Difference between revisions of "Education/Intro"

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How can we help people to become more educated? It seems quite simple {{em}} by making learning truly interesting and relevant to the individual and making proper use of modern media. A one size-fits-all curriculum only benefits the schools and assessment bodies, and not particularly the children.
 
How can we help people to become more educated? It seems quite simple {{em}} by making learning truly interesting and relevant to the individual and making proper use of modern media. A one size-fits-all curriculum only benefits the schools and assessment bodies, and not particularly the children.
  
It is a crime for education not to be interesting. Luckily for every module of every subject there are educators (and others) who are truly gifted at explaining those concepts to other people, for example [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan Carl Sagan] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough David Attenborough] - although of course there are plenty more who are not well known. So it makes sense to distribute this material as widely as possible; one obvious way might be record video footage of these people and make it openly available on the internet, which today is a trivial and cheap task. Of course there would be plenty of people, both material distributors and educators, who might want to do this on a commercial basis, but for the benefit of those learning, this is not the ideal model - it is vital that this material is freely available. Once this free repository contains some great material, it should encourage others to follow suit. Great respect will be given to those that do contribute good material and it is likely that reputation will be the driving factor for quality.
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Interactive educational media could be highly engaging, but there is remarkably little high quality material available. It usually focuses too much on entertainment without much educational content, or it badly produced and not particularly engaging. Luckily it is becoming ever easier to create interactive 3D computer generated environments such as those found in advanced computer games and with the right scripting engine, making a captivating experience where the child (or adult) hardly realises they are learning.  
  
It cannot be expected, at least initially, for the educators to do this spontaneously, there needs to be a concerted effort to target inspirational individuals and record their material. Anyone would be free to submit material too and as there
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It is a crime for education not to be interesting. Luckily for every module of every subject there are educators (and others) who are truly gifted at explaining those concepts to other people, and their material could be made feely available over the internet.
 
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There would likely be plenty of bad material, but the good stuff will bubble it way up to the top.
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Teachers can then use this resource to help them introduce new subjects.
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There are teachers and educators for every module of every subject
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Making the material of the most interesting educators available to anyone. Video and interactive material. Many teachers become learning managers, making sure the students understand what is being explained, supervising experiments etc.
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What is being explained must be made relevant to the person consuming it. Subjects should be linked together rather than artificially partitioned.
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The importance of understanding other other people. Understanding other cultures, Empathy etc. <unfinished>
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Revision as of 17:52, 18 November 2006

School.jpg

Ignorance is a great source of our problems today and education is obviously hugely important for the continued progress of society.

How can we help people to become more educated? It seems quite simple — by making learning truly interesting and relevant to the individual and making proper use of modern media. A one size-fits-all curriculum only benefits the schools and assessment bodies, and not particularly the children.

Interactive educational media could be highly engaging, but there is remarkably little high quality material available. It usually focuses too much on entertainment without much educational content, or it badly produced and not particularly engaging. Luckily it is becoming ever easier to create interactive 3D computer generated environments such as those found in advanced computer games and with the right scripting engine, making a captivating experience where the child (or adult) hardly realises they are learning.

It is a crime for education not to be interesting. Luckily for every module of every subject there are educators (and others) who are truly gifted at explaining those concepts to other people, and their material could be made feely available over the internet.

Refresh Education with updated text