Bernadine Joselyn flagged last week’s New York Times Magazine for me – Learning by Playing was the theme. It’s all about how technology has, can have, maybe should have an impact on learning. It’s great reading for anyone interested in technology or education. They don’t mention broadband by name – and not all technologies require broadband – but broadband certainly opens a lot more doors.

I’m tempted to go on and on about what I thought about the various articles – but I suspect for most readers, I’ll be preaching to the choir. So I will say – if you’re interested in technology or education – check it out! The article paints a compelling case for using games and the Internet in education. It engages students and gives them 21st century skills. And I’m not just talking about fast texting fingers – but ability to work within, design, build and fix a system.

Here are some of my other quick highlights:

• With games it’s OK to fail. Failure urges you to try again. In education failure is disastrous. Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook Founder who recently gave $100 million to schools in Newark) talked on Oprah about how Facebook is based on lots of failures and a few wild successes. We need that enthusiasm for progress. I often hear people say – keep the bar low and celebrate victory. I loved the idea of make it hard and try until you get to the next level. That leads to progress.
• “Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.” School books have tried to do this for as long as I can remember with Chapter Questions – just imagine if those self-tests were interactive quizzes. And that’s a weak example of drawing kids in.
• Looking for an excuse to get your kid a phone? Dial-a-Class is an article that will give you a couple academic examples of mobile use.
• There’s a pen that records class at you take notes. I could use that at the Broadband Task Force meetings! Here’s a description…

The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.…
If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.

• One father wrote about home schooling his son…

The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be.

Random observations – but that’s because technology and education is such a big topic. For a number of years I think we’ve been looking at how today’s technology can help us teach yesterday’s classes. It’s great to also see how today’s classroom is being altered to meet the needs, advantages and challenges of today (and hopefully tomorrow’s) technology.