melanie mcbride.net

Every day I read the tweets of fellow educators it’s clear that the battle for technology adoption is still going strong. It’s also clear that endless panics – moral and otherwise – are a part of the problem. Just today, wired educator and author Will Richardson described the challenge of teaching critical (technological) literacies without [...]

In my ongoing quest to locate the pedagogical value of games (via game play, research and dialogue), I have come across an interesting example of situated learning in WoW: The random dungeon, or “PUG.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is an excellent and educator friendly overview. “A PUG is a “pick-up-group,” [...]

After close to ten years of watching my other half blast his way through massively multiplayer worlds (MMOs), I decided this was just too big a phenomena for me to avoid. Not only that, but I felt I couldn’t really continue to call myself a “gamer” if I hadn’t played an MMO – let alone [...]

Last week, one of my media course (ed PD) classmates talked about the ongoing struggle to help students make sense of the flood of information online. She cited a negative experience with wikipedia, which resulted in an energetic exchange about the merits (and challenges) with open online content. It’s not about “authority” nor should it [...]

As a media producer, educator and outspoken advocate of emergent media pedagogy (social and participatory media, Remix culture, Open Source publishing and production, Creative Commons open licensing and citizen media in all forms), I’m delighted to announce the launch of my (full disclosure) partner, author, Liam O’Donnell‘s newest graphic novel, Media Meltdown. While I am [...]

For months, I’ve been trying to connect my wired educator network with ideas from critical pedagogy while looking to traditional academics (specialising in critical pedagogy, social justice and anti-oppression education) to share the key questions that might inform a meaningful assessment of web2.0 tools in relation to social justice, equity and diversity. Here are a [...]

TED: Larry Lessig – How Creativity is being strangled by the law Scaffolding 101 I’ve been talking a lot lately at conferences and consultations about the idea of “scaffolding” content. Scaffolding isn’t new. It’s teacher talk for supporting a resource or learning objective with various structures such as: questioning sequences, introductory discussion, activities or some [...]

Mozilla/Creative Commons Open Education Course – Seminar 1 View more presentations from philipp. These are the slides from our first session of the Mozilla Open Education course. As you can see, this is a truly inspired project that combines big picture vision (open education as a movement) with practical outcomes (using Mozilla/CC to create applied [...]