Education

From AdCiv

Intro

Will it look like this in the future? Probably not

Ignorance is a source of many of the problems that exist today and quality education is clearly hugely important for a good foundation for the progress of our civilisation.

How can we promote better education? The answer seems simple: make learning truly interesting, more relevant to the individual and make proper use of modern media. An inflexible curriculum only benefits the schools and assessment bodies.

Interactive educational media could be engaging and effective, but there is remarkably little high quality material available. It usually focuses too much on entertainment without sufficient educational content, or it is badly produced and not particularly compelling. Luckily it is becoming ever easier to create interactive 3D computer generated environments such as those found in advanced computer games, and with the right scripting engine for the interaction and behaviour, making a captivating experience where the child (or adult) hardly realises they are learning.

It is a crime for education not to be interesting! Luckily, for every module of every subject there are educators (and others) who are truly gifted at explaining and teaching key concepts and we must make better use of these people in conjunction with the latest technology to help disseminate knowledge to those who wish to learn, wherever they might be in the world.

edit

Sections

Main Page > Education

1 Intro
2 Sections
3 Educators who are gifted explainers
4 Collaboratively generated educational material
- 4.1 Links
5 Games, worlds and models

edit

Educators who are gifted explainers

Helping to gather material from people who are exceptional at explaining concepts clearly and interestingly should be a priority. Examples of inspirational explainers might be Carl Sagan

and David Attenborough

, although of course the majority of these people will not necessarily be well known.

It cannot be expected, at least initially, for these people to spontaneously contribute and submit their work to a freely available educational repository, there needs to be a concerted effort to find these people and help them record their material.

Other people have a talent not just verbally explaining but writing, making diagrams, images, animations or interactive games in ways that make it as easy as possible to understand the concepts in question. Again these people should be sought out and encouraged to contribute their knowledge to open content educational projects so the material can be built upon and offered freely to anyone who wishes to use it.

Another way to get good material is to let anyone freely submit their material and the promising parts can be incrementally improved by other editors and contributors until perhaps it reaches a high standard as in the wiki process. This good material with the help of ratings and recommendations will bubble up to the top.

Teachers if they wish could then use any of this material where appropriate, and use their own skills to check it has been understood by their students and elaborate further where necessary.

edit

Collaboratively generated educational material

Educational material contributed and edited collaboratively, constantly evolving and increasing in both quantity and quality, similar to the evolution of the famous wikipedia

Material free for anyone, teachers or students, to use and customise for their own purposes. It is very early days, but this is very much under way already.