Some Serious Games...

I have been gathering a collection of simulations and serious games.  Just click on any of the tags below for examples of Serious Games on that subject:

Biology Bullying Business leadership Career Casual games Citizenship City Management  Civics Civilization Compliance Cyber Cyber Security Engineering Entrepreneurship Environment Ethics Healthcare Healthy lifestyle High school math High school science High school STEM History Law Enforcement Leadership Learn to be Marketing Math Middle school math Middle school science Military Military mental health  Negotiations OpEdPolitics Pricing Primary math Project management Safety Sales Science Small businessSTEM Urban Planning US Government US History

The Implications of Unschooling Rules

I was asked in an interview the other day to summarize what the key implications of Unschooling Rules are. Here they are, by group:

• For families of children in schools: You do have a choice. Traditional school may be the best option, but understand several alternative options anyway. It will make you stronger. Further, traditional schools do a lot of things horribly. They are businesses and, no matter what they say or imply, do not love your children nor are they committed to their long term success. They have scalable processes not answers. You need to budget as much time for compensating for schools as supporting their programs.

• For families of home- and unschooled children: Treat childhood as you treat adulthood. There are no single answers or paths. Your family members are education entrepreneurs. There are some rules, but not that many. The future belongs to the creative working.

• For teachers and schools administrators: You are stuck in a broken monopoly. It is not your fault. You are given an impossible task. Still, you are powerful. Think of your job as protecting the authentic education journey of each child from the system and pressures around them. And look for other jobs, again for back-up. You cannot be effective if you believe you have no career choices.

• For policy makers: Embrace and encourage real alternatives to school as much as possible. De-emphasize test scores and other standardization attempts. Think of home- and unschoolers as a fifteen year research and development experiment. Be prepared, over time, to try to make institutional schools more like homeschooling, not the other way around. Here are two thought games. First, what would you do if half of what schools taught was useless? Second, what if you had to cut the budget for schools in half?

• For foundations and think tanks: Those who have tried, through brilliant arguments and generous donations, to improve schools over the last thirty years have suffered epic failures. If you want to have been influential in improving schools two decades from now, put every last dime and neuron into supporting and enabling home- and unschoolers today. Think of how often you have thought "If only schools could..." Well, home- and unschoolers can.

Isaac Asimov on Personalized Learning

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“In the old days, very few people could read and write. Literacy was a very novel sort of thing, and it was felt that most people just didn’t have it in them. But with mass education, it turned out that most people could be taught to read and write. In the same way, once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries, where you can ask any question and be given answers, you can look up something you’re interested in knowing, however silly it might seem to someone else.

Today, what people call learning is forced on you. Everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class. But everyone is different. For some, class goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wrong direction. But give everyone a chance, in addition to school, to follow up their own bent from the start, to find out about whatever they’re interested in by looking it up in their own homes, at their own speed, in their own time, and everyone will enjoy learning.”

- Isaac Asimov, Bill Moyer Interview, 1988

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Unschooling Rules 33: In education, customization is important like air is important.

• Mass Customization in Education? http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/02/21/mass-customized-learning-the-key-to-education-reform/
• The Daily Pennsylvanian: Redefining the college diploma:  http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2012/02/students_pursue_individualized_majors
• Deeper Dive: Education is Individualistic

Six Wrong Arguments for Growing School Budgets

Here are six arguments that school budget advocates just can't resist to raise money, but that we should:

• Use case studies from disadvantaged schools as an excuse to expand school's reach everywhere. (i.e. "Pre-K is great for children in the poorest neighborhoods, so all communities everywhere should spend on Pre-K.")

• Use "getting into college" (or grad school, or Ph.D. program) as self-evident proof of earlier success. The number of new graduates who are unemployed and 200,000 dollars in debt are a success only of the school industry not society.

• Use "falling behind" grade level and the vague threat of "never catching up" as an excuse to implement any program. "Grade levels" are arbitrary sets of internal standards that inevitably and erroneously assume that students are the same. Different students have different strengths and weaknesses by subject. The clustering of Math + English + Science into rigid and lock-stepped "grade levels" is a weakness of school programs, not an opportunity for more extra hours.
  
  At the very least, schools grade on curves. 30% of the students will always be in the bottom 30%. If the bottom 30% of school children trigger automatic special help (because they are in the bottom 30%), schools have an infinite cash feedback loop.

