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Directed by a Twitter update, I landed on the PF HYPER blog… which directed me to a Wikipedia article on Open Space Technology:

In Open Space, a facilitator explains the process and then participants are invited to co-create the agenda and host their own discussion groups. Discussions are held in designated areas or separate rooms known as ‘breakout spaces’ and participants are free to move amongst the discussion groups. Each group records the conversations in a form which can be used to distribute or broadcast the proceedings of the meeting (in hard copy, blog, podcast, video, etc). Online networking can occur both before and following the actual face-to-face meetings so discussions can continue seamlessly. In a multi-day Open Space, participants have the opportunity to announce new discussion topics / late-breaking sessions each new morning. At the end of the day (or 2 days or 2.5 days) the full group reconvenes for comments and reflection. This helps participants to re-engage in the full group over the duration of the meeting.

Holy cow! That sounds a lot like open seminars/co-seminars — but with a problem-solving or conference-type focus. Open seminars and Open Space might have a lot to learn from each other!

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 that are interactive and look better than many films. Decisions, actions, and communications happen like they would in a face-to-face conversation, but they are done through a proxy, that is first and second-person perspectives with an avatar: a graphical representation of yourself in the game space.

Here is my avatar in Second Life.

He is a mix of Yoda, Pei Mei, Zatoichi, Master Po, and Real Ultimate Power. I would have liked to have made him old, but this is only possible if you learn to use some tools outside of the game to create more specialized characters. There are many who do this custom avatar creation, and the cool thing is that you could make your avatar something other than a person. Maybe a virus or a mailbox.

In fact, many people are already creating a comfortable living creating products for in game use. If you have not seen it yet, there are already success stories of people capitalizing on the new economies that virtual worlds have created.

In this Business Week article, one school teacher in Germany has made substantial gains flipping virtual property!

Imagine that you have the tools and access to build in these environments. In Second Life you do. You can visit models of the Sistine Chapel, Yankee Stadium, or even visit government agencies like the Center for Disease Control. You can build what you like on your virtual land.

What make this kind of play appealing is the ability to play and communicate when you want, and the possibility of meeting people from all over the planet. The prospect of building models and interacting in this environments should be very appealing to educators. This is an extension of the diorama. (Tomorrow I will talk about a project using these ideas in the classroom).

(Read more …)

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 you.

Gibson talked about environment and context, with affordances and constraints. What the world gives you for advice, warning, limitation, and opportunity.

These ideas are present in embodiment and how we might contextualize our curriculum as an activity system.

One of the big lessons from games is design. Good learning is by design. A teacher, like a game designer creates the environment where we learn.

(Read more …)

We’re back this week with the final five top ten lists! Today’s list contains tools and Web resources to help people start leapfrogging now.

Note: It’s hard to create an innovative tools top ten list while omitting services from Google – but, for the purpose of this list, Google is left off because everybody wants to be like Google. Why be like Google when you can leapfrog the industry?

1. GNU/Linux: It’s open. It’s free. It works. And, it’s very well supported.
2. Tom at Sky Blue Waters believes no leapfrogger can get by without a proper RSS feed to quickly digest and disseminate information.
3. WordPress: Get your message out and solicit reponses with the best blogging tool out there.
4. Wikimedia or other open knowledge-based software to quickly publish your stuff and open it for public additions, corrections, or (if necessary) deletions. Wikimedia is the platform that powers Wikipedia and Wikiversity.
5. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Croquet and other virtual environments for building new social contexts, experiences and for trying out things you can’t get away with in the real world.
6. Skype: You’ll want to talk a lot to others around the world. Why not do it for free or almost free?
7. Old skool media (also available on the Web): New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc., etc., etc…
8. Social bookmarking (e.g., del.icio.us): Find new ideas and resources, share them with others, and learn more along the way.
9. Creative Commons licensing: Mark your creative work with the freedoms you want it to carry.
10. Finally, if the resources you need aren’t out there, create your own. Need help? Consider building a team online.

An interesting article appeared at Ars Technica yesterday:

A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia’s accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.

The study involved a small pool of 55 graduate students divided into two groups (experts and non-experts), bringing into question the generalizability and validity of the findings. This follows, however, last year’s finding that Wikipedia matches the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy.

The evidence is mounting. Wikipedia is pretty darn good.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports their take of the top ten trends affecting education in 2005:

1. The browser-based application
2. Firefox
3. Wikipedia’s news reporting
4. The $100 laptop
5. Podcasting
6. A renewed debate on what students are doing on the Internet
7. OpenOffice.org 2.0
8. Web 2.0
9. Moodle
10. Blackboard’s takeover of WebCT

Read the original article.

Today, Wikipedia turns five years old. From their announcement:

“The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.”

That’s over 500 articles per day for the English-language version alone!

This follows last month’s finding that Wikipedia matches the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy.