September 2009
21 posts
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WatchA student asks about truth. A clip from “A Chat With…” featuring a BBC Journalist and Producer in English City.
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UN Security Council Recognizes Virtual Worlds ;)
“There comes a time when stubborn facts will compel us to take a decision if we want a world without nuclear weapons,” he said. “We live in a real world, not a virtual world,”
-Nicolas Sarkozy at UN Security Council, Sept 24 2009
Source: Washington Post: Security Council Adopts Nuclear Weapons Resolution
Credit to: Raphael Koster
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Character Driven Learning - Teacher to Character:...
Increased student engagement and participation directly correlate to faster student learning. Having to maintain the persona of a teacher places certain limits on the level of engagement you can achieve with your students. While employing role-play can mitigate these limits, playing a fully developed character can bypass those limits altogether.
Over the past two years Languagelab has created...
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“(students) require multiple streams of information, prefer inductive reasoning,...”
– Richard Van Eck
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Proof that Digital Natives Exist?
“Take for example the ‘Hole in the Wall project (Mitra and Rana, 2001) Computers were set up across India in locations that had never seen any type of technolog before. No training or tuition was provided, yet these children were surfing the internet within hours, downloading movies, using drawing software, playing video games, and even taught themselves how to cut, paste, and save...
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“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of...”
– Carl Rogers
(via notational)
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Dyslexia & Virtual Worlds
Dyslexic students do not gain as much from classroom teaching as their non-dyslexic peers. The reasons for this and degree to which they are affected vary greatly from student to student. Learning in virtual worlds can offer several advantages to dyslexic students. Some common characteristics of dyslexia, how they manifest and how virtual worlds (like Second Life) can help are discussed below....
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WatchMuch of the language practice that takes place in English City is community driven. Students meet up with their friends in their own time to do and discuss anything.
These meetings are organised and run by the students, no instructor or permission is required. Students get up to all kind of things, in the clip above, Jason in Malaysia is playing the saxophone for his friends.
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ISTE Speaker Series Event: Lessons From Four Years...
This Tuesday, September 15th, 5 PM SLT, the good people at the International Socitey for Technology in Education have invited me to talk about what we have learned since starting Languagelab.
I’m still deciding what to deciding what to include in the presentation. The possibilities include:
Learning Styles
Pedagogy
Curriculum design
Course design
Student behavior
Effectiveness
...
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2 Recommended War Games to train your Working...
I’ve was a fan of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games long before research suggested that: “Video games that involve planning and strategy, such as those from the Total War series, may also train working memory” The same article also suggests:
Sidoku and Facebook are also good for working memory
Twitter, Youtube and Texting are bad for working memory
Working memory is far more...
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WatchStudents singing The Winner Takes it All by ABBA
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Watch“Years of research have shown us that textbooks are among the least effective ways to teach, but they’re in every classroom” - James Paul Gee
Excellent video explaining the problem with schools and the benefits of games.
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“the Future of Schooling May Lie with Video Games”
An interesting article in this week’s Economist describes Quest to Learn, a US state funded high school that will teach through games.
Influenced by James Gee, MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, and Bank Street School for Children, their approach involves transferring much of the pedagogic effort from the teachers themselves (who will now act in an advisory role) to a...
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Coming soon to Languagelab - Black Swan
Black Swan, one of the most talked about, innovative and artistically significant sims in Second Life will soon be part of Langaugelab’s growing city.
Pictures from Black Swan:
More on what we plan to do with it later.
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WatchWhy should you adopt new technologies as early as possible? Wine blogging superstar Gary Vee tells us. His social media savvy and daily video blog on wine and have brought him a 7-figure book deal (despite him stating several times that he can’t write), several new companies, made him a regular key note speaker at web conferences around the world, and made him bigger on Twitter than Stephen...
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Read web pages 3.5 times faster using FireFox
Thanks to the web we all have access to thousands of Journal Articles, Blog Posts, Essays etc that we would like to read. There is constantly new research being released that you want to keep abreast of and this all takes time. My RSS reader has 108 sources, many of these are feeds that aggregate other feeds, and I check it several times a day.
Reading on a computer screen is typically 25% slower...
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