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Tag Archives: James Paul Gee

Challenging the idea that games can’t be fun AND meaningful

18-Mar-13

In “Reading, Writing & Videogames,” parent and New York Times features editor Pamela Paul seems to be arguing that digital games are just that – games – they should just be fun. They don’t need to be educational, and they don’t really belong in classrooms. The first part of her argument makes perfect sense – [...]

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EduCon 2.5 & helping kids learn in ‘a landscape with no maps’

30-Jan-13

As parents, we’re now beginning to accept this, I think: “We live in a world that is re-creating itself one life and one digital connection at a time … a landscape for which there are no maps,” as Krista Tippett said it in her introduction to a timely radio conversation with Seth Godin on American [...]

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So what good is social media?

28-Oct-11

I hadn’t seen this figure: Social media use is forbidden in 52% of US classrooms, writes writes Prof. Todd Finley at East Carolina University in Edutopia. He suggests that this prohibition is working about as well as did Britain’s royal decree in 1763 that North American colonists were not to settle west of the Appalachians. [...]

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To bring learning back into school

22-Sep-11

This is a mashup of a blog post and a retweet. I’m basically retweeting (Twitter users’ term for reposting someone else’s tweet because you think it’s worth your own followers’ attention) educator and author Will Richardson’s March 2011 TEDxNYED talk in case you missed it. At about 1:30 into Will’s 14-min. talk, he mentions 17-year-old [...]

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No ‘God complex’ in Net safety, please

25-Jul-11

In his TED Talk, author Tim Harford tells the story of World War II prisoner of war Dr. Archie Cochrane and the start of his life-long observation about “the God complex” – the idea some people have that, no matter how complex the problem or conditions, they understand the way it all works and are [...]

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Why videogames are good for learners

22-Mar-11

School and videogames may not be so far apart after all.

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PBS Frontline’s ‘Digital Nation’: Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

01-Feb-10

Seems to me, Gever Tully’s Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation” – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the [...]

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Net safety: How social networks can be protective

05-Oct-09

Hmm. It’s arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, MD, discovered and presented at medical conferences – as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of [...]

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