5 reasons students would rather play Xbox than use the LMS

There are few things that LMS courses could learn from games design and defeat the cursed scroll of deathly dullness – but hey ‘nice graphic on the header there dude’ kind of activity screams quality does it not.  Many LMS courses are there to  suit the teacher, the organisation and occasionally the content, not the [...]

From innovation to the grave

Do you subscribe to the bell curve theory? The one that talks about 3% of people being innovators and 14% early adopters etc.? I don’t. It’s too fatalistic and generalised. I doubt those measuring it have sufficient access to innovators as I’ll explain, and generally use their world view to determine a false innovation datum [...]

Our concious selves need to play

Nothing is as new as it seems, yet new manifestations are often mystical. Take the phenomenon of the “personal learning network”, which isn’t simply a way to scrape useful materials and resources from the internet, but has come about through the ability of technology to connect an ever more diverse group of people though very [...]

The culture of acquisition – and why we don’t have one.

Adults do value children’s play and talk to children about their play. Teachers often say “I like the way you’re working,” but rarely, “I like the way you’re playing.” unlike parents. No wonder children get confused. Play with children is appropriate, especially during the early years. Nothing beats playing games with your kids, either as [...]

Keeping Dragons

There are new merchants in the digital-exchange. You’ve probably noticed them with their corporate hash-tags etc., There will, for any given innovation enclave always need to be a middle earth, and at the center a marketplace that attempts to feed off it. There will also be people who believe they have dragon-eggs and who simply [...]

Performance before Competence

I found this was an interesting principle of game-play. It relates to notions of tinkering with technology broadly, and having waning interest in being ‘trained’ to use anything. It might also point to how keen teachers are to obtain ‘badges’ from commercial companies. We simply feel that performance comes before competence, and actually need ways [...]

Why we should play games with teachers

In the gambit of ‘why would you’ discussions, those who suffer sufficient madness to suggest that game-worlds are in fact more useful in efforts to influence teachers to think about digital-pedagogues are familiar with the ease at which their ideas can be dismissed. Adoption (and change) has lot to do with belief and less to [...]

Do you have the keys to tomorrow?

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Lin Pernille Photography I recently wrote about how I believe most of the innovation in education is being developed in individual’s downtime moments. This post is about why social-keys being used by Downtime Learners can lock a non-networked manager or organisation out of the future in [...]

X-School in Newcastle?

Patterns and routines follow education as surely high tide follows low. A hundred years of mass education, sounded out by the bell of inevitability. The pattern and routines are rarely broken, but reinforced with each passing day. Smart-kids know how to game the system. I recently spoke to a young woman, now doing a PhD, [...]