PatSine

Here's a quote that's bound to get you riled up! The 2009 Game-Based Learning Conference was held March 19th-20th in London. As part of the proceedings, I was led to this post on agent4change.net

'Classrooms dead' says games pioneer Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell (left), founder of Atari and a world authority on computer gaming, presented an epitaph for the classroom when he opened the two-day Game Based Learning 2009 Conference in London yesterday (March 19). "The classroom died as a concept 12 years ago," he said. "There are so many things wrong with the classroom that, unless we evolve to the next plateau, we will never fix education in a real way.

Today, Will Rich's Delicious link led me to this book review, 'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein by Lee Drutman. There are so many interesting points raised by the article and its lead sentence is a bit scary.

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day.

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There's a new book out by Tony Wagner of Harvard with the attention-grabbing title The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It. In it, he addresses the current tension between teaching to the test and preparing for the 21st Century world of work.

Today is the last day of a 2 week graduate course I'm teaching. Right now, it's 10 minutes before the "final" presentations. The students are clicking away and consulting with each other. They are using technology and collaborating, so I feel happy!

I'm now two days into my graduate class for the summer, K-12 Technology Integration. I'm also part of the team on a 6-week program for inservice teachers to learn about how science and math are done in the lab and how that might inform what they do in the classroom, the NISE-RET Program.

Almost the first day of NECC and I'm attending the Edubloggercon. This is an "unconference" which is supposed to be very unstructured. This has been "organized" on its own wiki for several months now.

But this one has over 200 people attending so we drop back to the way conferences get organized more traditionally. We've all voted on what the schedule of discussions should be using polleverywhere.com.

Just finished reading an interesting post from Liz Davis expressing her end of year frustration about the slowness of change called Dealing with Negativity. She did a Twitter poll and collected responses from her followers that range from consolation to commiseration. Funny, nobody said that it doesn't happen in their lives.

From "Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace" (600+ page .pdf) comes this passage by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation:”

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I've been sitting in a wonderful session today at Princeton called The Future of Children. This is all focused around the latest edition of the journal Children and Electronic Media.

Last night, I think I finally started to "get" Twitter! I had my window open and just randomly commented on whoever I saw say something interesting. Kind of the "bull in a china shop" approach. Had some wonderful exchanges with Mindelei (who I only know from last night's conversation), DMCordell (who I've followed on Twitter and worked with online), and many others.