A world to rule all worlds

Unless you are Dickensian, you can’t fail to have noticed the massive appeal of Lego. Yes the small plastic bricks that require an engineering degree to put together unless you are under 12. To most adults Lego is a toy of their childhood, and a painful thing to stand on in the dark, when checking [...]

5 ways to get what you edu-pay-for

A wise person (anon.) wrote “Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get”. If we are to walk into a course, a school or an institution, there are some indicators that you want to see, because you want to get what you pay for. So when [...]

Good practice encourages active learning

A follow up from Games Based Learning Day. One of the statements people made at last weeks workshop was the idea that while playing games, or working on projects around games – students show remarkable signs of ‘active learning’. Learning (in games) is not a spectator sport. Players do not learn much just sitting there. [...]

Games for rethinking learning

Yesterday, a group of brave teachers came to a games based learning colloquium. The day looked at how games operate, and perhaps how the current gravitational Blooms taxonomy is absent in mmo and casual games, and that in turn, many of the attributes we find so engaging in games, are fundamentally missing or disproportionally represented [...]

New pedagogies for new technologies

The last couple of weeks have been really busy. Not least because of Macquarie University putting on ‘celebrating learning and teaching’ next week. I’ve put together a day for Sydney to share experiences of what is happening now in all sectors. There is no cost and its happening on the 22nd September 2010. You can [...]

Field Runners

Field Runners, a $9.99 iPad Game is awesome. I won’t repeat the review, but for the non-gaming educators out there, the strategy of this game is typical of many online browser games that kids of all ages are playing called ‘tower defence’. Field Runner is basically a 2D matrix of rows and columns, using a [...]

Interactive Zombies

Game? Narrative? – Youtube? (warning: blood, gore, bad words and zombies). Ways people are using YouTube you might not know about – from NZ.

Why kids need to write their own lyrics

Do we need tools that auto-pilot spelling etc., find things for you after a tap a few predictive letters? Is the world ready to not make any more Dylans? I get the point of the advert – but serr105sly … when did writing your own narrative require correction. On the other hand, the video below [...]

The summer of 69

Me an the guys from school, got a computers and we tried real hard … This is great. Firstly – it shows a book up sequence of a computer in 1969, but wait there is more. Let the historical document roll. The ‘boys’ are being taught about software and its design though the same syllabus [...]

Restoration of a walled garden