THE FUTURE OF LEARNING THIS IS A BRILLIANT…

The Future of Learning

This is a brilliant explanation of where #gamification and #education intersect, and why the internet has suddenly rendered hundreds of years of institutional education obsolete.

I very strongly think that the teacher-student dynamic is absolutely essential in the educational process. This video emphasizes the places where teachers should step aside, and I agree with everything said here. But I think we should still be thinking about what role teachers (not just programmers and game designers) should have in overseeing and managing the development of the students.

I’ve been running web-based courses from within a brick-and-mortar university setting since 2005, first at the University of Illinois, and then at Illinois state. Nothing too fancy; we ran a collaborative WordPress blog with regular posting and commenting requirements. I set due dates and formats, but I usually let the students pick their own topics to write on. You can see the blog from my last phil mind class here:

http://phil238s12.http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/

The most recent posts were scrambles for extra credit, but there’s lots of student engagement on the blog, and I think the format was a huge success. I stayed pretty hands-off on the website, but that’s because I had 3 hours a week of their undivided attention in the classroom. I used that time to keep the learning community unified as a community; it was the lectures that set the tone and issues that informed their own free blogging activity.

I think this kind of unified learning community is important, and I think the teacher has an important role to play in its unification. So although there are great models being discussed in this video, I think they might be made that much stronger by finding ways to adapt the teaching process to the future of learning.

I have some pretty neat ideas about how to do this, and over the next few weeks I’m hoping to start experimenting with regular G+ Hangouts as an ongoing educational environment. I’ll be releasing specific details about the hangouts in a few days, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be starting by covering the basics of deductive logic. If anyone reading would be interested in participating in weekly educational hangouts, please let me know by leaving a comment below, and keep your eyes out for future updates!

http://youtu.be/qC_T9ePzANg