Brian C. Smith's List: Education

• ...To prepare people for life in an information society, they need to be taught with the technology of an information society.” -Tilfen, 1995

• One of the very first sessions kicking off the 2006 Game Developers Conference was a keynote for the Serious Games Summit, which deals with game development in the areas of education, government, health, military, science, and corporate training. In it, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in a talk named 'You Can (Not) Be Serious' offered some fascinating opinions, both on the future of virtual worlds and the way in which his own company's efforts are helping to stretch boundaries.

• Digital cameras and videocameras, handheld devices such as iPods, Palm pilots and even cellphones are all some of the devices that could be included in a list of educational technology tools. You could make the arguement that all of these things are really just different forms of computers. Therefore, maybe what I am cautioning against is confining yourself to thinking of computers as the traditional desktop devices that anchor students to a set location in the classroom.

• "It's pretty interesting to think that such a high-ranking leader (or his employees) would start a blog and poll readers on whether the United States' or Britain's interaction in the Middle East are instigating World War III," Brian at ITS Community Blog writes, commenting on the blog's poll question.

• "I think if you have the expectation they can use it and learn from it, then it'll happen. Kids do not approach it the way some s do. They are not afraid to try it. They're not afraid to make mistakes. They just kind of go with it," Smith said.

• Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement.
• Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.
• Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote-work of achievement.
• Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement.
• We invent achievement tests designed to be completely immune to coaching, and therefore we have ever more expensive coaches to break the code of the noncoachable achievement test.
• We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend, but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain.
• We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain.

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