“The way to fire children’s enthusiasm for education is not to get them learning lists of facts, but to think like someone who learns for a living” and “scrap tests – judge the schools by the number of university graduates instead”, says education guru Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High in San Diego.
Larry Rosenstock steers a group of student-centered schools in San Diego; High Tech High, a chain of nine charter schools … set up nine years ago by a coalition of business leaders and educators in the Californian city. Among its supporters is the charity set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda.
Rosenstock says: “The problem with pedagogy, in US high schools at least, is that, if you get kids to memorize 3,000 biological words, you make them think that they do not want to be a biologist. “But if you get them to behave like a biologist, or behave like a photographer, or a journalist, or a mathematician, that changes everything.”
Rosenstock said adult learning was also key. Teachers at High Tech High spend the first hour of every day on professional development. He said this work was more important than any set of formal qualifications the teachers might have.
He added that he was against the idea of “standardization” in education: setting central goals for schools and then using accountability to check they were being achieved.
Full article here.
Here is a documentary on High Tech High by the Nokia/Pearson Foundation:
A nice literature review on Serious Games in Education written by FutureLab.
Excerpt: “… the limited use of serious games in formal education may be related to … concerns about physical and cost barriers, having enough hardware, licences, sufficient access, IT support, and confidence in using the game, which includes having had time to read the manual, understand how the game relates to the curriculum goals, and an understanding of how learning will be assessed (Sandford et al)54.
Games that align to the curriculum appear to have a wider take up than those that are pedagogically sound and engaging but have no clear relationship. For example, Dimension M55, a set of games modelled on a first person shooter where game progress is determined by correctly answering mathematical questions to score points is popular in the US. This game aligns to state standards for teaching and can track and report on student progress. Games which develop more critical skills that are harder to analyze and assess, such as Global Conflicts: Palestine, have a lower take up, which the developer attributes to the difficulty in integrating it into lessons given the time needed for the teacher to learn and the time it takes to play. This contrasts with leisure games, where time constraints are not usually an issue.”
Grab the PDF here.
The following link provides really well thought out categorical thinking on the utility of game play for different outcomes.
View white papers here.
The Ecology of Games from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, looks “at the relation between youth, learning, and digital media.”
Some interesting work here. Mimi Ito’s Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children’s Software is a great source.
PDF (1030 KB)
