Thursday, April 07, 2005

Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines. PDF. James Paul Gee asks, "How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex, and difficult games?" Here's how (quoted from the text): - Learners feel like active agents (producers) not just passive recipients (consumers). - Different styles of learning work better for different people. - People take on a new identity they value and in which they become heavily invested. - They can manipulate powerful tools in intricate ways that extend their area of effectiveness. - Early problems are designed to lead players to form good guesses about how to proceed when they face harder problems later on. - Challenges feel hard, but doable. Learners feel - and get evidence - that their effort is paying off. - Repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn anew. - Give verbal information just in time and on demand - Create simplified systems, stressing a few key variables and their interactions. - Risks and dangers greatly mitigated (one of the worst problems with school: it's too risky and punishing). - See the skills first and foremost as a strategy for accomplishing a goal and only secondarily as a set of discrete skills. - People learn skills, strategies, and ideas best when they see how they fit into an overall larger system to which they give meaning. - Make the meanings of words and concepts clear through experiences the player has and activities the player carries out. There isn't one principle here that I would disagree with in any great measure, and indeed, I find these principles definitive not merely of game-based learning but also of network learning. By James Paul Gee, E-Learning, April, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 10:03:20 PM      Google It!.

F For Assessment. Blunt criticism of the standardized tests currently applied in U.S. schools: "in most instances these evaluations are inaccurate. That's because the standardized tests employed are flat-out wrong." Some of the tests, argue the author, are designed to elicit responses based on social profile rather than learning. "This kind of test tends to measure not what students have been taught in school but what they bring to school... they're unable to detect improved instruction in a school even when it has definitely taken place." By W. James Popham, Edutopia, April, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 10:01:01 PM      Google It!.

Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Satisfaction. Seb Schmoller sent along this link to a site offering a detailed comparison between Blackboard and Moodle. The authors ask, "Can free software satisfactorily meet the needs of students, faculty, and instructional technologists for online teaching and learning?" And, according to this study, Moodle performs as well as, if not better than, Blackboard. By Kathy D. Munoz and Joan Van Duzer, Humboldt State University, February 15, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 9:44:17 PM      Google It!.

Google Delivering Factual Answers [Slashdot:] The machine begins to look more intelligent and this question answer facility will play well with cell phone browsers becaue it tries to cut to the chase --BL 9:42:08 PM      Google It!.

MindRaider. Interesting. "MindRaider is Semantic Web outliner. It aims to connect the tradition of outline editors with emerging technologies. MindRaider mission is to organize not only the content of your hard drive but also your cognitive base and social relationships in a way that enables quick navigation, concise representation and inferencing." Coded in java, so it's a pain to install. Looks like open source - it's on SourceForge - but absent any declarations I can't tell for sure. The integration with a wiki is a very cool idea. By Martin Dvorak, April, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 2:11:59 PM      Google It!.

The Wasp Micro Air Vehicle [Slashdot:] 2:06:24 PM      Google It!.

Early hominid 'cared for elderly'. Ancient hominids from Georgia may have fed and cared for their elderly, a new fossil find has indicated. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 2:01:56 PM      Google It!.

AOL Enters the VoIP market [Slashdot:] 2:00:31 PM      Google It!.

More media-shifting. In response to yesterday's item about media-shifting, Jason Burton reports that he uses a free tool called Sermonex, written by Chris Lundie, to extract audio tracks from Channel 9 videos. ... [Jon's Radio] 1:59:31 PM      Google It!.

29th ACM Intl. Programming Contest Results [Slashdot:] U of Waterloo 1:58:30 PM      Google It!.

Plone Keyword Manager 0.3 released. A simple add-on that eases the administration of keywords in Plone. [Plone RSS] 1:55:43 PM      Google It!.

Plodcasting, a Plone Podcasting Product. Plodcasting is a Podcasting product for Plone. This tool will allow a radio station or community audio project to publish audio files for users of iPodder to automatically download. The initial version of Plodcasting has been released on Plone Collective's SVN server. [Plone RSS] 1:54:32 PM      Google It!.

The Encyclopedia Britannica supports RSS. [Scripting News] 1:52:37 PM      Google It!.