Education

Intro

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.

Sections

Main Page > Education

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.

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.

Links

• Wiki books
• Wikiversity
• OpenCourseWare  such as MIT's original initiative - MIT OpenCourseWare .
• How much can you really learn with a free online education (Wired)

Games, worlds and models

Some skills -- such as walking, riding a bicycle, putting a basketball in the hoop, and swimming -- are most rapidly learned by actually doing it, perhaps with someone who already knows how to do it putting your hands in the right place, etc.

Other skills -- such as skyscraper design, aircraft engine-out recovery, parachuting, leading troops into battle, urban planning, etc. -- are generally considered not appropriate for beginners. These skills are today generally learned with a bunch of classroom lectures and simulation. For example, modern flight simulators have a combination of computer graphics (simulating the view out the front window) and robotics (moving the simulator round to simulate the "feel" of climbing, spiraling, rough landing, etc.).

Improvements in computer graphics and robotics can improve education in several ways, including:

• The simulation looks and feels more like reality to the person being trained, so when that person does it "for real" it feels more familiar, and there is less risk of "overtraining to the simulator" -- learning to do things in a way that won't work in reality.
• Simulators themselves have dropped in price and require less effort on the part of the teacher to set up and monitor each round of simulation, removing some of the barriers that keep most people from ever learning those skills.
• Things that were once "too expensive" for beginners keep falling in price, eventually passing the threshold where it's faster and cheaper to go ahead and do it "for real" (throwing away or recycling the early common beginner's mistakes) than to train how to do it in a classroom and with a simulator. For example, "printing a newspaper" is far easier and cheaper today with copiers and computer printers than it was with earlier printing press or even earlier manual copying. For example, "building a chair" is much easier and has less risk of bloodshed using Grid Beam than using raw lumber and a circular saw.

See also: Free and open-source computer-aided design/Virtual environments for scenario modelling. World Game . Edutainment .