Girls should play more video games. That’s one of the unexpected lessons I take away from a rash of recent studies on the importance of — and the malleability of — spatial skills.
Girls Should Play More Video Games
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Category Archives: Conceptual Framework
Weird Science
Why Canada is failing at tech
Education’s Death Valley
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
Fab Lab
What’s a FabLab@School?
A FabLab is a low-cost digital workshop equipped with laser-cutters, routers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, and programming tools, where you can “make almost anything.” There are over 150 FabLabs around the world, open to local inventors, small businesses, and garage entrepreneurs.The FabLab concept was created by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld at MIT. Despite the potential impact of FabLabs in education, they are mostly focused on adults, entrepreneurship, and product design. The FabLab@School, created by Prof. Paulo Blikstein at Stanford University is a new type of digital fabrication lab especially designed for schools and children, with several special characteristics.
Room 20 @ Virginia Technology Centre
“Room 20″ is our affectionate nickname for Torgersen 3080, the home of the VT Center for Innovation in Learning. The nickname pays tribute to MIT’s famous “Building 20,” the “magical incubator” of many of the 20th century’s greatest technological innovations.
https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/cil/room-3080/
Centre for Innovation in Learning http://www.lt.vt.edu/CIL/
Virginia Tech’s Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL) seeks to stimulate, support, and assess innovative approaches to augmenting the human intellect by means of information and communication technologies. CIL programs focus on what John Seely Brown and others have called the “edge” of traditional practices and approaches. Such “edge” endeavors, and those who pursue them, share some important characteristics:
- Their work is nimble and has the potential to scale.
- Their work is differentiated from core practices.
- Their work is intensely aspirational, motivated by an unusually strong sense of mission and purpose. Those who work at the edge “are truly out to ‘change the world’ and will settle for nothing less” (Brown et al., “Three Ways to Distinguish an Edge from a Fringe,” Harvard Business Review, March 10, 2010. Online: http://blogs.hbr.org/bigshift/2010/03/three-ways-to-distinguish-an-e.html).
This third characteristic is the most important of all. Only this kind of intensity, born of a desire to lead within a “symbolic” frame (Bolman & Deal, 1997), can bring about cultural transformation and the “leapfrog” innovations that are truly breathtaking.
Signature pedagogy
Shulman’s article – sig ped in disciplines anchors the thinking behind the physical space of EME 1123. Schulman reminds us “since the physical layout of classrooms so typically tracks the premises of a field’s signature pedagogies, the very architecture of teaching encourages pedagogical inertia” (p. 57).
Passionate curiosity
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” -Albert Einstein
Love the work you do …
“The only way to do great work is to love the work you do.” -Steve Jobs
Educational Technology Debate
The Educational Technology Debate (ETD) seeks to promote a substantive discussion of how low-cost information and communication technology (ICT) device initiatives for educational systems in developing countries are relevant to the very groups they purport to serve – the students, teachers, and their surrounding communities.
We advance the conversation in weekly posts on a monthly topic of discussion – like these previous topics. You are encouraged to augment each post with comments, related information, and relevant news items. You can also apply to be a moderator or discussant at any time, just contact us.
ETD Goals
Through this monthly debate process, ETD will achieve three overarching goals:
- Stimulate a public, holistic, and documented discussion on appropriate low-cost ICT solutions for educational systems in developing countries.
- Become a primary knowledge repository and knowledge transfer mechanism to support implementations of low-cost ICT devices in education.
- 3.Increase the effectiveness and efficiency of low-cost ICT device implementations in educational environments of the developing world.
These activities can be categorized into four mutually supportive and inter-related focus areas, each building on the other to create a true industry- and continent-spanning community of practice.
Sharing Information:
The main focus of the ETD will be to facilitate sharing of knowledge and perspectives, and to point people to additional knowledge resources. Sharing will happen between educational and technology practitioners, to increase the knowledge base of each practitioner, and the overall network of technology and education practitioners in six major groups. Information sharing can happen through almost any medium, but an importance will be placed on documenting the knowledge and its source.
Sharing Experience:
Each practitioner brings to the ETD different experiences with technology and educational settings, and through the community, each can share his or her experiences to enhance the network’s collective ICT in education expertise. The ETD will incorporate opportunities to share practitioners’ experiences at every turn, documenting and promoting experiences across the community.
Discussing New Innovations:
The community will serve as a platform to exchange ideas and opinions on appropriate technology and education solutions for the developing world – a conversation currently lacking a central point of communication between practitioners. This discussion will be open to external stakeholders from the beginning and also serve to promote thought leaders in appropriate technology for education.
Solving Problems:
The community will be a resource to quickly resolve outstanding ICT in education implementation issues through peer support – education and technology implementers will look to each other’s varying skills and knowledge to expedite solutions.
Sponsors
The Educational Technology Debate is brought to you by a partnership between infoDev and UNESCO to stimulate conversation around low-cost information and communication technology (ICT) device initiatives for educational systems in developing countries and how they are relevant to the very groups they purport to serve – the students, teachers, and their surrounding communities.
Both organizations welcome new partners to expand the discussion and dissemination of the knowledge we will share and discover through this open process. If your organization is interested in joining, please contact us.
And while both partners support the ETD goals, the views and opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of infoDev or UNESCO.