Educational CyberPlayGround ®

K12 Department of Education - Do It Yourself

WE ARE A COMMUNITY OF KIDS WHO MAKE

 

School for Hackers The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing. By Mark Frauenfelder
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218
[... The ideal educational environment for kids, observes Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the way children learn, is one that includes the opportunity to mess around with objects of all sorts, and to try to build things. ]
[... Diane McGrath, former editor of the Journal of Computer Science Education, reports that project-based students do as well as (and sometimes better than) traditionally educated students on standardized tests, and that they learn research skills, understand the subject matter at a deeper level than do their traditional counterparts, and are more deeply engaged in their work.]

THE IMPORTANCE OF
CREATIVITY, PLAY, DREAMS AND MOTIVATION

The greatest violence is the mediocrity of routine.

WHERE DO WE LOOK
TO SEE WHAT EDUCATION CAN BECOME?

2015 The Schoolification of the World.
Attract people through the Arts to bring people to learning.

Department of Education REDESIGN
DIY Movement

Piotr Czerski's manifesto, "We, the Web Kids," originally appeared in a Polish daily newspaper, and has been translated to English.

Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun 'we', as our 'we' is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say 'we', it means 'many of us' or 'some of us'. When I say 'we are', it means 'we often are'. I say 'we' only so as to be able to talk about us at all.

1. We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not 'surf' and the internet to us is not a 'place' or 'virtual space'. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of 'Estonia', or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.
To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it. Full text


Hello.
I'm a tweener. People try to shoehorn me into the baby boom, but I'm between Buffalo Springfield and Nirvana. I'm the prototype for all you "Web Kids." We were the shock troops for the BBS and Usenet. We're the ones the greybeards who invented all this Internet shit trained. We're the ones you go to when it breaks, and we fix it and make it better.
We got busted hacking and phreaking first, before your LOIC was even written.
We grok ARP, ICMP, FTP, GRE, RIP, HTTP
1.0 and understand bandwidth delay product implications like the Web Kids never will, and never got ribbons for participation. Well, maybe "War Games" was our ribbon, but it was too fantastic....
So, Web Kids, get fsck'ng over yourselves. Grow a bullshit detector (hint--if you think any hits for that string on the first page of Google results is correct, you probably don't have an adequate one) and get out there and DO SOMETHING. Quit Occupying, opining, and whining and DO SOMETHING. Make your country a better and fairer place to live. Yes, you'll have to get involved in the rough and tumble of politics, make enemies, and split friendships. Life sometimes hurts more than unfriending.
Note: If you are a resident of an "Arab Spring" country and are or have actively been involved in protests, demonstrations, or revolutions you have fsck'ng DONE SOMETHING and I sincerely hope you find your way through the chaos to peace and prosperity. ~"CB"

Brain Spaces - the link between learning & the physical environment. Amy Yurko The Wonder of Wonder


Most famous college dropout billionaires
DIYers are building their own versions of schools, in the form of summer camps, workshops, clubs, and Web sites. Tinkering School in Northern California helps kids build go-karts, watchtowers, and hang gliders (that the kids fly in). Competitions like FIRST Robotics (founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen) bring children and engineers together to design and build sophisticated robotics. Unschooler parents are letting their kids design their own curricula. Hacker spaces like NYC Resistor in Brooklyn and Crash Space in Los Angeles offer shop tools and workshops for making anything from iPad cases to jet packs.
When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things can't be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them. As our public educational institutions continue down this grim road, they'll lose value as places of learning.

Robot Teachers: A new research effort outlines new ways in which humanoids could actually be used to instruct our little ones. At the core of the project is imitation; humans, especially young ones, learn a multitude of mannerisms and such by simply watching others. Thus, it stands to reason that robots are "well-suited to imitate us, learn from us, socialize with us and eventually teach us." Already, these social bots are being used on an experimental basis to teach various skills to preschool children, "including the names of colors, new vocabulary words and simple songs." Just think -- in 2071, those harmless lessons will morph into studies of subterfuge, insurrection and rapacity.

WE REMEMBER

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear

70% of what we discuss with others

80% of what we personally experience

95% of what we teach others

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do.
Chimps Don't.
- NYT Essay By CARL ZIMMER

[ ... Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.]
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "]
Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children.
But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting. Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she over imitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.

"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do over imitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.

If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate. Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said. We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."]


In A Disaster

Learn Morse Code In a Disaster (Think 9-11) Why aren't Public Schools able to communicate with Morse Code?

With Gmail Tap on your phone, you'll be able to:

  • Tap without looking at your screen
  • Replace 26 keys with 2
  • Double your productivity by typing two emails at once

Google has improved the QWERTY keyboard with Morse Code

 

Radio Waves: Crystal Radio, Learn to Be a Ham Radio operator Become a Lifeguard And Guard our Airwaves YOU can save lives

https://web.archive.org/web/20151107144154/http://www.darkreading.com/government/states-cyber-security-readiness-presents--grim-picture--pell-study-finds/d/d-id/1323042

Mubarak's approach to shutting down the Internet vs. Morse code. Morse code rules!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20110130/cm_huffpost/815889

K12 Education Redesign

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