The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.
Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott
Ideas themselves are perhaps the ultimate social software, evolving via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them. Yes, if facts change our mind, that’s science. But when ideas change our minds, we see those facts afresh, and that’s history, culture, science, and philosophy all in one.
Tom O’Reilley
Now, though, for the first time in its history, young people are watching less TV than their elders, and the cause of the decline is competition for their free time from media that allow for active and social participation, not just passive and individual consumption. The value in media is no longer in sources but in flows; when we pool our cognitive surplus, it creates value that doesn’t exist when we operate in isolation. The displacement of TV watching is coming among people who are using more of their time to make things and do things, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and to share those things with others.
Check out this great article from Edge.org on the “cognitive surplus” and how we can take advantage of it. Be sure to read the articles and watch the video too!
Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky
National Center for the History of Electronic Games
This is an excellent resource on the history of video games. I recommend reading the PDF file at the bottom of the page, “Concentric Circles: A Lens for Exploring the History of Electronic Games”.
It’s not often that we think of video games as artifacts of history, but they have been integral to modern cultural, aesthetic and educational development. This institution does us a great service in its preservation.
