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870607_braeburn_1What tools do teachers find useful for learning and teaching? The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies out of the UK conducted a survey in 2007 that asked people to submit their top 10 tools – they then came up with a list of the top 100.

If you are an educational software publisher the results may not be what you want to hear. Not 1 of the top 10 is an education specific title and only 5 of the top 50 are (if we include Wikipedia). All the rest are general productivity tools and range from Office apps, search tools, social networking sites, mind mappers, RSS readers to name just a few categories. In an even more interesting twist 37 of the top 50 are free.

This survey is very unscientific, 107 self selected responses. Take it with a large grain of salt. On the other hand the questions it raises are fascinating.

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If you are attending the panel on games and learning tomorrow the correct room number is 320 EF. I posted an incorrect number yesterday. Hope to see you there.

(First post from the iPhone. Works like a charm. )

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FETC 2008 starts tomorrow and I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues from across the Education Technology industry.

I’m participating in a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon about games and education that will balance practitioners with vendors in a discussion about the state of games and learning. From the practitioner side John Rice of the Education Games Research Blog will be there along with Gary Weidenhamer, Education Technology Manager at Palm Beach County District. Dave Martz from Muzzy Lane Software and I will be speaking from the business perspective and Karen Billings from SIIA’s Education Division will be moderating.

The panel runs from 1:50-2:45 PM Thursday in room CS4. Hope to see you there!

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Hype alert – Web 2.0 Marketing is a paradigm shift but only a portion of the market is using it today. In Part 1 I argued that market trends should be pushing you to use social networking, blogs, wikis, and the other tools of Web 2.0 in your marketing mix. Given the uneven adoption of these tools in your customer base you will be managing a mix of the old and new for quite some time. So think of it as expanding your paradigm.

Before we go on I want to add to what I said in Part 1. There is one additional reason for doing all this that is specific to the education market. Most teachers are isolated in their classrooms – they yearn to have their voice heard and to be part of a larger community. The asynchronous nature of most social media are ideal for meeting this need. It is one of the reasons there are so many education groups already on Ning.

So what does this “paradigm expansion kit” look like? Here are five ways of thinking like a Web 2.0 Marketer that you can add to your toolkit.

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Education marketers have been slow to adopt wikis, blogs, social networks, and virtual worlds. There are valid reasons for this (see below), but it is time for us as an industry to begin embracing these tools. In this series I’m going to explore the industry context, the gestalt, and some concrete ideas to help you get started down this path.

Over the past year I have been asking people “what is the first thing you do in Amazon after you make sure you have the product you were seeking?” The almost universal answer is that people scroll down to look at the user generated comments. This is the power of Web 2.0 at work – what your peers have to say on a subject is far more important than anything a company might say.

There are two primary reasons the education industry should be employing Web 2.0 tools:

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By Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm

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Educator’s love the internet but they have valid concerns about using it in the classroom. Thinkronize’s study, “Schools & Generation ‘Net” uncovered compelling insights from nearly 1,000 principals and library media specialists. Relevancy, commercialization, information literacy, instructional validity, and children’s safety were all significant issues. Today we look at 5 ideas that can help you rethink your on-line offerings to fit into today’s classrooms.

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1. The Internet is a Valuable Instructional Resource

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Blood-Grave.jpgWill a middle school video game to teach ethics using a story line out of zombie movies and Frankenstein work? Doug Thomas at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication is working on “Modern Prometheus” a game that involves plagues, body parts, and building a better monster.

My hat is off to the Professor and his team but I question how much real life ethics they are going to teach. One of the fundamental challenges we face in creating serious games is the balance of fantasy vs. reality. Deciding whether or not to dig up graves for body parts just isn’t something your average middle schooler is going to be faced with on a regular basis. On other hand – being nice to the new kid or saying goodbye to a friend who is using drugs are very real.

It also surfaces one of the more vexing issues the entire game industry is facing – how do we move away from guns and gore and yet maintain fun game play? Mainstream gaming sites are full of lamentations about how staid and formulaic most games are today (despite fascinating new entrants like “Portal” from Valve – crazy fun and mind bending at the same time).

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New Thinkronize Research – Schools and Generation ‘Net – Shows that Porn Nudges out Predators as Leading Online Danger for Students

Editor’s Note: Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm, CEO of Thinkronize, will be sharing some insights from a survey they recently conducted on the concerns of Teachers and Parents what kids are finding on-line. This is relevant information for those who are in the business of producing instructional materials for web-based delivery. As parents become more skeptical about internet resources we have to double-up our efforts to promote on-line safety for children.

413605_old_mittens.jpgAs the cold of winter is almost upon us, my wife and I have been digging out the kids’ winter coats, hats and mismatched mittens. Mittens are like socks – they get lost mysteriously – either eaten by the dryer or left to freeze somewhere on a snow bank. Whatever happened to those sturdy metal clips that parents used to fasten mittens to winter coats? The act of fastening those mittens was more than just to protect us from cold hands, it was an extra safety measure to ensure that when we ventured out, everything possible had been done to assure our safety.

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Jessica Hagy - IndexedTechnology & Learning On-Line has launched a set of forums on education technology issues. For some odd reason they selected me to moderate the Games and Virtual Worlds Forum. As the graphic shows teaching and learning is about a conversation, so lets get one going over there.

MaestroC got the ball rolling by stating that Second Life is the best platform and that games for education are a fad. Agree, disagree, keep it polite and lets all learn together. See my response on the forum and ad your own!

There is also a quick poll on which kind of game player you are. Several years ago Richard Bartle articulated the four primary styles of game play and a theory about how to balance them. Take the poll and see where you fit with your peers.

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Sometimes in the rush to finish a chapter on deadline or to get six copies to Paducah by Friday we loose sight of the essence of what we are doing.

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Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietanmese monk, writing about how everything is connected expressed it this way:

When you look at this sheet of paper, you think it belongs to the realm of being. There was a time that it came into existence, a moment in the factory it became a sheet of paper. But before the sheet of paper was born, was it nothing? Can nothing become something? Before it was recognizable as a sheet of paper, it must have been something else – a tree, a branch, sunshine, clouds, the earth. In its former life, the sheet of paper was all these things. If you ask the sheet of paper, “Tell me about your adventures,” she will tell you, “Talk to a flower, a tree, or a cloud and listen to their stories.”*

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