scoto's blog

The New York Times Magazine for September 19 has a lengthy article about New York City’s Quest to Learn school, an experimental public secondary school that organizes learning around games and other 21st century literacies. The school was founded by our colleague Katie Salen of the New School’s Parson School of Design. (Katie is one of the co-authors of the Ed Arcade’s Moving Learning Games Forward, available here.)

The headline in the January 12th New York Times read, At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard. The article described how introductory physics lectures have been replaced by the TEAL (Technology-Enhanced Active Learning) program, in which students work in clusters around workstations in a lab setting, engaged in hands-on, interactive collaboration. The story—which reports that TEAL has resulted in higher attendance and lower failure rates among students—must have hit a responsive chord, as it remained one of the Times most e-mailed articles for a week.

The appearance of a story on Ted Castranova's Arden: The World of William Shakespeare in last month's issue of WIRED began a discussion around The Education Arcade about academia's role in game creation and specifically in creating educational games (since that's what we do). This post by Ed. Arcade Creative Director Scot Osterweil continues a series of posts we'll run on the topic. We hope to begin a discussion in the educational game community about their best practices, so please comment with links to some of your own thoughts and best practices!