Month: February 2009

Jasper learning project

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date February 24, 2009

I’m impressed by the Jasper learning project.

The videos present natural learning opportunities as the characters progress through challenges – for instance … how long will the fuel in your ultralight last, how far can you go, and so on.

In spite of the fact that the videos are clearly very dated, they’re entertaining, topical, rooted in “real” life, and effectively present learning as a natural requirement of everyday realities. This is an answer to the “why will I ever need to know this” attitude that often prevails in middle and high school students.

I can imagine using these with a class and then working through the problems with them. I wonder about interfacing this type of learning with more traditional textbooks and wordbooks, however. Perhaps this would serve best as an introduction to a topic/problem area, and the traditional textbooks would be more suited for practice and follow-up.

Tags education, jasper, pbl, problem-based learning, technology, tele

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Classmate PC

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date February 12, 2009

I’m currently working on the user interface for the Classmate PC. My company has a contract with Intel to provide it. So I found this page on Wikipedia very interesting …

They don’t have all the details right, but many of them.

I’m currently using the tablet format CMPC for testing, and find it pretty nice. It’s much better than some other netbooks I’ve used, which I can’t type on. The keyboard is pretty well done.

The build quality may not be totally solved yet, but I’ve dropped my a couple of feet onto the floor a few times during demonstrations with partners – it’s built to be rugged – and have had no issues at all …

Tags classmatepc, cmpc, intel, netbook, tablet

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Received wisdom, education, & technology

Post author By John Koetsier
Post date February 2, 2009
1 Comment on Received wisdom, education, & technology

For me, a central concern in technology and teaching today should be: what does intelligence mean?

Is someone intelligent if they can locate the right answer?
Is someone smart if they can derive the right answer?
Is someone smart if they can synthesize the right answer?

Is someone smart if they can ask the right questions?

Of course, questions of what intelligence is have been with us for decades if not centuries. And the answer is very likely: there’s different kinds of smart.

But what do school optimize for?

Do they optimize for retention? For synthesis? For investigative skill? Or for sheer intellectual horsepower that powers through tough learning challenges? And, of course, we haven’t even talked about any of Gardner’s physical or musicla intelligences yet, or Goleman’s emotional.

None of this is clear.

What is clear is that teaching someone to be smart in a networked 21st century is a different proposition than teaching someone to be smart in a paper 18th century … just as that was different than teaching someone to be smart in an oral 5th century AD.

But sheer intelligence … has that changed at all?

Going to the oracle of Delphi, as a teacher I interviewed referred to Google, doesn’t make someone smart. And blind reliance on canned answers might be as dangerous and prehistorical obedience to cryptic priestly incantations. But distributed memory and cognition is surely and aide to the wise.

It strikes me that we don’t understand these issues as well as we should.