Teaching and Learning

There are lots of inquiry models out there, and a lot of them require you to follow a step by step process from finding a question, researching that question, and then spitting out a presentation showing what you've learnt. 'Doing' research isn't that straight forward though, we know that simply from our own lives. Example. I was at the Louvre in Paris today, and being artistically and historically incompetent, I was looking at all the statues and thinking "how did they make those? What tools did they use? How long did they practice?" But the overwhelming urge for me was just to have a go at doing one. Just to have a go... Then I might do some research on better ways to do it... and then I might have another go... Then I might show someone, do some more research and maybe have another go. Some models try to cover for this kind of fluidity of research projects, and as they do, get extremely complex and confusing for both adults and students. In fact, people wor...

When I was younger, I played a lot of computer games.  Most of my days would go like this; struggle out of bed at 8am, get dropped off at school, go through the motions of school until 3:30pm, walk home as fast as I could, go on the computer, eat dinner, go back on the computer, go to bed. My dad used to say to me things like: "you're wasting your life" "get outside and enjoy the weather" "go and hang out with some real people" "you'll regret wasting all these years later in your life!" I think Dad eventually moved on from these things, whether he saw the benefit of games, or just gave up hope I can't be sure. All those years of playing computer, if they didn't give me anything else, gave me a interesting insight into teaching and learning... Runescape is a MMORPG - a massively multiplayer online role playing game - which started in 2001, which was when I started playing it. Runescape was an interesting, ground breaking game becau...