EduTainment Titles

[Richmond Mathewson]

udy Perry wrote:
> Richmond,
>
> Your rant is somewhat unfair and ignores the bulk of instructional 
> design research that has taken place over the years.
Um, Yes; probably slanted too much in one direction; but mainly as a 
reaction to too much in the other.

To be fair; I gave warning, and characterised it as a 'rant' rather than 
trying to palm it off as a piece of sweet reasonableness.  :)

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Warning; Reasonableness follows.
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Also; good educational programming can be intuitive and interesting 
without becoming so 'tainment' that there
is a risk of the 'edu' getting swallowed alive.
>
> Yes -- FORCE them to do it, and make it as unintuitive and boring as 
> possible -- and some WILL still learn regardless.   The main idea 
> behind EduTainment done well is that you can give it to students and 
> have them VOLUNTARILY spend FREE TIME learning.
Force????? Not really, but I do think it is important that children 
should learn the distinction between what we might like to term
"pure learning" and "pure play"; most of my programs probably lie 
further to one end of the intervening continuum than to the
other. However I am not in the business of churning out soul-destroying 
little numbers that might come from some latter-day
Dickensian schoolroom complete with computerised caning machines (the 
"iThwackum" no doubt).

As the children I work with grow older and their level of English 
becomes better I tend to move away from the 'tainment' end
of the spectrum towards the 'edu' end; however there is always room for 
goofy pictures to keep the smiles going.

I just don't want to lose sight of the ball while I am running through 
the garden full of lovely, distracting flowers.
>
> With the other method?  goodluckwiththat.
My 13 year old has just spent a month cranking away at Maths problems 
as, tomorrow, he has a Maths exam which (along with one
in Bulgarian language and literature) will determine whether he gets 
into a good school, the bargain basement, or somewhere
in between. For that he has had to get his head down and done buckets of 
boring Maths - not what I would choose, and, Judy,
something that would probably make you blench. But it is hard to see how 
one would separate out the "good, bad and the ugly"
in any other way.

Bulgarian children, at least, see my educational programs as a breath of 
fresh air beside the stagnant, old-fashioned,
rote-learning oriented stuff that is dished out to them in state 
schools; and the sort of computer-deliverables they are
subjected to at the EFL factories just down the high street here.

As I studied instructional design principles at Abertay (even though the 
lecturer hardly ever bothered to turn up to
the lectures, and, on one "famous" occasion, suggested that 2 other 
students and myself should do the teaching as he
felt "a bit tired"), as well as looking into a fair bit of that, both 
when I was doing my MA in Carbondale, and when
trying to make visually rich programs in a University where one had to 
be jolly careful not to upset Wahabi Islamic
sensibilities, I am well aware of them; and use them.

I sincerely hope, that within a couple of weeks with the advent of the 
RR 4.0 betas I will be able to have a couple of
my programs up, embedded in webpages for everybody to have a look at.

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It will be really great fun if as many people in the, err, Edu 
........... tainment "game" could upload samples of their
stuff so that we teachers could do some jolly old compare and contrast 
exercises.

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Sorry, Judy, I had to chop off the rest of the posting as the Use-List 
bot sent me a message saying that everything was too long. R