Innovation for Education

Honeygrow Using Virtual Reality to Train Employees

Once again a friend passed along an article that's relevant to my study of education tech. This time it's from Wired Magazine.  Pippa Biddle looks into WolframAlpha , an AI system that can complete complex math calculations, and show its work. Some see it as a way to cheat, and others see its power to transform the way we think about math education. Once again, I put the issue in front of my brother. He's just graduated magna cum laude from Robert Morris University with a degree in biology, and he's headed to Ohio State for graduate work. I asked him what he thinks of tools like WolframAlpha, and he did not fail to provide more thought-fodder on the matter: Zack, I can see how some people think this is cheating but i agree that it's probably more of a useful tool. There will always be students who plug their problems into it, copy down the answers, and don't learn anything from it. But I've been in this situation before - having problems I don't

Ladies and gentlemen, I normally don't paste personal correspondence into my blog, but this week my younger brother sent me something very thought provoking. It's an article by Patrick Lee from the A.V. Club. My brother Ben is ten years younger than me, born in 1995, an avid gamer, and about to begin medical school. Please read the original article he sent me  here , and then feel free to read our email exchange below. I realize that my response to him does delve into quite political territory, and my own leanings will be plain as day. But apart from the politics, I think the crux of the matter - Lee's observation about the shift in the content of new video games - is very interesting, Here are the two supporting articles I link to in my email: Lazy Millennials Won't Buy Cereal Obama: "You didn't build that without help"

In her book Alone Together , Sherry Turkle explores the effects robots have on our humanity. When we accept robots into our lives, we begin to trust them to keep watch over our property and to satisfy our desires. They become something more than simple machines; they transcend gears and circuitry and become family members, confidants and even friends. I feel I've been steeped in this robot topic for the last several weeks. I recently rewatched the movie Bladerunner.  I let a coworker know I'd read Turkle's book, and he clipped an article about robot waiters . I might be experiencing the frequency illusion , but it seems like robots are popping up everywhere, most recently in an episode of one of my favorite podcasts Hidden Brain . Hidden Brain  is a thirty minute weekly podcast that features interviews with scientists and experts who seek to understand the world through science. This episode, called " Could You Kill a Robot ?" is a thought-provoking dive int

My organization, the entity that runs the National Museum of the U.S. Army, falls under the leadership umbrella of the department that manages Army installations and the resources they offer to soldiers and their families. About once a quarter, Army administrative departments get together in "town halls" to discuss the current initiatives. They talk about the current green projects that the Army is working on at various bases around the world. In a recent town hall, a high ranking civilian Army leader mentioned some of the initiatives involving "serious games" . Most in the audience were old career Army folks, so an explanation of "serious games" was needed. As she toggled through her Powerpoint slides, some of my coworkers scoffed; they're stuck on the  the old school belief that games are mere entertainment. I know better, so I smiled to myself. I wanted to stand up and shout out that games are transforming the way we learn! This innovation isn't

A colleague of mine likes to give me clippings from the newspaper he reads on his commute by train. Almost every morning I come in to some snippet left on my desk. This colleague is an older gentleman, an Army historian and curator, and loves to share his wonder and amazement at the ways technology is changing our ways and habits. Today's snippet was from the Washington Post's Weekend Express  and included this photo of a robot waitress serving food in a restaurant in Pakistan. When I read the caption I instantly thought of Sherry Turkle and the countless pages she devotes to discussing robots in Alone Together. Turkle wouldn't be surprised at all to find that robots are serving pizza. This might seem incredibly futuristic, but it's really only the hilt of the technological sword. We see this as new only because our exposure to this kind of robotic service is still germinating in the United States. One can order a sandwich with an iPad in the U.S., but robots already ru

Images and video on social media can be used to persuade - big time. If you don't believe me, consider the Tilapia scare memes circulating on Facebook. This is just the sort of image that I usually scroll right past on my way to other more "important" braingum - recent travel posts from friends, pictures of college friends' babies who aren't very cute, posts about players who were traded from my favorite sports team. I stopped and read this meme, though, because a family member posted it, and commenters were running amok. When I saw a family member post this, I felt compelled to read the comments. People were reading and reacting to the meme and treating it as fact. This surprised me, because I considered it a pretty poor photoshop job that seemed to contain some pretty dubious, unsupported claims. I felt an itch I just had to scratch. My critical evaluative reflex kicked in, and I decided to enter the conversation. I advised the original poster

Children train, feed and play with virtual pets. They enjoy bedtime stories read to them by robotic teddy bears. They feel guilt when they neglect to take care of their machine friends, when one of them dies. These fanciful snapshots are not from some science fiction movie, they’re typical scenes from the late 1980s and early 90s. Anyone who ever played with a Furby, nursed a Tamagotchi or owned a Speak and Spell or a Teddy Ruxpin will recognize these scenarios. These unsophisticated forms of artificial intelligence were welcomed into the homes of countless families over twenty years ago. In the tech world, of course, the 1980s and 90s are ages ago, and artificial intelligence has come a long way. A future with indistinguishably lifelike robots, like the replicants of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is closer than one might think. Robots that were once bedtime buddies are now so much more - they’re caretakers, household servants, companions, therapists and even sex partners.

As I wrote in my review of Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together , the author’s primary concern is what technology is doing to us. The tone of her book is ultimately one of concern. She feels that these days, although we do decide how and what role technology will play in our lives, more often we allow it to influence our routines, impulses and emotions, often more than we realize. As Turkle notes, “We don’t need to keep computers busy; they keep us busy” (279). She describes the gamers who are so addicted to play that they stay home from work to play a newly released title. She talks to folks who acknowledge the Pavlovian effect that an email notification has on them, but are powerless or unwilling to change it. The video and photo tools available through social media allow us to share and connect with people worlds away. They enable us to know what friends are doing miles away - down to the most minute details. Every day we’re fed scrolling updates of what friends ate for brunch,

Greetings! Welcome to  A Community of Practice , an education blog created to share ideas, research, and practices for creating community in digital learning. For those of you who I’ve not met yet, my name is Zack Cyphers. I am an education and technology specialist at the National Museum of the US Army. Everyone always asks, “where is that?” I’ll explain:  The Army is the only branch of the military without a national museum, and when construction is finished in 2019, the Army’s art and artifact collections will move into a beautiful new facility on Fort Belvoir in Virginia (down the road from Mount Vernon). Right now I’m helping to write and produce education programs, games, videos, tours, guides, and interactives, so that visitors will have some great experiences when the museum opens. I studied film and media arts at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I taught documentary filmmaking to high school kids in a “second chance” diploma recovery program. My students shot a

Spring Semester 2017 - EDIT 782/783 - Week 1 My Wordle This week's requirement was to read several texts about literacy and to distill keywords into a " Wordle " word cloud. My Wordle looks like this: The most prominently featured words in this word cloud are "digital", "literacy", "reading" and "writing". When I compiled my notes and keywords into this cloud, I was pleased to see that "digital" and "literacy" came up most prominently. I think these tow words lie at the core of what 21st Century students need. Modern literacy includes the ability to read and write, as in past generations, but differs in that it includes many more new forms of fluency. Teachers often complain that their students do not read. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students today are reading an enormous amount, but in ways that differ from their parents and grandparents. Students may learn from what they read in their a