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 […]
Archive | Children
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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 […]
Kids, Social Media & Computer Games – A Guide for Grown Ups
As the parent of two young children, I’m often in conversation with other adults about the ways kids use technology. We sometimes feel a bit out of our depth and almost intimated by the boundless confidence our children exhibit when engaging with games, apps and social media. However daunted we might feel, we can’t sit […]
Google Glass in the Classroom
Here’s an interesting infographic about the educational potential for Google Glass from the good people at informEd. We live in an age when progress is not driven by need but opportunity: it’s always exciting to see what we can do with new technology. Google Glass, like the growing list of technologies delivering real time information […]
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 […]
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 […]
Creativity review
There is a continuous stream of research studies and articles about creativity that catch my eye. Here are some recent pieces that have caught my attention. Hope you find them useful. Creativity and children Despite less play, children’s use of imagination increases over two decades according to research Looks into the reality of the idea […]
Let the children play, it’s good for them
I read this fascinating article by Alison Gopnik on Smithsonian.com and I wanted to share the main thrust of it because I think it reiterates the importance of play. “Walk into any preschool and you’ll find toddling superheroes battling imaginary monsters. We take it for granted that young children play and, especially, pretend. Why do […]
Reforming education
The reason I do the job I do, is because I believe that education can change lives. I believe that is a universally applicable truth. For some though, the importance and potential impact is more significant. I am privileged to work with a host of organisations helping them develop and deliver their learning provision. One […]