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Virtual Reality and Education have a long and checkered history.

On-line worlds give students opportunities to experience things that would be too expensive, too dangerous, or too time consuming in the “real” world. It allows us to distill an experience into it’s essence while allowing learners to be active agents rather than passive recipients.

That said I would argue that the word “virtual” has little or no meaning for today’s students. It is an artifact from a time when the internet was not a pervasive presence. In todays on-line social spaces teens are making friends, sharing experiences, flirting, competing, earning status, and defining their identities. There is very little that is “virtual” about any of this for them – it is just one more aspect of reality.

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NFImageImportHere is some food for thought from Seth Godin on how social networking can help us organize. His main point – the side in an argument that is better organized usually wins. Whether your issue is education reform, textbook and software adoption, privatization, highly qualified teachers, NCLB, or any of the other issues of the day there is a worthy nugget of wisdom in his thinking.

What Happens When We Organize?

As Seth points out these tools upset the power dynamic and if harnessed can lead to positive change.

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A family member – who works in a Texas middle school – forwarded this bit of wit and wisdom to me today.

A teacher dies and goes to Heaven. When she gets there, she meets Peter at the pearly white gates.

Peter says to her, ‘Welcome to Heaven. Let me give you an orientation first.’

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976838_palayAn instructional monoculture is a world where all children are expected to learn the same things, the same way, at the same time.

Are we building instructional monocultures in our schools? By we I mean publishers, policy makers, and district level decision makers. The forces of conformity are driving hard against the need for instructional diversity.

More importantly in the Web 2.0 world is it even possible to assert this level of control? Is it an effort doomed to failure as Citizen Marketers invade traditional publishing and turn it on it’s ear.

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517386_scanning_testNew York, Texas, California, and Florida have opted out of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and will be abandoning all high stakes testing. It is unclear at this time if other states will follow, although indications from across the political spectrum are clear there is strong interest.

In a joint press conference the Chief State School Officers for the big 4 expressed a commitment to move the money they are currently spending on high stakes testing into Art, Music, and Intramural Sports.

“Frankly we were not seeing real gains. We kept tweaking the tests and measurements to give the illusion that progress was being made – but at the end of the day it was the same old same old” stated one Chief. Another added that it was difficult to measure whether the tests were really making a difference. As he pointed out – “the mortgage crisis was driven by people educated 15-30 years ago, it is hard to see how today’s students could be dumber than that.”

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Tom Chapin’s satirical song “Its Not On The Test” is worth a look. Even if you are a fan of No Child Left Behind this issues he raises need an answer.

I particularly like the jab at shout TV which reduces all discourse to name calling. Education reform is a deep and important topic and our current confrontational political culture isn’t serving us well in this – or many other – areas.

He has a web site with good links and more information at Its Not On the Test.

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Crayon Physics from Kloonigames is a very cool serious game. I can see young kids in particular playing with this for hours. The designer said about one comment “Chris Baker wrote a great article about Crayon Physics Deluxe for Slate. He wrote that the game looks like it was designed by a third-grater. I take that as a compliment.”

If you don’t get video games this is an excellent video to watch. The kinds of puzzles kids are solving in Portal and World of Warcraft are very similar to the ones you see here. But with the interface stripped down to bare essentials you can get a sense of the brain work that is going on while players wrestle with the more complicated games.

If you want a sense of how engaging this kind of simple interface with some basic physics can be go play Linerider for a while. It only take a couple of minutes to learn it – then see if you don’t want to just PLAY.

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Information Overload and Education Publishing Marketing penned (keyed?) by yours truly was published today on the AEP blog. This is a summary of the longer series I did last year on information overload. If you want a quick introduction or need a refresher hop over and take a look.

While you are there bookmark the blog or better yet drop it into your RSS reader – on a regular basis senior people from the publishing industry will be writing about the business.

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Advertising isn’t working as well as it used to. In an age of information overload people are tuning out distractions as a matter of survival.

Here are two visuals to help make this point.

1. It is far more important to be found when someone is looking these days than to be visible when they are just scanning. To visualize this look at the graphic below

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897541_we_are_lostCurious about how Web 2.0 is going to affect education? Steve Hargadon has distilled into one blog post an excellent summary of the trends that are leading us there and what teachers can do to help their students thrive in this new environment.

Much of what Steve talks about has been part of a vision for education long before computers were going into schools. There is a clear link from Dewey, Piaget, Vigotsky, and even the constructivist critic Mayer to the ideas Hargadon lays out.

Both the technology and the culture that surrounds it have matured to the point where this vision can transform into the dominant paradigm. Quantitative and anecdotal evidence backs this assertion up.

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