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Entries Tagged as 'edu'

A Civilized Education

August 21st, 2010 · 3 Comments

I’ll say it: I don’t think Civilization is all that educational. It’s more educational than most videogames, certainly, but that’s not saying a lot.
There are four arguments made by the pro-educational camp:
Firstly, that Civilization teaches people about technologies, cultures, buildings, leaders, and of course, civilizations, from all over the world and across the sweep of history. [...]

Tags: adrian · civilization · edu · games

Educational games from 3500 years ago

June 13th, 2010 · 5 Comments

Freeborn children [of Greece] should learn as much of these things as the vast throngs of young in Egypt do with their alphabet. First as regards arithmetic, lessons have been devised there for absolute beginners based on enjoyment and games, distributing apples and garlands so that the same numbers are divided among larger and smaller [...]

Tags: edu · games · history · science

The Unbidden

March 29th, 2010 · 3 Comments

If you’re a parent, you want the best for your children. You want them to eat healthily, to do their homework, to keep fit, and to be well-mannered. You may go a step further and carefully study nutritional information to make sure they receive the right balance of calories, protein, and vitamins. You’d hire a private [...]

Tags: adrian · edu

The Quick Rise of Reading

January 25th, 2009 · No Comments

A mere two weeks after I wrote about The Long Decline of Reading, which drew largely on the US National Endowment of Arts’ (NEA) 2007 data, the NEA promptly released a report (Reading on the Rise) showing that fiction reading rates significantly increased from 2002 to 2008. Not just for certain age groups or ethnicities, [...]

Tags: book · edu

Ernst Choukula

January 7th, 2009 · 3 Comments

There’s been some ruckus about a History class at George Mason University in which students created a hoax about an ‘Edward Owens’, the “Last American Pirate”. They made a blog, put up some YouTube videos, and most annoyingly, created an article on Wikipedia.
I find these hoaxes tiresome. We all know that it’s easy to publish [...]

Tags: arg · edu · silly

The Long Decline of Reading

December 28th, 2008 · 47 Comments

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the [...]

Tags: book · edu · future · spec · tech · web · writing

Teaching ARG Design to teenagers

April 29th, 2008 · 15 Comments

The vision: Eager teens, listening quietly and attentively as I led a discussion about alternate reality games.
The reality: Thirty seconds into my prepared spiel, there were four hands waving in the air and the kids at the back were already talking. “Oh boy,” I thought, hoping to make a quantum leap out of here, but [...]

Tags: adrian · arg · edu · games

English Literature

January 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment

At my school, all students were entered into the English Literature GCSE. What this meant was that a couple of times a week, we would take out copies of ‘English Literature’ – things like The Crucible, A Passage To India, various Shakespeare plays, poems – and take turns reading them out.
There is nothing that kills [...]

Tags: adrian · book · edu · mefi · theatre

The Videogame Straitjacket

August 25th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Like many others, when I was kid, two of the games I had the most fun with were Lego and Meccano. It would be trite to go into the reasons why, and it’s enough to say that construction kits like these offer kids a unique place to use their imagination to build anything they want, [...]

Tags: adrian · arg · edu · games

All Souls: The toughest test you’ll ever take

August 24th, 2007 · 16 Comments

If you’ve ever visited Oxford, chances are that you’ll spend some time in Radcliffe Square, admiring the University Library and the round Radcliffe Camera building. Along the east side of the the square is a long wall with a black metal gate set into it; people often poke their heads in to see an immaculate [...]

Tags: edu · oxford