Augmented reality is exactly what the name implies — a medium through which the known world fuses with current technology to create a uniquely blended interactive experience. While still more or less a nascent entity in the frequently Luddite education industry, more and more teachers, researchers, and developers contribute their ideas and inventions towards the cause of more interactive learning environments. Many of these result in some of the most creative, engaging experiences imaginable, and as adherence grows, so too will students of all ages.
20 Experiments, Paragraphs, and Links Below the Line
Attached is an abstract for a talk given today in Vienna, Austria, for the Heinz von Foerster Society. This Society, which has become a leading center for cybernetics research in Europe, celebrates the work of Heinz von Foester, who was born in Vienna and taught for many years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The abstract is in German and English.
A Constructivist University: Farewell to the Paukmaschine*
Heinz von Foerster Society
Tuesday 13 November 2012, 18:30
Lecture Hall 21, University of Vienna
1010 Vienna, Austria
How can creativity be at home in a perfect imaginary university? How can one conduct seminars and lectures, and in the cafeteria have enthusiastic and joyful play, which is the origin of new knowledge? Bernhard Pörksen, media professor at the University of Tübingen, recalls in his presentation the ideas and approaches to learning of the physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster. Its central thesis is that the constructivist insight leads to a variety of worlds and realities that can be used in university teaching to support intellectual curiosity, fascination and cooperative thinking. Constructivism inspires us to reduce blocking hierarchies of knowledge and encourages a dialogue-based learning. However, the aim of the ongoing Bologna reform among European universities, Poerksen says, takes us in a different direction. It relies on standardization of the learning process, not on personalization. It requires ready-made answers, not open questions, and provides no time for diversions for thinking and confrontations with the unknown and uncertain.
Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to teach a billion students, Technology Review reports.
“Massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”) will affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify.
A quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.
Contents:
Insights from the crisis of science and belief
Questionably exclusive framing of multiverse by science
Imaginative engagement with multiverse through poetry
Poetic insights into becoming a poem and being one
Transcending both scientific and poetic comprehension of multiverse
Explanation vs. Inplanation: multiversal embodiment through the Ouroboros
It has an annex which develops the arguments of Rupert Sheldrake's presentation in the form of:
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”
And he’s not alone. The Post’s own Vivek Wadhwa recently predicted that all online education would be totally free within 10 years — and that includes an education from the same elite institutions who have joined Coursera. For a really mind-blowing scenario of how it all unfolds check out the EPIC 2020 video — it lays out a realistic route for free online education by the year 2020.
It can be hard to keep up with the ever-growing list of free educational sites out there, much less distinguish which ones will best meet your needs and help you learn skills you really need without shelling out big bucks.
In the video, Ridley uses the example of a pencilto demonstrate how no single individual alone knows how to manufacture one, and that is why our progress is dependent upon collective intelligence. Watch Ridley and other experts on collective intelligence in the video here.
A Constructivist University: Farewell to the Paukmaschine*
