What do you want from technology?

It’s an important question that anticipates a broad response. But we have to ask it more often, in order assess the kind of learning-outcomes we want for ourselves. Sadly some people assume we want the same now as when they started asking the question in the early part of the decade. And why not? they’ve [...]

So you think your robot can dance?

Last week I was showing Mr6 the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre via their website. He’s going to be presenting with his sister at their conference in October on Massively Minecraft, and wanted to know what it was about. His sister is hoping to go to the regional public speaking competition with her talk, so anyone [...]

6 essential outcomes of successful learning spaces

I have been reading Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. It reinforces this view I have that we use the wrong (but convenient) language when it comes to using ICT, and in this we are not sending the right message to teachers. The new task is about Integrated Communictions Technology ecosystems, not [...]

5 life rules that games teach and Facebook won’t.

If you want kids to learn about how to behave in massive online spaces then don’t rely on school. If you are worried about Facebook – you should be. Games however, are far less scary than many people imagine. There are signficant benefits from choosing an online game world over ‘the web’ as a place [...]

How can we help you to learn with mobiles – PBL project

One of the fantastic project based learning solutions that came out of our Massively Productive #red project with K12 distance and rural educators was “How can we help you learn with mobiles”. The problem statement surrounds the high numbers of students simply don’t respond to using a learning management system. They don’t log in, rendering [...]

Games are assessing you, even if you’re not assessing them.

Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the act of exactly measuring the state (position and momentum) of a particle is impossible as the act of observation or measurement changes the state of the particle. This seems relevant to rising number of observations by non-game players of games based learning. So put away your tokens and badges, [...]

GBL is not about games, it’s about mindsets

Games don’t want to bow to the will of education, as every game designer knows, as soon as the fun stops – you’re dead. For example, kindergarten kids are supposed to count to 30 by the end of the year (I know, it’s crazy). Setting that as a limit in games would appear to the [...]