How can digital technologies transform the way that people learn
I apologise for spelling mistakes…. Blogging on the fly issomething new for me!!! I will play with these posts later tonight.
This has been a great seminar…. One of the best I have attended in some time!! I will go through these posts and tidy them up in the coming days… For now here is the final session.
Opening with an interest video showing how students in London are using GPS technologies to learn about African wildlife. The students are out playing a game with GPS PDA’s, engaging in a game where they have to survive in the Suvanna. The students receive information through to their PDA – When they need to eat, drink and their success of surviving. Once they have finished using the game the students spend time to reflect on the experience. The learning becomes relavent and real to them. This is great!!!
We have a live link from one of the project officers in London about to give her presentation live from London. This is cool!!! (Virtual Suvannah – Still looking for the link)
The digital Environment
- User driven revolution
- Pervasive and ambient technologies
- Open source and scoial software
- Games environments (Joint authorship)
What might the learner of the future look like
- Learners shaping their own learning
- Networked and collaborative learners
- Changing ‘identities’
- Changing conceptions of production and consumption
- Expectations of agency and feedback
She has noted some ideas on assesment that are of interest to me…. Assessment as something that is collaborative. I would like some more thoughts on this.
We are watching a demo of a game that teaches physics of racing cars where students develop cars that perform in the game based on what the students have learnt about the properties learnt relating to the physics.
What might teaching and learning look like in the future
- C-learning not e-leanring (connectivity creativity community construction collaboration) – indivdual learning becoming less important or dominant.
- Authentic learning – Becoming relavent for young people (engaging the learner into curriculum)
– Immersion and simulation
– Particpation in real action (eg: Peer assessment)
- Making learning visible – Personalised digital resources… Logs of the learning. Visiable to parents, teachers and future employers. integrating features of video games into the learning of particular concepts.
(eg Space Mission Ice Moon: Another game (will try and find link later) that Future Lab developed where students engage in a video conference with a command centre where they have to save some stranded astronaunts. Students have a program on their computers that feeds health information about the stranded astronaunts which they use to work out how to communciate with one another to save the day!!
What are the impluications for the teacher and the educational institution
- Teachers needing to work out what the required competencies will be for students into the future. Teachers needing to reflect upon learning experience and understanding the learner more effectivly. Making connections for learners to other groups of learners or experts/resources. Needing to become and expert in learning, expert researcher of student learning, and an expert particpant that engages in learning forums for themselves.
- Institution becomes a site where learners go to support and review what learning is occuring. It is not the focus of learning experience rather the environment for sharing and collaborating.
How do we get there
- Learners as co-designers (Making it relavent to our learners, we engage the learners in their own learning outcomes, looking beyond the classroom and the learning that occurs outside the school – Assessing skills required for the 21st century survival. New Basics program from Queensland (Link coming soon)
- Innovative applications of technology to support learning
- New sites and spaces of learning
- Shifts to our curriculum assessment systems.
Question Time:
1) Making these concepts sustainable – Open source seems to be the answer to making these concepts sustainable and seeing them become affordabel. Young people seem to be the ones making this possible in the way they engage in the open source community.
2) Much of the teaching and learning theory is not new. It is using digital technolgies to enhance the great pracitce.
3) Using games in education without tagging them with the word education in a way that turns kids off using games in learning – How do we make sure this doesn’t happen? It is a matter of making the learning fun and engaging as students love learning when it is engaging.
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2 users responded in this post
Brett,
Thanks so much for blogging this session. I wish I had time t attend the entire conference on Hitchhikr (http://hitchhikr.com/?conf_id=50). I’d like to take a brief stab at your third question.
I think that rather than trying to convince students that games are not about learning, that we might try to convince teachers that learning can be a game — it can be fun.
Beyond that, I’ll suggest that the key to the video game as an intense learning engine is not the the word “game”, but the experience that the students having. Rather than turning classroom instruction into a game, we should try to determine the elements of the game (and MySpace) (and IM) that are sooooo compelling to students, and then try to integrate those elements into their learning activities.
We can bring games into the classroom, but I do not believe that merely integrating games will reach the full potential of our opportunities.
I’ve been thinking about this, and it appears to me that we should be asking these questions, among others:
How do we make our classrooms, teachers, and textbooks as responsive to student actions and need as a video game is?
How do we design classrooms where students literally invest themselves, in some way, into the activity of the classroom? How do we make them a stakeholder?
How do we design outcomes or prizes into the classroom that even if they are not of intrinsic value, they will be awards that students will want to talk about to each other?
How do we give students opportunities to build products that are of value to other people, through which learners can be identified as value-adders?
Just a few questions. I agree that we need to try to leave the word game behind. But we need to try to figure out how to make our classrooms the same kind of learning engine that video games are.
Have a great rest of the conference!
– dave –
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