I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Ozzy Knows Best | PBS - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Apr 08
  

  Daniel Hope

  Cringely questions the necessity of education taking place in a single location.

  by Tracksuit CEO tracksuit

  • In my future model the "school" is only a PC/game machine/mobile phone/headset thingee that clues me in about everything around me and helps me learn what I need to know. Why would I ever give that up?

    
    
    

    The truth is we won't. If we have more students, we just build more devices. Classrooms aren't absolutely necessary, nor will location even matter.

• 10 Apr 08
  

  Derek Brandow
  • Part of any answer is figuring out what education is for. We use it for paying dues, for passing time until a certain level of maturity is reached. We use it for networking and finding mates. We use it for acting goofy at the expense of our parents. And we use it, to some extent, to learn what we need to know to get by.
• 05 Apr 08
  

  kim tufts

  capstone

• 

  Erin Remple

  talks about how important digital games, not video games, could be to education

  cringely education technology education_games

• 

  Tim Lauer

  cringely education gaming

  • So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.

    
    
    

  • Stories came out this week from the NPD Group announcing that 72 percent of Americans play PC or video games with 58 percent of those played online. Those numbers -- which apparently don't include kids, by the way -- are HUGE and explain all by themselves much of what is happening to traditional mass media like TV, magazines and newspapers.

    
    
    

  • 4 more annotations...

  • • And at a time when what we're decrying is the lack of attention our children and grandchildren are paying to traditional modes of education, they are spending hundreds of hours learning to steal virtual cars and play lead air guitar.

      
      
      

    • I am not saying schools will disappear. I AM saying that new modes of instruction will emerge and they will inevitably involve processing power and context. We took our kids to Washington, D.C. for Spring Break and I would have loved to outfit them with MP3 players loaded with age-appropriate descriptions of what we saw. That's just scratching the surface.

    • People want to do new stuff with their Wii's, so why not use them to learn?

      
      
      

    • The truth is we won't. If we have more students, we just build more devices. Classrooms aren't absolutely necessary, nor will location even matter.

      
      
      

• 

  John Blake

  Learning 1 to 1 learning

  • It's easy for old farts like me to assume everybody will learn the way we did, but that's unlikely simply because the underlying assumptions are changing. When I was a kid human labor was cheap and technology was expensive. Today technology is cheap and getting cheaper, while human labor is expensive and becoming more so. Yet our model of education technology is still so defined by that remembered Apple IIe in the corner of the classroom that is it difficult for many to imagine truly pervasive educational technology.

    
    
    

    This is in large part because there is no way that Apple IIe or any PC is going to somehow expand to replace books and teachers and classrooms. For education, the personal computer is probably a dead end. It's not that we won't continue to have and use PCs in schools, but the market and intellectual momentum clearly lie elsewhere.

    
    
    

    So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.

    
    
    

    I say "digital games" rather than "video games" or "PC games," or "handheld games," because the platform doesn't matter as much as the application. Whether it is a PC or Mac, xBox or PS3, PSP or Nintendo DS, gaming has done an excellent job of proving that the application is more important than the platform on which it runs.

    
    
    

    Stories came out this week from the NPD Group announcing that 72 percent of Americans play PC or video games with 58 percent of those played online. Those numbers -- which apparently don't include kids, by the way -- are HUGE and explain all by themselves much of what is happening to traditional mass media like TV, magazines and newspapers.

    
    
    

• 04 Apr 08
  

  Kate Olson

  Every generation disapproves of the one that follows and barely claims to understand the generation that follows that. It's the way we are, simply because we tend to see everything in the context of our own experience -- an experience that is changed by age, the times we grew up in, and yes by technology.

  cringley ozzy npr education article technology generation

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