Recently found … 04/22/2015 (a.m.)

  • tags: gamification assessment education reform

    • Based at Electronic Arts’ Silicon Valley headquarters, GlassLab is bristling with PhD-level learning scientists and assessment experts who are experimenting with ways to combine game mechanics with academic content. The effort’s ultimate aim is essentially to do away with standardized testing as we know it.

      The project is part of a larger effort across academia looking for alternatives to standardized testing.

    • schools, for all of their obsession with testing, have an inability to do something with the results. The tests happen at the end of the school year, when there’s little time to change course. What else is there to do in the face of failure but fire the educators who brought you all those terrible scores?

      If games do nothing else, they lower the cost of failure, making it happen early enough and often enough so that players can regroup, recover and come back with a better plan. That’s where real learning takes place. Why can’t school work that way?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.

Promoting his new show StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson said:

So what does it mean to complain about what politicians do? We should complain about what the electorate does. I’m an educator, so I see it as one of my duties, especially as a science educator, to alert people of what science is and how it works. About what it means for there to be an objective truth that we would then act upon.

Yes! Read the entire interview.