As the parent of a child who's been keen on computer games from the age of three(!), I welcome the Scottish Government's plans for teaching schoolchildren how to design and develop their own electronic games. Apparently, pupils will use software to create their own games, and be taught how to use computer software to create animations and feature films. While this is at least partly intended to support Scotland's games industry, which employs more than 500 and generates £20million annually, Maureen Watt, Minister for Schools and Skills, also notes "Technologies have become part of every day modern life, whether in computer programming, engineering or craft and design - and we need to encourage children to be confident and competent when using them".

From what I can see, confidence in using technology is already par for the course among primary 1s, certainly in terms of xbox, playstation, nintendo ds various... And if you need convincing about the potential educational value of games, have a look at how it is being done on gamelearning for the 'playstation generation'; read what John Rice has to stay about the educational uses of the ds; or for something more practical (and my favourite) why not see if you can beat the clock on Lunar Jim's patchwork game (Level 3), or for something a bit easier how about Spooky Spoon Sudoku?

Labels: digitalnatives, education, games, learnerexpectations, schools, scotland

Yesterday I attended an interesting presentation by Ewan McIntosh (his edublogs site is worth checking out) run as part of the Urban Learning Space seminar series (a podcast of it will be available soon).

What I found refreshing was his discussion of how emerging technologies (social software in particular) is really just another development in a long line of 'in-things' (from sliced bread in 192x!) whose use seemed daunting, unusual or even inappropriate initially.

What I took from his talk was that maybe educators tend to take the use of emerging technolgies too seriously, treating them as an all-or-nothing. Overplanning the use of technolgy, putting so much emphasis on the need for them to be successful (or the need for it to not fail) means that the flexibility, spontaneity and innovative use of technologies is often stifled in the learning environment. And yet our learners are displaying exactly these traits in their personal use of the technologies - from using their blogs to publish creative writing, to producing videos for youtube sharing their comments on current affairs, and using some impressive technical features to showcase their talents. Maybe it is time we learned from them and see it as a creative medium rather than looking for the way to assess it and 'prove' the value of the excersie... maybe the value is it can engage the interest of learners!

Labels: digitalnatives, education, educators, elearning, freedom, internet, IT, learnerexpectations, online, web2.0

This recently published article reports on research which says that university applicants expect unrestricted access to internet. While this is unsuprising as most university applicants will already use the internet in their everyday life, it does raise questions for institutions who want to maintain a degree of control over their networks, and how to reach an acceptable compromise between learner expectations of freedom of use and safety/security of the network.

Labels: digitalnatives, freedom, HE, internet, IT, learnerexpectations, networks, security