Interesting idea

How can we as educators create learning spaces for our students that are engaging and meaningful? Chris Dede, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is looking into this idea. He calls this quest distributed learning. Learning that is not suspended in time or place - such as a classroom - but which is distributed throughout time and space our environment.

Two types

Muves
secondlife
RiverCity Developed by the Harvard School of Education

This idea of Learning by doing (experiences) continues

Not that Muves are not learning by doing but there is another idea. Handheld Augmented Reality. Learning is interwoven between face to face and moving through the real-world. Students use a PDA with global positioning software to move around an environment (school yard) to solve real-world problems (environmental crisis). Programmed within specific locations in this environment are experts. Students can call upon these experts (scientist, landscape artist) to gain further knowledge about a topic to help solve the problem. It is similar to playing a game but the game is based on real problems that have many solutions.

How scary for a teacher but how exciting - Scary, how do we as teachers design and create these learning environments for our students and still have time to complete the other duties that we must perform? My idea, how about using our wikis and blogs to create a container of learning objects - teachers can pull from these containers and easily use the content with their students. Each learning experience would align with national standards so any teacher can pull and utilize the learning experience with their students. Teachers could provide feedback when they are finished to build the level of knowledge and to aid in making this a smoother process. The feedback can be used to help improve the learning experiences. This would be a learning community that aids in growing meaningful experiences for our students.

Resources

Handheld Devices for Ubiquitous Learning (HDUL) project

Campus Second Life

secondlife Education