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Join us at the new Play + Learn conference

I delighted to announce a brand new initiative focussing on play and learning in the UK. The inaugural Play+Learn conference will take place on 17-19 June 2015 at the University of Bradford. Play is our most elemental vehicle for learning, and new digital tools like games provide whole new worlds for exploration and interaction. Together we’ll explore how we can make learning and training more engaging […]

Learning wherever

I’m delighted to announce that in a collaboration led by Richard Hudson from Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) and with Sean Duncan of Indiana University, I will be starting a new project in the New Year focussing on affinity spaces. Affinity spaces is a term coined by James Paul Gee to describe places (both virtual […]

Board of Rights and Responsibilities

Making a game of the Magna Carta Next year, the Magna Carta is 800 years old. As a seminal piece of human rights legislation it is arguably one of the most significant documents ever written. It describes the balance of rights and responsibilities between the English king and his lords (the closest it could get […]

The Benefits of Gaming

Games are everywhere aren’t they? Never before have games had such a high profile or generated so much debate. I enjoy playing a lot of games but I’m equally interested in the psychology of gameplay and how we can benefit socially, emotionally and intellectually from play. Although I am concerned that without additional support (or […]

The Potential of the Google Glass Classroom

A guest post by Bill Magana via Bluefire PR Google’s upcoming wearable computer heads-up display, Google Glass, may still be in the testing phases, but many educators are already considering the possibilities it could unlock in the classroom. Though the technology isn’t yet available to the public, BITE Interactive reports 10 percent of those surveyed said […]

Learning stories

If we believe that learning can be a profound, life-changing experience, we cannot merely scratch the surface of a subject but must burrow deeply to its core. No question worth answering is easy.  It takes time and effort. Increasingly many learning providers seem scared of expecting this level of commitment. Many people mistakenly believe that […]

Reflections on learning

The brilliant educational thinker, John Dewey, argued that “the purpose of education is to bring meaning to experience,” but discovering and embedding that meaning is not always straightforward. All too often, our ‘learning’ experiences are superficial and temporary: we learning something for a specific purpose, it’s “just in time” and then forgotten.  Learning becomes a […]

Real things games teach

As you may know, I’m a great believer in the potential of games to engage and stimulate users. I’m more skeptical about their ability to deliver learning entirely on their own so I was intrigued to discover this Tumblr site: Real Things Video Games Teach You. It proposes transferable skills that you can acquire by […]

Who’s winning with game-based learning?

This week the UK’s National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) released a study examining the latest research about game-based learning. The main findings in the NFER report were: The literature was split on the extent to which video games can impact upon overall academic performance. The studies consistently found that video games can impact positively on […]

Deeper digital learning

I saw this interesting infographic over at Getting Smart the other day. I think it makes some thought-provoking comments about how digital tools and techniques might make learning more profound.  I think the explanations are a bit little superficial (although that doesn’t mean that they are not accurate) so it would have been good to […]