Blog-hopping

Catching up on reading the blogs...


Clive on Learning - Putting it bluntly business games seem to work -

"There were no significant differences between ethnicities, yet all ethnic groups scored significantly higher with game play. Students 40 years and under scored significantly higher with game play, while students 41 and older did not" from Does Game-Based Learning Work?, a report by Richard Blunt of Advanced Distributed Learning.

Take-aways

• Take with a grain of salt.
• Older adults scores actually went down.  Wonder if their perception was the game made the learning trivial and therefore less important to learn.
• Amazing how much money is spent with no real assurance it has results.

Academic Commons - NEH Launches New Online Database

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) unveiled a new Funded Projects Query Form that allows visitors to search online for information on all projects funded by NEH since 1980.

• Would be interesting to just wander through and see what people are doing and how much money is spent on the way.  Not today though.

Dy/Dan - Bob Parker Nails It  which is a followup to A Trash-Talking High School Math Teacher 

• The question originally posed to the class is which grocery store line moves faster, several carts with only a few items each, or one large cart with a quite a few more items.   It ended up in a discussion the role cash, check and credit play in moving people through the line.   Bob Parker points out

Credit can’t be slower then cash – Visa told me so. They told me I am a social pariah if I pay in cash.

Informal Learning Blog - Blogging to show off your organization 

At first, I choked on the practice of paying bloggers $10/hour. This smacks a little of surreptitious product placements. (Drink Coke!) Then it occurred to me that payment takes care of the loss of control issue. While MIT vows not to fiddle with anyone’s posts, a student who wants the job is not going to go crazy online.

• Why not EPCC?  I can hear them now, our students aren't really  there yet, but if we aren't there yet, how can we attracts students who are?  Round and round, downward.....

Informal Learning Blog - Social Contagion Researchers Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler say:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

• Hmmmm, maybe I need to take a good hard look at my friend lists.
  

Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech - Honour our attempts  (The quote below is a copy of a copy that originated in Jan Smith's classroom blog.

Please notice our successes, not our mistakes. Our blog is an invitation to see what we are up to. Some of our work will be polished, and some will be in draft form. Please honour our attempts.

• Absolutely love this.   Being free to make mistakes, to not have it perfect.  A priceless freedom.
  

Onlignment - Using John Keller’s ARCS model to motivate online learners

• Sometimes it is so very hard to hang on to the basics 
• Attention-capture it or nothing will happen
• Relevance-if I don't know why they need to know it, what makes me think they know why?
• Confidence-who wants to do things they don't think they can succeed at?
• Satisfaction-without it, the work is drudgery.
  

Enough for today......

The Way North

EPCC Salute to the Arts sponsored this documentary in the Lecture Forum at TM.   I was fortunate enough to get to spend time talking to the producer (Dan VanZant) and director (Shara K. Lange) at a reception before the documentary.   Both are very animated young people.  

The documentary highlighted part of the life of Fatima Rhazi, the first female sports photographer in Morocco and her work for the Femmes D'Ici et D'Ailleurs (Women here and elsewhere). 

Take aways:

• Fatima is an incredibly strong person, a survivor who also enables others to do so too.   Once a photographer for the King, she left Morocco after her husband's death to avoid her husband's parents from taking her child from her.  
• Quote I especially like:  "I thought that in France life would be easier—it’s the land of liberty. But it wasn’t like that at all." --Fatima Rhazi   I suspect my great-grandfather would have said the same thing about the United States.
• The issue of clothing (in this case wearing a head scarf) is universal between parents and child.
• Children need to feel they belong in school.   Fatima made a point in the film that her son, who is very dark skinned, will have a much more difficult time because of his color.  We forget that racism isn't just here in the US. 
• In France, she deals with the same ills we find here, racism, sexism, learning a new language, finding one's vocation, etc.   Before the film, I hadn't thought much about other countries having illegal immigration issues, and this was a great film to start that conversation.
• Maghrebi refers to people from the areas of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania.
• This documentary was a school project for Shara's MFA.  Dan and Shara teamed up at UT Austin.
• Small grants and access to the equipment/staff/fellow students at UT Austin made the project possible.
• Hadja's papers were eventually approved. 

Definitely enjoyed the film and bought a copy of the DVD to watch it again.

Trivia:  Dan and I are both from Illinois.