Posts from — August 2006

I recently came across the name of the documentary that inspired the previous post entitled Students are People Too. The documentary is called Middle School Confessions and it is part of the HBO Family series. This is an important piece of work and should inform educators as to the kind of environment they need to create in order to allow young people to flourish and grow into adulthood.

Here’s a short paragraph from the web site describing the show:

Middle School Confessions provides a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at the inner lives of today’s adolescents, and the efforts of adults to connect and help the kids they care about to navigate this treacherous rite of passage.

When I ask educators what they need to do to make education better almost envariably they say – make learning relevant. OR connect learning to life. Educators have been saying that for more than 20 years. But what have they done? Here’s an example of making learning relevant and real:

MAKE IT REAL
Doing leads to learning. Instead of confronting students (or employees) with abstract concepts, take the lesson out into the real world. Make it real: That’s what Bob Moses did when he created the Algebra Project. He took his middle-school students around Boston in search of experiences that demonstrated the practical uses of math. A ride on the subway became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers. When Moses taught students about displacement, he had them measure the dimensions of their own bodies. Students always had to “participate in a physical event.” Follow-up studies have confirmed the benefits of Moses’ experiential curriculum. Ninety-two percent of his Algebra Project graduates in Cambridge went on to upper-level math courses, twice the rate of students not in the program. The same philosophy works outside the classroom, too. Look at Toyota. In many ways, its Georgetown, KY, manufacturing plant is a school that happens to produce cars. Because Toyota doesn’t distinguish between learning and doing, it’s willing to stop the assembly line any time a problem crops up on the floor. With its philosophy of constant self-improvement, turning out slightly fewer engines each day is a small price to pay for teaching its workers how to turn out better ones. (Seed 19 Jul 2006)

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

In a current project with high school teachers in Nebraska I’ve set up a series of online learning experiences to give them a sense of what the technologies are that current students might be experiencing.

I’ve asked them to experience Social Networking and explore sites like Blogger, Flickr, MySpace and sites like classmates.com. I’ve asked them to become familiar with podcasts, YouTube, and experience Wikipedia.

Finally, I’ve asked them to become familiar with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).

In reading an innovation blog called Sharkride I just learned about an online game being used for an entire course for credit at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Their Econ 201 course is a microeconomics course which will be taught via an online video game! The principles of microeconomics are taught by “following an alien species that must learn how to survive after crash-landing on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic earth.”

This is an perfect example of what is coming and a small glimpse into the future of interactive learning.