• Use test scores as broad proof of success. Tests measure a very finite set of skills. Anything extrapolation, specifically as a justification for school expansion, should be treated with suspicion. And then there is the paradox of: Test scores up? Spend more to replicate the program! Test scores down? Spend more to get them up!

• Assume academic success as currently delivered by today's schools is a driver for economic success. Any statement from school lobbyists that falls into the broad camp of, "In order to be competitive in the global marketplace, we must give schools more power to..." is unsubstantiated. These statements are not backed up by our experience over the last few decades (there are no measured correlations between economic good times and previously enacted school programs), nor by highly responsive research between the new economic realities of the last few years with the new academic programs of the last few years (as this research not only doesn't exist but almost inevitably can't exist.) So at the very least, one can measure the intellectual dishonesty of education industry spokespeople by the forcefulness by which they make these claims.

• Demand that childrens' experiences be 'fair' and standardized. Children have different starting conditions, home environments, and competencies. But factories and places where measurements are heavily used strive for consistent inputs. So when schools argue for activities that make "students equal" and everything "fair" (so that they can subsequently and aggressively sort and judge them against their own internal criteria), this means disintermediating parents and growing schools, inevitably fighting against authentic experiences open to students (such as family trips), and increasing their own budgets to pretend to replace what has been stripped away.

Our nation needs both broad competencies, and a diversity of world-class specialized talents which comes from passion, depth, and rigor across generations. The services that schools are structured to offer are able to help with this some of the time and for some people. But we all have to be smart, active consumers of education services seeking out the best options between real choices and working to unbundle offerings, and not just Soviet-style heterotrophs, consuming whatever our bureaucracies decide to paternalistically feed us for our so-called collective good.

My point of this piece is not that education budgets should be slashed or should be expanded. My point is that if we use the wrong arguments for growing school budgets, we will spend more and get less. And that hurts everyone.

Dr. Jack King's list of 13 influential books that can change the world.

Dr. Jack King posted a list of '13 influential books that can change the world.'

13. Anyway by Kent Keith

12. Good to Great by Jim Collins

11. Strategic Intuition by William Duggan

10. They Smell Like Sheep by Lynn Anderson

9. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership by Donald Phillips

8. Unschooling Rules by Clark Aldrich

7. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

6. The Go-Giver by Bob Burg & John David Mann

5. Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

4. Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr

3. William Wilberforce by William Hague

2. Make Gentle the Life of this World by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

1. The Servant by James Hunter

Math Sims and Games at ClarkChart

I have been launching www.clarkchart.com, a comprehensive database of simulations and serious games, now in beta.  The database should grown significantly over the next few months.

Some collections worth exploring:

• Math:  http://www.clarkchart.com/subject/math-stem/.  
• Cyber security: http://www.clarkchart.com/subject/cyber/
• Free: http://www.clarkchart.com/prices/free/
• OpEd (Games for Social Good): http://www.clarkchart.com/subject/oped/

Please feel free to leave comments if you have experiences with any of those listed, and also suggest new ones.

Four Articles

Today, my fourth article for the British magazine Inside Learning Technologies & Skills came out.

The three so far were (and click on title to download pdf):

• Why Educational Simulations? Designs to Develop Competence Plus Conviction: This outlines the most important reasons for pursuing simulations and serious games, and some some design frameworks to make these programs accomplish their lofty goal.  Developing conviction in all students will be one of the most meaningful opportunities of the next decade for universities, corporations, and other organizations.

• How Would Steve Jobs Do Training and Education?: My most important article, this outlines my research agenda for the next five years to create a unified framework for all education and learning.  Part three, the new old education, changes everything.

• L&D Life Through a Lens: A broad look at the multiple perspectives through which to evaluate techniques and opportunities for any formal learning organization.  This is probably the weakest developed of the four (although I still like it quite a bit!).  

To these, I now add:

• Simple But Effective Branching Story Techniques: This is a "small" piece on simple techniques to make branching stories more effective and interesting.  I love good design, and will continue to geek out over the minutia.

I am proud of my run, and thank both Inside Learning Technologies & Skills and its readers for the positive reaction.  I have also highlighted the most important passages in each.

Finally, for those looking for some easy, fast reading, may I suggest my newest book, available at Amazon: