Youth Futures: Projecting the Roles of Disruptive Technologies, Anticipatory Knowledge, and Continuous Innovation Summary: This session highlights the Global Youth Policy and Leadership Program at the University of Minnesota where faculty and students of all ages (kindergarten through graduate school) crafted scenarios, composed alternative futures, and explored other various futures methodologies. In this session, particular [...]

Twenty years ago, playing games over a distance might have meant that you played turn-taking games like chess over email, and you were cutting edge. I remember people playing chess through snail mail! You would make your move and wait for a reply. What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments [...]

To do is to be To be is to do So Do We? It is just good teaching Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn. Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is [...]

Video Games in the Classroom? I am a gamer. I am also a teacher for the Minneapolis Public Schools, and have been working with students on issues of Language Arts, Reading, and Video Games. I also offer a class called “Video games as learning tools.” This course is for teachers and people who are interested [...]

Brock Dubbels, a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota is joining Education Futures for the next week or so as a guest blogger. Brock brings nearly two decades of experience in education and instructional design, exploring new technologies for assessment, delivering content, creating engagement with learners, and investigating ways people [...]

Okay, okay…!! I’ve been getting lots of emails from WordPress bloggers looking for a copy of my widgetized adaptation of the Leia theme. I’ll try to get a sanitized edition (with EF-specific stuff removed) available for download sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can insert this code snippit into your theme’s sidebar.php [...]

Will Richardson asks, “is anyone else a bit interested in the fact that one 21,000 student district in the UK has decided to close all of its high schools and open learning centers instead: In the words of rock legend Alice Cooper’s most famous song, “school’s out forever”. Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which – for [...]

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Arthur Harkins is teaming with me at Education Futures as a regular blogger. A short bio: Arthur is an associate professor in international development education at the University of Minnesota and faculty director of the University’s graduate certificate in Innovation Studies. Arthur’s major interests lie in converging technologies [...]

Famous for changing the color of their skin, chameleons are more like mood rings, with their color changes reflecting mood, temperature, light, and other stimuli. Based in the analysis of Hatano (1982), Brophy, Hodge, Bransford (2004) wrote a short and interesting work in progress where they analyzed the idea of adaptive expertise as the “ability [...]

Dr. Cristóbal Cobo, professor and director of communications at FLACSO-México is joining Education Futures over the next week or so as a guest blogger. He is no stranger to blogging, and is the author of e-rgonomic, which explores human-web interactions. Cristóbal studied his Ph.D. in the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. In addition he has been [...]