Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

Via: Voxy Blog

The Six Technologies are no surprise to those of us who have been advocating and developing mobile learning practices and tools. They are:

1. mobile computing
2. open content
3. electronic books
4. simple augmented reality
5. gesture-based computing
6. visual data analysis

If these look at all familiar, it may be because you are already using them via your smartphone. They are all  fiercely personal, socially connecting, and deeply embodied. The iPhone and iPad has ushered in an era of apps that take advantage of the geo-locative technologies, brilliant displays, touch screen and accelerometers of these devices to make many of the items listed already either mainstream or nearly-so — highlighted in popular “near-future” media representations.

What they do no explicitly mention, but what is implicit in the current uses of many on this list is games. Mobile games are huge, often rely on complex visual data analysis and gesture-based input.

I’ll be adding more commentary to this as I have time.

HSN (yes, that one) is partnering with Quirky in an experiment to crowdsource the development of new products. Not surprisingly, the idea is aligned with the Internet-ushered-in shift that is turning consumers into creators — of content (blogs, forums, Wikipedia, etc.), of media (YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc.), and now actual physical products (etsy, threadless, and now HSN).

Some teachers have been doing this for years by asking their students to dig deeper into what interests them, and pull the curriculum from that inherent motivation. Dewey famously had his laboratory school, where students learned important subjects such as math, chemistry, etc. from doing authentic real-world activities like gardening, baking, sewing, and other things that the students might know something about because they already do them with their families, friends, and neighbors. He referred to these activities as occupations.

As class sizes became larger, and educators were pushed to include more and more content while assuring that the diverse range of students in their classes all learned at the same rate (an increasingly improbable task!), the curriculum became more chopped up and removed from the lives and interests of students.

So, here we are in 2011 and one of the most consumption-based mediums, home shopping television, is promoting a very participatory activity: design the products you want to buy.

Can education do this? Yes. Just replace “Quirky” with “Curriculum Experts” — easy peasy. (And replace the bags of money with something too because educators rarely if ever actually profit. Um, maybe cultural capital?)

Computers, the connectivity of the Internet, and the tremendous amount of content available allow communities of students to follow a similar process:

1. Idea Submission (I’m interested in learning topic x)
2. Community curates (Me too! Me too! Me too!)
   • initial research of interest,
   • propose to Evaluators
3. Product Evaluation (That looks like a worthy topic)
4. Research, Design, Branding
   • attack problems through active simulations,
   • test and iterate on hypotheses,
   • discover/develop answers/solutions that work,
5. Engineering and Finalization
   • compare results with the “right” answers, and
   • discover/challenge the nature of “right” answers.
6. Presale (pilot on larger group of interested learners)
7. Manufacture (SCORM and publish to WikiSchoolia)
8. Cash in. (We are all so much smarter now!)
9. Rinse and Repeat.

All of these steps are useful. We can do it now. It’ll be scary the first time. By third time it’ll be routine and we’ll wonder why we didn’t do it years ago. Trust me.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is excited to announce the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference 7.0 to be held June 15–17, 2011 at the Memorial Union on campus.

Session Submissions are due by Monday, 7 March 2011.

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its seventh year, this grass roots “indie” event is evolving to include innovative content formats and new programming. And after waiting lists for registration in past years, we’re now finally expanding our registration to reach an even larger and more diverse audience. The GLS conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high-quality digital learning media can gather for a serious think about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal schools through the promise of games and simulations. And this year’s conference promises to be the most diverse, dynamic and biggest GLS event yet.

This year we are pleased to partner with the New Media Consortium [NMC] Conference to be held concurrently in Madison in June 2011.

Good Learning Environments. Is what this post is about. It’s more than pedagogy; it’s about supporting the sorts of things that all the curricular planning in the world can’t predict, and rolling with it — incorporating it into the lesson at hand, or taking it as an opportunity to veer terribly from the lesson at hand for the good of the lesson of school (Learning can be cool!).

There’s a very good Prezi on the (non) Linearity of Math here. Check it out. In case you don’t want to click away from this post, I’ve gone and included it here:

• research a topic
• identify key points
• find a song whose lyrics “fit” a few of the key points
• adapt other key points into lyrics to fit the song

This alone is pretty powerful learning. But historyteacher doesn’t stop there. She’s a talented singer, has a penchant for costumes, and has a crew of talented friends and students who help her then take the song lyrics and make them the basis for a re-shooting of the music video into amore historically-accurate account (one must note here that these are high school students, and as such, some of the lyrics are not as accurate as scholars might prefer — but they’re probably good enough to engage more people in the study of a particular historical story).

If the song doesn’t involve a pretty woman in Victorian costumes, there are variations featuring remixed video cuts from films about the topic. This, of course requires a whole host of other skills that move far beyond a mere history lesson. Here’s an example about the Crusades, sung to the tune of “Eyes Without a Face” (Billy Idol)

and on the Vikings (music: “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode)

Worth checking out. I’d love to see other examples of classes doing this!

McGrail, E, & McGrail, J. P. (2010). Copying right and copying wrong with web 2.0 tools in the teacher education and communications classrooms. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 10(3). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol10/iss3/languagearts/article1.cfm

What this is not, is an “Easy Resource for Students” — I’ve yet to find one. Rather, this is more of a “Why there are no ‘Easy Resource for Students’ sites.” Copyright law is ridiculously tricky and nuanced, and your best lawyers may or may not understand it.

A better solution, I believe, is to just start creating Open-Source content. Everyone. There’s a lot of talent in the world, and the tools for creating amazing things are becoming more and more affordable. If there were collections showcasing that amazing work, that kept increasing in size,  we might someday have a simplification of copyright laws to something a bit more reasonable. Maybe. If not, we can avoid the game by playing on our own open-source field.

So publish your papers open-source. Encourage your students to go open-source and contribute to the pool with their papers, media, theses and dissertations.

*as it currently stands. I recognize that there are good arguments to be made for protecting intellectual property in certain cases, and that eliminating all forms of copyright might not be the ultimate solution.

1. Mobile Editing: For iPad, iPhone, and Android devices, being unable to even create and edit Google Docs has been a major missing feature — let alone being able to collaborate with others on that document. Imagine, for a moment what this could do for large class lecture note-taking, with 50 students contributing in real-time to a shared transcript of the lecture (okay, it’d be chaos; but groups of 3-5 would work)
2. Six new typefaces: Droid Serif and Droid Sans, Calibri and Cambria, Consolas and Corsiva. Consolas especially caught my eye as a monospace font that doesn’t suck horribly.
3. Editing in MS Word: Word docs can automatically be saved to Google’s cloud. I “grew up” in MS Word, delving into Power-User features as a technical writer. I just can’t quit you, Word. (Though I’ve tried). This may help to ease the pain of having to deal with Word’s many limitations, while allowing Word addicts to continue in their affliction.

I chose Google Docs for it because of Google Doc’s collaboration feature, which has become *really amazing* — if you haven’t tried collaborating on Google Docs lately (it used to sorta suck), you should try it now!