floating worlds

tonight i'm heading to sydney for an education workshop as part of the geek program. i've been doing a bit of research and in talking to phip, who also works with NGV, i found out about the sa-hu-pa-her cool gaming technology art education program, floating world.

here's a bit more info from the CAN blog, including the notes/ning by some of the teachers.

what jumped out at me first? "we put it up on the CLASS WIKI!!" (my emphasis). oh my god - i got so excited!

i think wikis are the bestest thing in the world, but i've only had a few really awesome experiences with using them. some people just don't get how they'll work. and perhaps email keeps people from really utilising them to their potential.


the interesting south crew used wetpaint really well, as did the candystripers for a couple of our projects so far. the website development part of geek program i'm doing here at west space is using basecamp, which is going well-enough, thanks to RSS and email capabilities, but could also be used a little more by peeps.

i've tried to get a few other groups using them, without success. and maybe its the interface, rather than the concept. or maybe i'm just not so good at convincing people :D

but the grade 5 kids from sydenham primary school have got a class wiki!! as the teacher said in her ning post - it meant that they could upload the links at school at the end of the day and then go home and be able to show parents what they had done for the day. and if they felt confident working on it at home, they could!

go team!





and it is the team aspect of this floating worlds project that i love the most - it just crosses a whole bunch of important learning outcomes: they're learning basic multimedia tools/techniques, they're using historical art as their source material (and they learn about the context for that art), creating stories and understanding narrative/dialogue, they translated the stories into japanese in their japanese class - excellent comprehension activity (not to mention ramming it home that technology is not just in english), plus they create the works in pairs and share the info with the class. this helps them also work problems out amongst the team and then wider to the class - information sharing and exchange 101.

no wonder it has been given the thumbs up by the New Media Consortium!

i'm excited again..

images from ngv.vic.gov.au