This is a moblog, typed in real time during the event. Please forgive misspellings and awkward text.>
It’s TechForum 2006 in Chicago, and Hall Davidson is doing the keynote. The speech title is “The World is Shrinking”. He just said that one thing that is definitely shrinking is the distance between imagination and reality. This is so true, and I’ve thought about this a lot. But I’ve never heard the idea expressed so succinctly.
He also says that it’s pretty cool to be an educator right now. We are more in touch with the future than anyone else, because we are in daily contact with the people who will be inventing the future. We (many of us) know what podcasting is. Most corporate workers do not! Not sure that’s true, but I believe that the idea is correct. We work with the future.
I’ve heard this address before, and I’ve blogged it before. But one thing that suprised me was when Hall asked what web site gets more than two and a half times the traffic of Google. The answer was Myspace. In MySpace, children are important. Learning is important. How do we make learners just as important?
Wow! Discovery now has a home version of streaming video, called Cosmo. No surprise, bound to happen. But a school in Evanston, Illios will be selling it to homes as a fund raiser. Kids selling media, to raise money to learn. To cool for school!
I must say that this is a rich conference. I have to choose a session to go to next, and my choices are Laptop Learning, Games for Education, 21st Century Professional Development, and Data Security and student safety. I’ll let you know where I went.
It should be little surprise that I went to the gaming session. I walked in a little late, and the speaker was saying that they are now beginning to get data that indicates more powerful learning through video gaming.
He then said that the mother-ship of instructional gaming is “Active Engagement”. Students need to talk about the experience before, during, and after the game. The learn, by talking about it, not by playing the game alone. I suspect that the kids are learning, but the do not know that they are learning, unless they talk about it. This is an important distinction, I suspect.
The speaker (Bill MacKenty) said that when he is selecting off-the-shelf games for his classroom, he picks the game first and then figures out how to use it for learning.
The next speaker is Corbett Beder. His angle seems to be helping students to learn by empowering them to design their own games.
The question and answer session was not very eventful. The big question was asked first, what about violence. MacKenty said that he was super sensative to violence. He dosn’t go there. He also said that kids understand context, that they can see the violence within the context of the games plot, and that it is not blatant violence.
One of the most interesting ideas I heard was about a language teacher who is using The SIMS to teach German. It’s about context.
Someof your readers might like the files which tell you how to play the Sims in German and get the game into German:
http://kairosnews.org/node/4567
Great fun and it works. ALL the language the learn in their language classes in there is you want it to be.
Danke, Ewan!
You hit the nail on the head there when u say “I suspect that the kids are learning, but they do not know that they are learning, unless they talk about it.”
They don’t make the connection because ITS TOO MUCH FUN! The average child does not equate learning with enjoyment. The cruel reality is that in many of our classrooms they are right – learning is not a lot of fun – we r selling our kids short.
I have experienced this first hand many times with my own kids who don’t realise how much they have learnt until you sit back and review with them just what it is they have learnt today – when they thought they had just been ‘mucking around’ on computers…
Adults also hold this view. Picture this:
An older neighbour is hanging over her back fence adjoining one of our local schools. A group of 9 year old children are shooting a scene on the adventure playground for the Maori myth they are reinacting. ‘They’re having a lot of fun’ she says. I reply, ‘Yes, aren’t they great – working so independently.” (there were no adults supervising – they were doing it all themselves). The neighbour was astonished, “Working!! I thought they were playing!”
Well i know her frame of reference for learning is 1/2 a century in the past but its a little to scary to think that for many this hasn’t changed very much.
Rachel 🙂
the speech is very dirty .what is the speech u have given rubbish u have to improve your language man .ok i understand that this is your style of writing. sorry to say.