Wil Richardson is one of my favorite bloggers.\u00a0 He’s a 2o year veteran teacher who now oversees instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ.\u00a0 He’s my favorite visionary these days on all things learning.<\/p>\n
In this reflection<\/a>, he draws attention to the NYTimes magazine article this past Sunday on the Quest To Learn school in NYC, a school organized around gaming.\u00a0 The school involves sixth and seventh graders and will add a class a year until they are grades 6-12.\u00a0 Pay particular attention to the video that is linked at the end of his reflection.\u00a0 This man’s vision for the activity based, collaborative learning that goes on at Quest is a transformative vision, one that contrasts nicely, and somewhat discouragingly,\u00a0 with the vision of reform advocated in Time magazine’s theme issue<\/a> on education this week.\u00a0 The two futures laid out couldn’t be more different.<\/p>\n I think we who work to make University teaching more accessible to a wider range of students need to be tweaked by transformative examples such as Quest.\u00a0 I don’t know about you, but so often it just feels like we are playing the higher education game, making learning more easily attainable for our UVM students when perhaps what we should really be thinking about is how to change the game, not how to improve the game.\u00a0 Some questions for us:<\/p>\n Should we be thinking about how to help faculty change the game?<\/p>\n Does gaming itself play any role in what we should be advancing to faculty?<\/p>\n Is gaming so much a future vision that it creates a learning setting beyond UDL?<\/p>\n How can we advise faculty on the facilitative uses of technology when we ourselves are relatively limited in our own use of it to serve our needs and purposes?<\/p>\n Is UDL a reformative practice or is it a transformative vision?\u00a0 What should it be?<\/p>\n If our goal were to be transformative, what technologies and web-based programs would be useful for us?<\/p>\n It’s questions like these we should be considering from time to time, and it’s people like Will who can help us think through our responses.\u00a0 When you get into his blog, scroll down through it and read the statements from parents who attended back to school nights at their sons and daughters schools.\u00a0 Ouch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wil Richardson is one of my favorite bloggers.\u00a0 He’s a 2o year veteran teacher who now oversees instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ.\u00a0 He’s my favorite visionary these days on all things learning. … Continue reading