I’ve given up hope now of finding the time and space to write up some of my activities from the past couple of weeks. Instead, I’ll link to other blogs where other people have written up the interesting bits…
Spotted this on whereisab - timely addition to this years Collaborative Virtual Environments class. Yugma is a desktop sharing conferencing tool - allowing groups of online users to share their desktop views for presentations and demos. Basic conferencing is free, premium features (allowing for more participants or the ability to share mouse and keyboard controls - useful in education and training) cost.
According to whereisab, there is an opportunity to get a years free premium subscription by blogging about the service and emailing them before the end of January. Opportunist that I am, I’ll soon see if he’s right about that…
When I saw the title of this Futurelab Flux blog entry, at first I thought it was a response to “Google University” book (see recent post here), while in fact it summarises yet another report which is making the same basic points:
The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.
But then it goes one step further, and finds that these bad habits are now commonplace amongst older users too…
Lots of other things to blog… but this was interesting to me. I’ll come back to those other things, this is a quicky…
Around 20 years ago, or so, it was felt that teaching children cookery in schools was a tad outdated - and not very useful for their learning and development. So, a lot of schools dropped it - and in many places where it was compulsory (for one or two years) it became optional. Now the government has realised that teaching children how to cook is actually quite important - not even necessarily as a skill, but because of the associated potential health benefits of having children know about food, with learning that is driven from practice rather than the theoretical and industrially focussed ‘food production’ taught in food technology classes.
Kind of losing track of all the different calls for papers for conferences, etc., so here are a bunch in one place. Most of these I am not really considering - I have only so much time and money for conferences, but these do look interesting. Quite a few have very imminent deadlines. Covering Game development, game research, games in education, learning technology, computers in education, and games for change… more below:
Reminder: SloodleMoot starts tomorrow evening/night! (Depending on your timezone!)
This is a virtual conference dedicated to looking at the educational potential of integrating Second Life and external web-sites and services. While the focus is on Sloodle, other projects will be presented - including Second Life Link (which ties SL and Facebook) and SL Claroline (another LMS/VLE integration project).
From midnight Friday night UK, till midnight Saturday night UK (!!!) 24 hours of time filled with 35 hours of presentations, discussions and chat. Plus a little spot of party!
Caught this short audio clip on BBC news (no idea how long it will remain available), of Tara Brabazon discussing, with Oliver Rickman of Google, the sometimes negative impact web-search has on scholarship and learning. Both seem to agree more than disagree that what is needed is education in information literacy to help students use appropriate sources and tools.
I’m guessing the interview was set up on the back of Tara’s new book - ‘The university of Google‘.
Registration is open and the programme is now available for MML ‘08 - taking place this year at Anglia Ruskin University on March 18th. Event sponsored by the HEA-ICS.
Practical hands-on sessions form a major part of the days activities - and some great speakers too. Im very impressed at the degree of practical content that Mike Hobbs has managed to arrange for the day. Shame I’ll have to miss some of it while I do my own demos.
New multi-blogger blog on Second Life and Education. Bloggers so far include Sarah Robbins, Alan Levine, Jeremy Kemp, Jonathon Richter and others (on occasion posts are un-credited). Don’t think I need to say more than if you are interested in Second Life and Education, this is one blog to keep an eye on.
Ben Sawyer of the Serious Games Initiative has criticized the ‘MyFirst’ category of digital games for children ages 3-5 - citing the use of character branding over good design. More here, at GameDaily.
Personally, I have no particular love of systems like LeapFrog or Vtech learning toys. The words ‘learning’ and ‘educational’ are nowadays simply terms used to shift products which aim to teach stuff that very young children are pretty good at learning anyway. Or for products which do a poor job of teaching stuff that they learn better through interacting with other people over time.
