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How Learning Spaces Reflect Our View of Children
Many school buildings are in a terrible state. Even in seemingly advanced western nations many old schools resemble architectural catastrophes that, along with post-war urban tower blocks and the shopping malls of the 1950s, have largely been left to the crumble of rust. In the last few years, though, there has been a renaissance in school building design based on a reimagining of learning spaces (pdf) that has mirrored the advance in our understandings of education-oriented information and communication technologies (ICT). Yet as I pass my local school, currently being completely rebuilt to a high-tech spec, and watch it rising up from amidst its old ruins, I find myself wondering what these new buildings might represent in terms of our ideas about children.… more
Community and Writing in an Age of New Collectives
In Larry Sanger's history of the development of Wikipedia in Open Sources 2.0, the Wikipedia co-founder writes: For months I denied that Wikipedia was a community, claiming that it was, instead, only an encyclopedia project, and that there should not be any serious governance problems if people would simply stick to the task of making an encyclopedia. This was wishful thinking. In fact, Wikipedia was from the beginning both a community and an encyclopedia project. (p. 329; my emphasis). In other words, Sanger argues that the problems he associated with Wikipedia when he was head of the project -- the bias against experts, for example -- were a direct result of his acting as if Wikipedia were merely an unique, communal encyclopedia rather than a community that was producing an unique, communal encyclopedia.… more
Literacies, Semantic Web and Recommended Resources
![](../../../sites/dmlcentral/files/imagecache/blog_image/blog_images/GK600x360.jpg "New Literacies, "Future of the Internet" and other Highly Recommended Resources Blog Image")
Editor's note: Global Kids does a stellar job each month pointing us to excellent resources.
The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition (report)
The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition, part of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, looks at emerging technologies and their potential impact on museums. The report, like all Horizon reports, identifies six key technological trends. For museums, the report features: mobile technology, social media, augmented reality, location-based services, gesture-based computing, and semantic Web. The report delves into each technology in much more detail, provides a list of museums that are exemplary in their use of those technologies, and includes additional resources for reading. It also details four key broader trends and six challenges.… more