February 2012
1 post
January 2012
1 post
Athens Plaython; playing street games in a broken...
2011 was a year of many changes in my life; firstly I switched jobs and went from working in a school to working in the field of online learning. Then I switched continents and went from being a devoted Brooklynite to splitting my time traveling between Europe and the US. But most importantly I launched a project called “Athens Plaython” in my hometown of -yes you guessed it...
December 2011
1 post
"hacking" with friends; a recap from Toronto
When we all met last November in Berlin for the p2pu.org annual workshop we agreed that one of the most remarkable things about working together has been the amount of work we are able to produce when we all find ourselves in the same coordinates. You see 90% of our time we work remotely dispersed in various and exotic locations of the world. I realize this reads a bit like marveling at how bright...
November 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Challenges Model @p2pu - what we learned from...
As part of the work we are doing at p2pu.org we are creating a new feature for asynchronous online learning that uses game and project based learning principles; we call that a learning challenge. We have already launched a very rough beta of challenges with School of Webcraft that you can check out here. Additionally these last weeks we have been really focusing on getting our current work out...
2 tags
Assessment from the point of view of a designer...
It’s time to cover the part about “personal assessment”, in thi ”assessment of deeper learning online” blog series that I am doing as part of my work at p2pu.org . So (if you haven’t done this already) and you are interested in the scope and context of these blogs please check out assessment related post number 1 (social) here and assessment related post...
1 tag
Assessment from the point of view of a designer...
In my previous post I talked about design of “social” assessment, one that happens within the discussions and debates that occur around a specific topic of interest in a community. In this post we will look at assessment of deeper learning as one designed in a space that is both “creative and dynamic”.
CREATIVE ASSESSMENT
Let’s start with “creative...
2 tags
Assessment from the point of view of a designer:...
Since I joined p2pu.org I have been thinking of “assessment” a lot. A long often misinterpreted word if you ask me; brings to mind things like evaluations and tests. Well, this post is about putting a 21st century spin on assessment and talking in particular about assessment of deeper learning in online learning environments, like p2pu.org. First a bit of background; the last two months we have...
October 2011
1 post
2 tags
"The Meta-Challenge" > "How do P2PU Challenges...
The Mozilla Drumbeat festival is coming soon and we are going to be running a bunch of fun workshops with fellow P2PUians. Since we have been putting a lot of effort in creating a new “challenge-based” learning model at P2PU we want to test it out by having people create their own p2pu challenges around topics of their own interest in an open setting. Before we talk more about the...
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
A basic "how to make" a School of Webcraft...
Last week I wrote a post about what makes a good challenge in School of Webcraft. This week I tried to break down the process of building such a challenge for content experts who wish to create a “challenge blueprint” of their own. The “challenge” model is a new approach for P2PU courses and we are trying it out for the release of Webmaking 101 in School of Webcraft along...
3 tags
What makes a good School of Webcraft Challenge?
We have been working hard with the P2PU community these past weeks to roll out the alpha version of the Webmaking 101 course for Mozilla’s School of Webcraft.
For this first phase we are rolling out five introductory challenges that take someone from being an absolute novice web developer to discovering the basic skills they will need to level up as a “web-crafter”. These skills...
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
10 steps to design a game for learning
(including...
Games as learning tools are in my mind A LOT these days. And so it happens with this gamefi-learni-cation happening all around that the topic is in many peoples’ minds. A question that comes up when I have conversations about games & learning (which happens pretty often) is what are effective strategies to design a game for learning (the practical stuff). The obvious answer is that games...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
4 tags
How should a school's spatial design support...
So I suppose we can start with the argument that many of today’s classrooms are not designed to facilitate the many different ways kids learn in the 21st century. On the contrary, they reflect the architecture of the industrial era; a system of box shaped rooms placed next to each other on long corridors that could be easily supervised. The efficiency of this model gave it initially the name...
April 2011
2 posts
2 tags
WatchNight Lights by yesyesno > 3 different types of interaction - body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones.
4 tags
Imagining open source learning- will Skype hack...
Last month has been one of unusually frequent traveling for me. Which means spending a lot of time in airplanes and on Skype. A productive thing I guess, since I am writing this blog post during a flight back to NYC and I want to write about Skype’s new teacher social network that launched last Thursday and the possibilities it opens for using open source models to design learning. So it looks...
February 2011
1 post
1 tag
January 2011
5 posts
WatchImmersive game play on two long screens - facing each other and switching between platform and zoom views; a Red Army soldier chasing 2bit ghosts, skeletons, etc. At PS1 Moma by Feng Mengbo.
Watch
2 tags
Entering the Magic Circle; what happens when the...
One of my favorite things about playing games is the idea of the magic circle; the invisible yet unbreakable boundaries that are established by the very act of play. The ‘lusory’ attitude that players take upon within this new space of meaning provided by the rules and space of the game. It entails a certain level of commitment to play a game. It means that you are going to invest your...
December 2010
1 post
1 tag
Ideas are made out of games
Last week I was at the Pictoplasma conference here in NYC and watched Rilla Alexander talk about one of her wonderful characters, named Sozi, who is part of her new book ‘Her Idea’. The book talks about Sozi’s adventures to tame her endless ideas, until she finds a good one that she eventually pursues only to be happily swallowed by it. I was especially interested in the way Alexander phrased her...
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
Switch Monsters and Creativity in the Classroom
A couple of months ago I read an article on Newsweek titled ‘The Creativity Crisis’. The article brought to light some interesting facts about creativity scores in America and their significant demise during the last two decades. Kyung Hee Kim who is a researcher at the College of William & Mary and who is mentioned in the article, found out that creativity scores (CQ) have consistently...
September 2010
2 posts
WatchGot to see Gever Tulley tonight, giving a version of his TED talk about ’ 5 dangerous things kids should do’ and his ‘tinkering school’.
It made me think about how learning is born in the loose, through messing around with things sometimes as simple as an hexagon.
Learning by Playing/ how does game based...
Starting to blog again has probably been on my top 10 list of ’ Things I say I’ll do this weekend but never do’, right behind ’ i will start making my own homemade ice-cream’. Well, here i am in front of my laptop on a perfect - for writing purposes- cloudy Sunday with a cup of coffee next to me, just to keep me on task. With our school Quest to Learn being on the...