Friday, February 8, 2013

Thoughts after watching “a day made of glass” and the “Microsoft Productivity future vision” pieces.


Thoughts after watching “a day made of glass” and the “Microsoft Productivity future vision” pieces.

Education is about building internalized models of reality. These models are then used to inform our actions with respect to possible futures.

In the corning model, a model of light mixing was played with in a very high tech way on a light table. This example was presumably chosen as content which would be immediately clear when you saw it on the video clip.  The learning involved a group collaborating to explore a cool educational artefact. As a model of collaborative and group education it was a nice example.  The park scene showing the dinosaurs was another easy pick up with its reference to the movie Jurassic park.  

The Microsoft educational vision was weaker. Although the whole tone of the video was corporate, the educational segment showed drill and kill math teaching with 20 year old graphics of a Bear.  The use of high tech to avoid the effort of opening the fridge door… How cool/pointless was that?

Education is a conversation. It is a communication. It is articulated structured and may contain Satori moments, but at the end of the day it’s a two way flow of information.  The corning vision showed an enriched channel with more interactions going in more directions.

My vote Corning: +1, Microsoft: try again.

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