iMedia

Educational games: getting to "what's worth knowing"

Inviting parents to be a part of the process, the New York Times reports on how online collaborative games are being introduced in schools to go beyond "skills and drills" to teach concepts and solve problems in context. "Educational Video Games Mix Cool With Purpose":

After years of watching technology transform the way children play, socialize and learn, a range of academics, foundations and now start-ups are working on games that will put the passion children have for the genre to good use....

The difference in many of today’s educational games is that they are online and social, allowing children to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. Unlike the stand-alone boxed games of the 1980s and 1990s, the newest educational games are set up like services where children can enter a virtual world, try on a character and solve problems that may relate to the real world.

Newer games work concepts of math, science or language into the actual game mechanics, rather than stopping for something that feels to the player like schoolwork, experts say.

While undoubtedly a pedagogical shift, using virtual environments lowers the cost of failure, encourages cooperative and creative problem solving, and leads to the summit of academic achievement: the penetrating question.

Saying that the most important question in a changing world is "what's worth knowing?" game scientist David Shaffer was blunt in response to "Five Questions" from the IdeaFestival:

We have to move away from thinking about education in terms of the traditional organization of schools. Schools as we know them developed in a particular place and time to meet a specific set of social and economic needs. But times have changed, and the way we need to think about education has changed too. The academic disciplines of history, English, math, and science are not the only way to divide up the world of things worth knowing, the forty-minute blocks of time in which they are currently taught using lecture and recitation are not the only way to learn, and standardized tests of facts and basic skills are not the only way to decide who has learned what they were supposed to learn.

Hat tip: MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

There really is no useless knowledge

Appearing at the IdeaFestival, A.J. Adams, author of The Year of Living Biblically, The Know it All and The Guinea Pig Diaries, talked at length about his life-as-experiment and the idea that there really is no useless knowledge. Jacobs spoke at the IdeaFestival last week in Louisville. A live account of his presentation is here.

To excel in math and science, learn rhetoric. Of course.

In this iMedia Kentucky podcast, program director for the AP English portion of the National Math and Science Initiative grant supporting the goals of AdvanceKentucky, Tina Rose, explains why English is important to math and science advanced placement students.

Recorded just prior to the recent teacher training sessions held in Louisville, some background noise intrudes into the audio as tables and chairs were moved about. But it's still very listenable.

She is but one of the many people leading an expectations revolution in Kentucky.

Classroom leaders of "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky education

Speaking to iMedia Kentucky at the recent training sessions held by AdvanceKentucky last weekend, these are some of the voices of advanced placement teachers leading an expectations revolution in the commonwealth.

AdvanceKentucky leading "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky

Last Friday a revolution came to town when advanced placement teachers in AdvanceKentucky gathered for a weekend training at the Brown Hotel in Louisville.

Welcoming them, Dale Fleury from the National Math Science Initiative spoke for a few minutes about how much of the rest of the world had caught up to the United States in innovation and educational attainment, how the National Math Science Initiative had been created and how it had selected, along with five other states, Kentucky as a partner in a groundbreaking educational initiative. Dale Fleury can also be seen in this iMedia Kentucky video talking about the educational challenges facing the country.

In particular, he noted how those in attendance were part of an "expectations revolution". Have a listen:

Excellence will be needed to meet the challenges of a right brain future. There really isn't a student to waste.

iMedia Kentucky will bring you more audio from the gathering over the next several days.

High tech, high growth

One of the things heard last week at the Visioning Kentucky's Future conference is the connection between high tech and high growth. It certainly makes this stat relevant. Our southern neighbor North Carolina has just recorded the highest fiver year rate of growth in biotech jobs in the nation.

Computerworld: National technology-related innovation in decline

Is the U.S. in "a decade long decline" in technology-related competitiveness?" Computerworld:

By most measures, the U.S. has been in a decade-long decline in global technological competitiveness. The reasons are many and complex, but central among them is the country's retreat from long-term basic research in science and technology, coupled with a surge in R&D in countries such as China.

R&D has two components, of course, and published figures showing a rise in "research and development" hide a troubling trend. Companies still spend billions annually on development, typically aimed at the next product cycle or two. But the kind of pure research that led to the invention of the transistor and the Internet is declining as companies bow to the pressure to improve quarterly and annual financial results.

Running in Place

The Lane Report's recent article, Pep Rally for Boldness, goes to the heart of why creativity and innovation matter to Kentucky. The commonwealth simply can't afford to accept the status quo and hope to keep pace.

This figure is staggering:

At the current incremental rate of growth, the state will catch up to the national average household income in 157 years. Small improvements will only allow us to keep running in place. 

Kentucky changing the game in Education

Gov. Beshear was in Lexington yesterday to announce significant educational grants targeting science and student development in the commonwealth.

A grant from the National Science Foundation, "which totals $12.5 million over five years, will fund university research in three key technological areas: biotechnology, nanotechnology and cybertechnologies," according to a University of Kentucky story this morning. The state will add an additional $5 million to that total.

A second grant totaling $2.1 million from the U.S. Department of Education will go to AdvanceKentucky, which is implementing a proven concept to expand the number of Kentucky high schools students enrolled in demanding math, science and English Advanced Placement (AP) courses. The money will be added to $13.2 million already allocated over six years.

AdvanceKentucky is affiliated with the National Math and Science Initiative.

The $2.1 million will enable another six schools to participate in the AdvanceKentucky program, which is currently providing support to 12 schools. The program hopes to serve ninety high schools statewide by 2012.

What do 70 percent of the people want?

Practitioners of the dismal science are often noted for what they're against, but a new economic consensus may be emerging that argues on behalf of a renewed effort to invest in our collective human capital. Boston Globe:

More than 70 percent of Americans routinely tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction. America will not change course just by electing a new president, no matter how much charisma or character that leader might have. America's future will instead depend on the skills of its citizens. In a remarkable new book.... Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz make a compelling case that America's 20th-century achievements owed much to our nation's once-robust investment in education, and that since the 1970s the growth in that investment has slowed dramatically.

Also since the mid-1970s, America has become much more unequal. Not all inequality is bad. I wouldn't mind if the guys who gave us Google earned even more, given their contributions to society. I do, however, care deeply that millions of Americans seem to have reaped, at best, modest benefits from the past 30 years of technological change....

American education is not just another arrow in a quiver of policy proposals, but it is the primary weapon, the great claymore, to fight a host of public ills. One can make a plausible case that improving American education would do as much to improve health outcomes as either candidate's health plans. People with more years of schooling are less obese, smoke less, and live longer. Better-educated people are also more likely to vote and to build social capital by investing in civic organizations.

The author of this Boston Globe piece, Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, promises his version of a Marshall plan for education in his next Globe piece.