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Key Events and People Driving the American Revolution
This short piece fills in the gaps tradition education, even when it teaches the founding of the American Republic, leaves out the buildup to the revolution. It is important because the revolution is based on the cultural and philosophical concepts in these events. A country that does not draw upon these concepts and culture may have a great deal of trouble forming a democracy out of whole cloth, as I discussed in Democracy: Is the US Defining the Right Target for National Security? The American War for Independence is often called the Revolutionary War. Strictly speaking, this is a misnomer. The war was technically a civil war. The revolution was…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 8: Path Dependency and Punctuated Equilibriums in Scenario Design
Part 7, in the cognitive load portion of Learning Objectives (LO) discussed stretch learning in the form of the germane cognitive load. Effective germane cognitive loads built into LOs drives learning. Not to delve too deeply into neuroscience, but simplistically,…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 7: Learning Objectives
Part 6 of this series noted the Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) was the driver for the serious game’s car. If that is the case, Learning Objectives (LO) are the roadmap the driver uses to navigate. The figure shows how we effectively…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 6: Scenario-Based Learning
“Scenario-based learning (SBL) is an immersive training environment where learners meet realistic work challenges and get realistic feedback as they progress, since everything that happens reflects the learner’s choices. Unlike many e-courses, where learners passively absorb information by reading a…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 5: The Keystone and Serious Games
I discussed the Keystone concept in Part 4 of this series and developed it in more detail in the Breaking Silos post. The Keystone concept is vital to redesigning education to meet the demands of a complex, challenging, and…
Breaking down educational silos: Using serious games in education to engage in critical thinking and integrated skills in a comprehensive approach to problem solving.
“Designers and developers of instruction targeted at deeper learning and development of transferable 21st century competencies should begin with clearly delineated learning goals and a model of how learning is expected to develop, along with assessments to measure student progress…
Capitalism Sows the Seeds of its Own Destruction?
Karl Marx, as opposed to Joseph Stalin, was not, I suspect, a bad guy. Marxism is essentially a utopian ideology. But utopian societies rarely work, as they often fail to take human nature into account. As a utopian, Marx saw…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 4: Education Framework
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana I developed this framework during Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series and work I did earlier on serious games. If government funds…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 3
Part 2 of this series looked at a preliminary assessment of the Department of Education (ED). Table 1 shows the mission and preliminary assessment of key tasks below. Nearly half of the key tasks related to ED programs. Yet there…
Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 2
“What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the 1930 article, “Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education,” in Pictorial Review. Part 1 asked,…
Educating Sheep Versus Citizens: Part 1
This blog series will develop a conceptual framework to assess how effectively schools prepare graduates for their responsibilities as citizens in a free republic. This first part will look at an overall framework that compares educating sheep versus educating…
