Blogs

October was a busy month: I attended three conferences. I took a fair amount of notes, which aren’t polished enough for blog posts, but definitely worth sharing. Read ‘em at:

Next up at the Handheld Learning 2008 conference: Steven Johnson, cultural critic and author of Everything Bad is Good for You.

He spoke about three types of increasing complexity in popular culture experiences: content, participation and interface.

The Handheld Learning 2008 conference, held in London, UK, kicked off this morning.

First up: Andrew Pinder, Chairman of Becta, which focuses on how to use technology to support teaching and learning in schools. It will launch a “surge” to address the lack of effective and productive use of technology in schools. Why? Because research proves that, when correctly used, technology does support educational attainment and raise grades. For young people, probably the only time they’re not using technology is when they’re in school. This is puzzling and demotivating for them, especially as they know that ICT literacy is required for 95% of jobs.

A truly interesting mLearn 2008 keynote was titled Wildfire activities: New patterns of mobility and learning by Prof Yrjö Engeström, Professor of Adult Education and Director of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki. Engeström is best known for his work around activity theory.

The mLearn 2008 conference, held in Telford, UK, kicked off this morning. The 220 delegates come from every continent except Antarctica, and comprise academics, mobile developers, educationists, and others. About half the submissions were from outside of the UK.

This morning I delivered a keynote presentation at the Schools ICT Conference in Cape Town. The conference is attended by 500 people, mostly teachers, and is about the use of ICT in education.

A very interesting perspective presented by Prof Anna Sfard is that Maths should not be used as a ’measure of intelligence.’ Read the piece, it’s short and thought-provoking.

An article on games and learning that appeared in the Business Day on Fri, 26 September, with some quotes from me, Alan Amory and Danny Day. Most of the facts are right :-)

I recently attended the Rural Education Project (REP) Conference. The theme: Towards quality learning and teaching. Between 2006 and 2009, REP aims to develop the literacy and numeracy skills of primary school learners in under-resourced rural schools.

Yesterday the second Games and Learning Indaba took place at the University of Johannesburg. It was very different to the first indaba held in Cape Town, I think largely because more game developers attended the Jo’burg event. In total 33 people attended, including researchers from the Meraka Institute and various universities, members of civil society organisations (e.g. SANGONeT and Women’sNet) and a number of teachers.

At the Shuttleworth Foundation we seek innovative ways to improve the communication and analytical thinking skills of youth in South Africa (SA). One of the ways to potentially develop these skills is through digital gaming — be it on a PC, mobile phone, platform (e.g. Sony PlayStation), handheld (e.g. Nintendo DS) or some other device.

Dr. Marion Walton, senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film and Media Studies, invited me to present to her students on serious games and learning in South Africa. I introduced games and learning, serious games as a genre within that space, and then discussed how these relate to the South African context.

A very belated post on the International Conference on eLearning (ICeL), which I have blogged about. Some thoughts and reflections:

Whilst in New York I visited the offices of Global Kids. Barry Joseph is the Director of its Online Leadership Program, which “integrates a youth development approach and international and public policy issues into youth media programs that build digital literacy, foster substantive online dialogues, develop resources for educators, and promote civic participation.” It’s a program by the kids, for the kids, and involves gaming and virtual worlds, amongst other things.

The Teachable Agents (TA) project is under way.  In June two training sessions were held with natural science teachers as well as computer lab teachers from all of the participating schools. The teachers learned how to create concept maps using the Betty’s Brain TA software. The software has also been implemented at all of the schools.

We live in a world where information is being generated at such a rate, and existing knowledge being challenged so readily, that the best education we can give children is to teach them how to learn. They simply cannot memorise content any longer. More important than knowing information is knowing how to look it up and apply it. This is the true skill of the lifelong learner.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Sick at South Shore Beach: A Place-Based Augmented Reality Game as a Framework for Building Academic Language in Science.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Thinking About Thinking Through Multimedia: Undergraduate Learning with MicroWorlds.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: New Media Literacies, Student Generated Content, and the YouTube Aesthetic.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Playing to Learn: Guidelines for Designing Educational Games.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Social Constructivism in Games Based Learning in The South African Context.

There are hordes of really impressive yet undervalued resources for teachers, parents and kids to use. I keep mentioning that I want Kusasa to embrace other resources and facilitate their use.

One of the very cool things about Kusasa is that I get to visit schools and just hang around and observe. Often I am interested in trying to pin down scenarios where kids share ideas or assist each other to see if we can build similar scenarios into our own material.

What we do in this area:

Part of the idea for the Kusasa blog was to create a space for recording ideas and insights that are linked to the Kusasa approach. Kusasa is more that just the content we are creating, it represents a kind of head space. Last night while watching Cameroon trounce Ghana in the African Cup of Nations semi-final I started teasing out the following thoughts:

I have been slowly working my way through the The Black Swan audio book by Nicholas Taleb and apart from finding the work pretty interesting generally, I was struck by the introduction of the concept of domain specific knowledge.

Yesterday I came across A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking by Daniel Kahneman. What a fascinating resource! I was searching for “metacognition” but what I found there is relevant to so much of what we’re doing in Kusasa. For instance, in session one Kahneman talks about “inside” and “outside” views of planning or problem solving…