The article today here in the Washington Post delves into the way soldiers are affected and the effects on war itself of virtual war games. One day these affects and effects will be a major player in pedagogy of many subjects. We are overdue in simulating the interplay of the mechanisms of biology, physics, history — and one supposes the plots of literature and other arts. The delay is not on the students’ side. They are raring to go into the virtual game of learning. For now virtuality is mainly done for war, not for enlightenment.
Learning war virtually: Zap that virus!
Whatsup map
Keep up to the moment on what is happening around the world from this map created by Dutch designer Jeroen Wijering.
Arts, Via Information Aesthetics
Skiing Heritage
The page here from Skiing Heritage is a graceful jump by a print magazine into the online learning venue. From the print version, which requires a paid subscription, the editors generously provide, for example, six excellent articles open on their website as a knowledgeable introduction to skiing history and practice. There is much more to learn about skiing heritage in this collection, including an account here of Pope John Paul II’s devotion to the sport. The illustration above, from one the articles, A Short History of Alpine Skiing, is a cave drawing from Eastern Russia dated 5000-7000 BC. History
Kids are king
The article here in eSchool News provides a stunning glimpse of the dawning golden age of learning. It is the children that are leading the change — I believe because the education establishment has hemmed and hawed until the kids stepped up and showed how to learn from the Internet. I recommend the entire article. Here’s some flavor:
A new survey of teachers and instructors at the high school and post-secondary levels has found that students who excel in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) are driving change in classroom instruction.
Dubbed “Power Users,” this “emerging group of youth distinguished by their self-directed, long-term, extensive experiences with technology” influence what and how teachers teach, have positively affected the way instructors learn about and use technology, and are generally helpful toward their classmates, the survey said. . . . Power Users, as defined by EDC, are the savviest of the “digital natives,” a demographic of 10- to 15-year-old students who have grown up with digital technology as a part of their everyday lives. According to EDC, these students have technical acumen beyond any previous generation. They are characterized by their ability to “leverage the internet to the highest degree conceivable” and are energized by technology well past the point of most digital “immigrants”–that is, older learners forced to adapt from the analog age.
Carnival of the Mobilists is online at Xellular Identity
Don’t miss Xen Dolev’s review of the best blogging about the mobile world here at Xellular Identity. To take a world from the vocabulary of my youth, it’s groovy.
Mobile Learning Conference, July in Ireland
Here is a call for papers for this conference which is at the edge of the global golden age of learning. They meeting will be held in Dublin July 14-16, 2006. It’s looking more and more like the mobile phone is maturing as the basic tool of individual learning. The conference will sharpen the focus and lead to next steps. The mobile just may be world enlightenment’s four leaf clover.
This dinosaur may be smarter than the real ones were!
This morning’s Washington Post has a story here of the Demo conference where a new Pleo toy was launched. I went to the website of the manufacturer, Ugobe, to meet Pleo’s makers. The website is compelling. Their idea is to make robots that respond to humans — and these robots learn. The implications for education are amazing. Why not “life form” bots as Ugobe calls Pleo and their products to follow, that would be tutors? The following is Ugobe’s description of Pleo:
Pleo is a one-week old infant Camarasaurus from the Jurassic period. Camarasaurus were born and raised in giant fern forests. They evolved camouflage that allowed them to blend with their environment of ferns, moss and ruff, the detritus that littered the forest floor. The first Pleo created is a Fernback. His markings help him to survive by hiding among the giant fern fronds in his habitat.
Pleo is an authentic Life Form. Treat him gently like any other living thing. Your Pleo will let you know how he feels at any moment. That’s because he is capable of actual emotions including joy, aggression, sorrow, and fear. He can also yawn, sigh, sniff, sniffle, snore, cough, hiccup, and sneeze.
Pleo wants to explore his environment. He will be cautious when he walks to the edge of a table. He may cry when he is frightened. Pleo will stretch when he first wakes up. He may stomp his foot for food when hungry.
When Pleo grows tired, lay him down and attach his ‘dream cord’ so he can sleep, dream, and gather energy for more exploration.
Nothing, of course, will truly replace the human teacher. We need to come at this idea from the other direction. Bots would not replace humans. They could and should begin to roll out as toys that teach. How about a bot puppy that gently nipped a child who petted too hard? Or a bot street sign that reacted when kids did unsafe things? To learn street safety, it would be better to get bawled out by a bot than run over by a car.
And as the bots grow up in years to come, they will be able to learn from the Internet and help their little human friends learn too. Is this a fairy tale, or the willingness to think about learning in new ways?
Rollable pocket display by 2007
The report here on bigger and better mobile phone displays does not say they can’t happen. It says they are taking too long. This is great news for learning. Millions of kids around the globe are already mobile phone equipped. Their standard learning device is looking more and more like it will be their phones. This means the delivery of learning could leapfrog the delay of waiting for the PCs or laptops to get to the world’s young learners.
But there’s more: the last paragraph of the article makes the exciting statement that we may have rollable pocket displays by 2007!
