Back to School Special

As students across the country are preparing to go back to school or have already started fall classes (as we have at Bloomsburg University),  learning and development professionals should take a few moments to think about learning, new technologies and the upcoming new generation of learners.

Here are three interesting blog posts highlighting those areas. Think of these posts as a reading assignment for your own "back to school" homework.

• Tom Haskins of growing, changing, learning, creating writes an excellent post about the gamer generation and their learning habits titled Changing Expectations from Gaming. He adeptly contrasts the learning expectations of gamers with the rigid structure of content delivery systems.
• Tony O'Driscoll's posting Games and Learning? Getting Serious! is along the same vein in discussing why MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games) are now being taken seriously as educational tools by none other than IBM.
• Mike Qaissaunee who blogs at Frequently Asked Q has an interesting post on Web 2.0 Tools we should all have in our backpack (toolkit) and points to an interested post by Josh Catone titled Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students...I would also add...for learning and development professionals.

Check out these posts and begin your own fall learning schedule. 

Karl Kapp is the Assistant Director of Bloomsburg University’s Institute for Interactive Technologies and a professor of instructional technology. See his own blog, Kapp Notes for information on the convergence of learning and technology. He is the author of the book Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning.   

Comments

[Joe Mendrzycki]

Here at Harrisburg Area Community College, we see students arriving, EXPECTING to see technology in place in the classroom. Whether it be offering enhanced or blended courses using Blackboard or supplementing learning with Podcasts, Faculty are being reminded by students that they want to have access to the technology. I've created learning content with Camtasia and posted it to our CMS, and the feedback is always positive. The opportunity to access content when and where the learner needs it is the new expectation in the learning environment.