Watch this awesome video on the future of education — from DIY
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On 11/01/2010,
in educational games / serious games, engagement / engaging students, motivation,
by Daniel Christian
How games engage the brain — from NspireD2 by Chris Clark
In a TED video released today, Tom Chatfield presents seven ways in which games engage the brain. Chatfield is a game theorist and author of the new book, Fun, Inc., about the gaming industry and how it is altering our society.
Chatfield’s seven talking points are
- Experience bars measuring progress
- Multiple long and short-term aims
- Rewards for effort
- Rapid, frequent, clear feedback
- An element of uncertainty
- Windows of enhanced engagement
- Other people
Of course, that list doesn’t mean much unless you watch the video.
Ask the Expert | James Paul Gee on video games and learning — from the NY Times Learning Network by Katherine Schulten
In this week’s New York Times Magazine article about video games in the classroom, Sara Corbett asks:
What if teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?
We’ve invited James Paul Gee, an expert on how video games fit within an overall theory of learning and literacy (and how they can help us in thinking about school reform), to take readers’ questions this week.
From DSC:
Be sure to check out the comments as well.
On 09/10/2010,
in education, education reform, education technology, future, motivation, student-related,
by Daniel Christian
On 08/10/2010,
in emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, generational differences, global / globalization, motivation, student-related, web-based collaboration,
by Daniel Christian
On 07/08/2010,
in elearning, instructional design, motivation, personalized/customized learning,
by Daniel Christian
In Designing e-Learning Motivation Makes all the Difference — from Allen Interactions
What was deeply personal to one group was irrelevant and pointless to another.
This is exactly the problem we face so often as designers of e-learning. Our subject matter experts or project owners live and breathe the content we are to teach. And they expect that the same values that have given significance to the content for them over many years can be directly transferred to the learners. Unfortunately, that’s impossible. To get learners engaged in understanding new content and performing new skills, we as designers need to tie the content to some motivation existing in the learner, or to manufacture an urgency (using game design, networking, or simulation aspects) that the learners buy into. This is important in all learning, but particularly so in e-learning where learners are, for the most part, working entirely on their own.
So equal to the task of analyzing content and designing instruction is the challenge of understanding our learners and designing interactivity that will provide personal motivation.
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Here are some ideas for designing for motivation:
- Ensure learners are aware of meaningful consequences
- Develop a sense of risk
- Ensure the learner benefits from adaptive content and branching
- Draw the learner in by expert storytelling and creation of suspense
- Appreciate the aesthetic appeal of graphics and media
- Engage in meta-thinking with questions whose importance is elevated through multiple-step tasks and delayed judgment
On 01/26/2010,
in creativity, Design Thinking, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning spaces, motivation, smart classrooms,
by Daniel Christian
Influence Education Through Design Thinking — Robert Jacobs
I have been thinking and reading a lot about Design Thinking. In his book Change By Design, author and IDEO CEO Tim Brown says that a prerequisite for creative cultures, “…is an environment—social but also spatial—in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties.”
He goes on to say that, “They physical and the psychological spaces of an organization work in tandem to define that effectiveness of the people within it.”
12-13 years sitting in a chair. Do you think the type of chair students spend the majority of their youth influences behavior? It is possible that the type of chair might impact the approximately 13,000 to 14,000 hours spent sitting in it?
The pinnacle of educational design seems to be the plastic chair. Does that chair say something about our educational system?
From DSC:
I post this because I do think that the learning environments that our students are in affect their motivation, creativity, performance and more. However, being a part of a smart classroom team, I realize that budgets don’t always allow us to create the “Google” (or other types of) working environments that we might seek to create. Nevertheless, if you are reading this posting and you have a chance to do something creative, fun yet classy/professional, I say “Go for it!”