

Brian Crosby

Will Richardson

Luyen Chou

TEDxNYED 2011 master video page

The Third Teacher: On School, Memories, Low-Hanging Fruit, Lessons from the Past & Better Ideas for the Future

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

by J. A. Ginsburg

"The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching & Learning" / OWP/P Cannon Design / VS Furniture / Bruce Mau Design

Close your eyes. Think back to when you were in elementary school. What do you remember?

For me, it’s the smell of mimeographed hand-outs, still damp with purple ink, and tall windows with tan shades. It’s polished terrazzo floors and my desk with a lift-up top. It’s the certainty of bells, the slam of lockers, the echoes of kick-balls bouncing in the gym. It’s the smell of a bologna sandwich in a brown paper bag and the challenge of eating “strawberry” ice cream from a little plastic cup armed only with a thin hourglass-shaped sliver of wood.

Construction paper. Pencil sharpeners. Crayons. Manila folders. Paste. On the swings, trying to touch the sky with my toes, and climbing metal monkeybars, giggling with my girlfriends.

It’s walking six blocks to and from school every day with my older siblings, navigating snowbanks in the winter and watching cottonwood seeds drift by come spring.

It’s the light in the classroom on a rainy day and listening to my teacher read the class a chapter from Stuart Little.

My memories of actual in-class instruction are rather dim, even though I spent thousands of hours in school and always did well. Somewhere in there I learned how to read, write and “do” math. A few wonderful teachers—and one utter disaster—stand out, but most of the memories have to do with places and senses: what I felt more than what I thought.

I was surprised by what had faded from memory and what had managed to cut through with such stunning clarity. Yet it makes sense from the perspective of a young child, for whom learning, like breathing, is just something that happens. Whether a child is learning how to read or figuring how to navigate a difficult classroom, she is learning…

And, unlike adults, who tend to think “thinking” is a neck-up activity, young children are much more tuned into “multiple intelligences,” gathering and synthesizing information from all their senses. Divisions between mind and body are blurrier. To think—and to learn—is to move, smell, touch, see, hear.

THE THIRD TEACHER

I took this meander back to childhood after reading (make that “gulping”) The Third Teacher, a book / “collaboration project” created by:

OWP/P Cannon Design, an American architecture firm specializing in school buildings

VS Furniture, a Germany company with a rich century-plus history that includes working with Maria Montessori herself

Bruce Mau Design, a Canada-based consultancy known for combining a “design-thinking” approach with a futurist perspective

The eponymous “third teacher” is the environment, a reference to the Reggio Emilia interactions-based approach to education: adults, peers, surroundings. School buildings and classrooms have a profound impact on how we develop and what we learn. Or what we don’t learn.

As common-sense as that sounds, it is too often overlooked, with especially dramatic and potentially tragic implications for young children.

The Third Teacher, which developed through a series of workshops in the United States, Canada, Germany and England, is split into eight sections, covering “79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching & Learning.” It begins at the beginning with Maslow’s basic needs and a two-page spread of gobsmacking statistics:

Students with limited classroom daylight were outperformed by those with the most natural light by 20% in math and 26% on reading tests

Asthma is the most common chronic disorder in childhood, currently affecting an estimated 6.2 million children under 18 years of age

Many classrooms feature a speech intelligibility rating of 75% or less. That means listeners understand only 75% of the words read from a list

American school children missed 12 million days of school due to the asthma

Clean air. Good light. Good acoustics. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, yet nearly a quarter of US schools are in serious need of repair.

Even the most inspired educators are stymied when forced to do battle with their classrooms. It is a waste not only of precious time and effort, but also of precious money. This is classic “low-hanging fruit”: Green schools aren’t just better for learning, they are also cheaper to run:

The financial benefits of greening school are about $70 per square foot, more than 20 times as high as the cost of going green

Schools in the US spend $7.8 billion on energy each year—more than the cost of computers and textbooks combined

On average, green schools saved $100,000 per year—enough to hire two new teachers, buy 200 new computers, or purchase 5,000 new textbooks

FUTURE / PRESENT / PAST

The need to design for the future is an underlying theme throughout the book. Technological capacity doubles each year, notes Bruce Mau. That means “…children starting kindergarten this fall will have…a million times greater capacity to shape the world around them by the time they finish university.” One look at at an iPad—a device that didn’t exist before 2010—and instinctively you know this staggering fact to be true.

But it is goes much deeper than ever-gee-whizzier tools. Schools are charged with preparing children for a world none of us can entirely imagine, for jobs that don’t yet exist, for a future full of uncertainties. How will climate change affect...everything? Will the planet’s natural resources be able to support a global population expected to punch through the 8 billion mark by 2020’s, a 30% increase from 2000?

In order to “shape the world around them” wisely, today’s children first have to understand it, which leads to a second major theme running through the book: environmental awareness and ecological thinking. Schools for the future need to be designed for all sorts of connections: technological, social, neurological, physical, cultural, environmental. And some of the best answers for how to do this come from the past.

My elementary school was not built to be green (in fact, it was ultimately torn down due to asbestos). But those tall windows not only let it wonderful light (back when light was light and not “daylighting”), they also easy to open, too. How delicious to smell a spring breeze or hear the rustle of falling leaves in autumn. The daily walk to school, though a trudge in winter, guaranteed that we all spent some time outdoors. Recess—we had three, two 15-minute breaks and and a full period for lunch—gave us a chance to run around and explore. By contrast:

7% of first graders (in the US) now get no recess at all, with many more having their minutes drastically cut; the poorer the school, the less time is dedicated to it.