The genuine expectation of roll-up screens has not sunk in yet to public awareness — much less at the cutting edge of education thinking. Probably subjectively, most of us think the little screens are too small to be the main thing in learning. The above illustrations from Polymer Vision belie our doubts. It is all too easy to think of future mobiles as either laptops (which are modified PCs) or mobile phones (the descendants of the old rotary models).
The functional ancestor of the rollable screens is paper! How cool is that! We need to make the shift in thinking scribes once faced when they realized they no longer had to chisel stone or draw with sticks in mud — when somebody figured out how to chew up papyrus weed and roll out paper.
Thanks Greg!
Multi-touch video
It won’t be long until this very powerful cognitive tool will be available for learning. For now it’s just cool to watch it! Enjoy!
via SmartMobs
Media is not mentioned for learning
The answer, I suppose, to the question I asked in the last post is obvious: folks just don’t think of “media” as a means of education. I can prove it by pointing you to the program here of the Media Summit going on today and tomorrow in New York City. Education is not on the agenda for the media heavies even to discuss. I got a little excited when I did see “The University Project” listed. Turns out, as it says here, that project is about: “Developing the next generation of Entertainment, Media & Technology Thinkers and Visionaries.”
There is not an inkling of how to use media to teach or deliver knowledge about astronomy, algebra, history, science or any other subject you learn in school. Kids spend their childhoods in non-media institutions. That’s wrong.
Astronomy by Armani
The bathroom shown above was designed by Armani for the gorgeous new apartments at 20 Pine Street in downtown Manhattan, New York City. The image is from the gorgeous digital exhibit here created to show the building online to prospective buyers of the new apartments in this historic Wall Street area office building now gone residential.
Why is it that our children do not have gorgeous digital tutorials like this one to study a subject like astronomy online? Use your imagination a bit and think how the different sections this Armani-designed exhibit could slide in and out to reveal planets, the solar system, and views into our galaxy and beyond into the universe. Where the map is on the 20 Pine exhibit there could be star charts. Other of the basic astronomy topics could composes sections and be linked to follow lines of inquiry and thought.
Too expensive to do? The 20 Pine exhibit could not have cost $100,000, and probably was much less. If an astronomy exhibit were made and put on line for $100,000, everyone on Earth could use it. The first 100,000 students to use it would do so for $1 each. When a million kids have done so their rate would have been a dime each.
We spend over $4 billion a year in the USA alone on textbooks. If we spent a few million making a terrific Internet exhibit (like Armani did for 20 Pine Street) for every topic students now study in textbooks they could all study for free for years following. We could afford learning exhibits with quality designers at the quality level of Armani. Why don’t we do it for astronomy? for our children?
Meanwhile our kids fumble at school with the pages of the sort of reference the great-grandparents had.
(Strangest of all is that there are already thousands of terrific free and open online knowledge pages. Many are as wonderful as the 20 Pine Street exhibit. Almost NONE of them were created by education dollars and most of them are not used in most schools.)
David Wiley has more to say about textbooks here.
Biodiversity Hotspots
Open the Hotspots Explorer here for an interactive world map scattered with dots representing biologically remarkable places on Earth, each of which is also threatened. Click any dot for a pop-up summary of the hotspot and a link to a page rich with text, images and links about the hotspot locale. These outstanding pages teach geography, ecology, and animal sciences at no cost to our education budget — and are far more compelling and up-to-date than most expensive made-for-school materials. Ecology
The kids are judging us!
Today I received a report through the administrator and a teacher from the We the People competition in the New York City public schools that I had some copy which was incorrect on the website I maintain for the program. The error was made by me and found by a high school student. This tells us of our times. Kids know what is online and use it.
We the People, BTW, is a superb program which gives students a chance to be amazing. Participating as a judge in January for the NYC competition was 4 hours of watching teenagers be amazing and left me agonizing at how little that happens in standardized schools isolated from the new generation’s medium: the Internet.
The program page I corrected after the student found the error is here.
Mediocrity by assessment
As she did in Internet Risk Aversion, once again Kathy Sierra tells us here how education should work in terms of a different human relations venue. Her diagram above (make the top box “student” not “employer”) tells us all there is to say about why the standards and assessment movement is turning our kids into middling test passers instead of stars. Have you ever met a child who was not or could not become f’n amazing? I haven’t.
I recommend Kathy’s entire article for reading in the context of what schools do with our kids. Here is some flavor:
By focusing on “areas of improvement”, we’re putting a square peg in a round hole. What do we end up with? A crappy, rounded off peg who meets the minimum thresholds at the expense of their most kick-ass attributes. What if let ourselves (and those we manage) spend a lot more energy in the areas where we are–or could be–amazing?
The higher tragedy here is that in focusing on the gray box of assessing the attainment of mediocracy, education misses the open connectivity that inevitably follows the pursuit of excellence in the 21st century. While kids grind away in a paper mill to pass tests, they are not free to pursue the grand knowledge of the open Internet learning ecology. That must change!
