Category: Computers and Education

Computing Programs

I was at the Ontario Universities’ Fair where all the universities have booths and thousands of high-school kids come through with their parents to shop for programs. After I had done my turn at the McMaster booth I took my son around to find a program that combines computing with arts or game design. Here is what we found.

The University of Ontario Institute of Technology is an innovative and market-oriented institution, pursuing inquiry, discovery and application through excellence in teaching and learning, value-added research and vibrant student life.
(UOIT Vision)

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Children and Computers

CNN.com РToo young for technology? РJul 23, 2004 is an interesting story sent to me by St̩fan Sinclair about starting kids on computers. I confess I was a keen computer dad when my kids were babies. I wrote little HyperCard stacks that triggered sounds and visual effects no matter what the kids did with the mouse. I suspect they made no difference either way.
Now, of course, I’m the one who needs to be helped. My son kindly helped me play an online game against a friend of his (for research purposes) – he asked the friend repeatedly to take it easy on me. Despite telling the friend I was going to whip his *** I lost miserably. My son now tells me that his friends MSN nickname now is something like “IbeatRockosDad”. This raises another interesting phenomenon – my kids tell me that they all change their MSN names regularly – they don’t think of their names as stable identities, instead they think of them as little boasts, taunts, or jokes that change as part of their communication.

Higher Learning Online Magazine

Higher Learning; Technology Serving Education is an online magazine launched in 2001 aimed at the higher ed market. It comes out about once every two months as a PDF and is a spin-off of TEACH Magazine. It is interesting that they provide the PDF versions for free of both HL and TEACH. What is dissappointing is that they are similar to Educause, emphasizing commercial technologies and “success” stories. Probably a good place to keep up on the hype, but I’m not sure they will invest in critical inquiry.

Independent Activities

How can Multimedia contribute to open learning at McMaster? If I am right that we have to create learning activities outside of classes in response to the increases in class sizes and the lack of opportunities to teach small classes then we need to imagine a venue for small learning activities.

IAP 2004 Activity: Getting Started with Weblogs is an example of something that seems to happen at MIT. It looks great and the site shows the potential for linking lots of these little courses. Hmmmm… something to think about.