I would like to take time now to apologize to many of you teachers out there. In my first blog post, I hopped up on my soapbox and condemned all academia. That was a little unfair. Growing up with ADHD and being forced to sit through HOURS and HOURS of INCREDIBLY BORING lectures literally feels like cruel and unusual punishment for a child/adult. It has left me a little bitter.
Many of you educators are picking up the Wikinomics standard in your communities and starting grassroots movements to make sure that students are being given better opportunities to learn. So, to extend the olive branch I have decided to write a blog post to try to help you out.
Recently I have come across some pretty cool sites and blogs that might be able to help you as you seek to better understand what needs to happen to make your class education 2.0. I would encourage the other educators that are reading this to share their thoughts and resources in comments.
Ok here goes:
There is an organization known as The Center for Learning and Performance Technologies. It is dedicated to staying up to date on learning trends, technologies and tools and finding ways to implement them into organizations.
The Founder and Head of the center, Jane Hart, also writes a blog called Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day in which she highlights and then breaks down how to use the learning tools.
Epistemicgames.org has developed a variety of videogames that educators can use to teach. Games like Digital Zoo, allows students to develop real-world skills in science and engineering. Journalism.net allows players to become reporters for an online news magazine and The Pandora Project allows players to become high-powered negotiators deciding real-world medical controversy.
classroom20.com is a community of professors and educators that share information, talk and share best practices with one another on how to better help their students.
The Institute of Play, The Digital Media and Learning Center is sponsored by The MacArthur Foundation. The foundation coordinates research programs with other universities and institutions to investigate new methods of education.
So to all you teachers working hard for Wikinomics, am I forgiven?
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Thanks for not throwing all of us in education under the bus.
Many of us are raising the issues, having the discussion, and collaborating to make a difference in opening up education and the transformation of it into Education 2.0
Groups like Classroom 2.0, Edublogger World, and NextGen Teachers are doing their part.
Thanks for the list of resources and for your support and ideas.
Comment by Rob Jacobs - July 31, 2008 1:04 am
I have a friend who has been developing Flash applications for the past year in preparation for teaching High school physics.
His plan is to use them in the classroom to help his students understand the concepts a little better and a little less abstract.
http://www.physics-lab.net/applets is a list of the applets he has made so far.
Comment by David Cameron - July 31, 2008 10:40 am
Those links look really cool and the applets intrigue me. I am one of those students that changed his major specifically to avoid those classes, but the tools look like they would be very beneficial. I forgot to post another resource. Diigo is a social bookmarking site similar to Del.icio.us but it is specifically developed for research collaboration. I might write a blog post on it later on because I love it so much but at the classroom20.com website they have a Diigo group that may also be filled with great education links as well.
Comment by Caleb Love - July 31, 2008 11:49 am