On average, children of primary school age spend 9 hours per day sitting.

While 71% of adult Americans say they walked or rode a bike to school when they were a child, today less than two in ten (17%) of school-age children walk.

The percentage of children who live within a mile of school and who walk or bike to school has declined by nearly 25% in the last 30 years. Barely 21% of children today live within a mile of their school.

This is not helping the cause vis a vis the obesity epidemic, either.

Notably, many of the of the ideas presented in The Third Teacher have dovetailing “goods”:

School gardens double as living science labs connecting children to nature while producing tasty vegetables for a healthier lunch

Playgrounds are places for exercise and imagination (“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” – Albert Einstein—perhaps my favorite quote from this quotalicious tome)

Desks and chairs designed to work with young fidgety bodies, rather than restrain them, help release nervous energy, making it possible for children to think better. The mind-body connection is particularly important in the young. Movement plays a key role neurological wiring.

The school itself as community “teacher,” a working example of how to to upgrade to greener design

All 79 ideas, along with a selection of case studies, are available for free on the Third Teacher website, but the book is the better package. Each idea is paired with a case study or a short essay by a delightful range of experts, spanning the famous—Ken Robinson, Raffi, James Dyson—to the famous-in-their-communities—teachers, parents, students. Studies a-plenty are excerpted and quoted. The insights of Maslow, Piaget, Gardner, Dewey and Toffler infuse the conversation—and a conversation it is.

This is not a standard book with page after page of identically laid-out text, with a few illustrations sprinkled in. This is a design extravaganza that manages to mix an astounding amount of information onto every page (hence the plentiful post-its on my well-thumbed copy pictured above…) The Third Teacher is a reference designed to engage, culminating, of course, with idea #79: “Add to this list.”

So get to it. The future is coming fast and there’s no time to waste.

Zippy Babies, Game Design & Learning

Monday, April 26th, 2010

by J.A. Ginsburg

Baby, we were born to play. And if for any reason you doubt that, Exhibit A:

Although filmmaker and father, Francis Vachon, assures us that young Charles Edward wasn’t left alone with a digital mother for four hours – adults were edited out to make a funnier video – still, four hours? He scoots, explores, chews, rolls on his back, wiggles his limbs and goes for another round, utterly fascinated with everything. Color, shape, size texture, edibility - he is, no doubt, beginning to find patterns and make sense of it all. That’s an added bonus. The exploration is very much its own reward.

The line between play and learning, well, there isn’t a line. And if Katie Salen, a games designer at Parsons The New School for Design, has anything to say about it, we should focus our efforts in education on keeping that line as narrow as possible. Salen, who also the executive director of the Institute of Play, helped develop Quest to Learn (Q2L), a new “school for digital kids” in New York City that takes a “game-like” approach to learning – the first of its kind in the country.

What you won’t find at Q2L are rows of kids zoned out in front of X-Boxes in permanent cyber-recess.”There is a misunderstanding that you can stuff content into a game and stuff a game into a classroom and that’s where good learning happens,” says Salen. Instead, the Q2L team designed “a learning environment that looks and acts very much like a game acts.”

That means creating engaging contexts, with plenty of need-to-know challenges and opportunities for collaboration.

The vocabulary reflects the game-inspired approach:

The “learning day” starts as soon a child wakes up and checks email. There might be a message from a teacher, another student, or a character from a “mission,” with clues or a question about an ongoing “quest.” The gears are already turning by the time everyone gets to “Home Base” at school. From there it is off to a series of 90-minute “domains” - classes – which are modeled on a design studio experience. Although the primary focus of a domain may be English, Social Studies, Math or Science, everything is interdisciplinary. After school, kids continue to play/learn at “Studio Mobo,” which this year has a mobile phone focus. Apps anyone?

Q2L opened in the fall of 2009 with the backing from the MacArthur Foundation in partnership with New Visions for Public Schools, Parsons The New School and the Pearson Foundation. The first class of 79 6th graders is now more than half-way through their first year and, if all goes well, a new grade will be added each year until 2015 when these students graduate from high school.

“When we think about education, we get a little bit stuck in the 19th century vision of something that happens in a single institution, in a single place, at a particular time,” says MacArthur’s Connie Yowell. “One of the shifts that’s been incredibly important for us is the shift away from thinking about education and to shift towards learning.” Since 2006, MacArthur has invested $60 million in grants to explore how digital media can support this shift.

Traditionally, education has been about consumption: a teacher delivering curricular content to students in classroom. Learning, by contrast, is an ongoing process, unbounded by time or space. “In the digital age, the learning environment is completely blown open because when you go online, or if you’re in a game or a social network, you could be interacting with thousands of people, many of whom are your peers. Peers play a hugely important role in learning environments in the 21st century,” notes Yowell.

This is not about injecting a sense of fun into learning (not that there’s anything wrong with that…), but rather an analysis of how we learn and what it is about games – about play – that so engages us. Likewise, the goal goes beyond making sure students have mastered a test-able suite of facts and skills to focus on developing a generation life-long learners. In other words, figuring out how to keep the “zippy baby” sense of wonder and excitement about all there is to explore.

Play: It’s a learning thing.

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning)

Digital Youth Research (website)

The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning (edited by Katie Spalen / John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning)

EVENT:

An Evening to Re-Imagine Learning in the 21st Century (May 17, 2010, New York)

Tags: Connie Yowell, game design, Instiute of Play, Katie Spalen, MacArthur Foundation, Parsons The New School for Deisgn, Play, Q2L, Quest to Learn, zippy baby
Posted in Education, Play, peer learning, technology | 1 Comment »