And the troika
In addition to (a) teachers being laid off and looking for work with online schools and (b) venture capitalists looking to invest in online education web sites, we’re starting to see a proliferation of online tutoring services to help kids pass school tests.
A shoe drops…
Is this the development that will start dismantling the 100 year old system of industrial schooling?
Virtual schools are seeing a dramatic rise in job applications as state officials cut education budgets to battle declining tax revenues
The system we have now–for all its problems–has survived for a long time. I’ve argued that changing economic times demand a change in how we educate young people. And perhaps now the economic changes will shake up the system enough to make that possible?
We saw just recently that venture capital is starting to flow to online education. Perhaps the ground is starting to shift….
Someone should have played Science.Net
Here’s an argument as to why it could help you to learn to think like a journalist:
If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor,
, together with representatives from the
and
departments, to whip it into publishable shape.
Why training matters
There has been much chatter in the last couple of years about crowdsourcing: the idea that the insights generated by large numbers of ordinary individuals can rival or exceed the work of a small number of experts working on a problem. The development of the Linux operating system, or Wikipedia, are often cited as examples of the power of the many.
In the field of games and education, this principle is often invoked (implicitly, if not explicitly) to explain how the community of players is able to provide mentoring that is as good or better than would be available from “trained” expert mentors.
But as a recent article, The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused), suggests, that argument may be too simplistic:
What took them so long?
I’ve long thought that the most obvious "educational" game would be a massively multiplayer online game for language learning–since so much of playing is just being able to communicate. There have been anecdotal reports of players learning English from playing games, but now a game designed to do just that:
Wiz World Online, developed by 8D World, a start-up based in Shanghai, China, and Woburn, Mass., was built by Rick Goodman, who developed the popular games Age of Empires and Empire Earth. In his latest virtual world, instead of re-enacting historical battles, Chinese children can learn English.
But here’s what makes this really interesting. According to the article:
