Extreme Accessibility - How to save lives with eLearning

Far from the typical audience of corporate or university eLearning, Thare Machi Education designs lessons on topics like human trafficking and cholera for learners who are extremely poor, mostly illiterate, totally unfamiliar with technology and speak hundreds of different languages.  How's that for a brief?



Thare Machi Education makes very simple life-changing and life-saving messages  

Read More

Graceful interface scaffolding - Learning from Letter School

Letter School, an app by Dutch game maker, Boreaal, is one of the several apps on the market created to leverage touch-screen advantages for supporting preschoolers in learning to make letter shapes.  Like the others, kids use their finger to trace and write letters of the alphabet.  



The animations and sounds in Letter School are delightful, but what I found especially notable was the

Read More

On Memory and the Life of Maps

There are so many childhood objects that leave indelible marks as one grows up, from the microscope that gives you a secret window into invisible worlds, to the medical kit which made you a superhero with the power to fix people.  In his articles, The gears from my childhood, renowned MIT professor and educational technologist, Seymour Papert, explains how playing with and loving gears gave him a

Read More

Paper still the cutting edge

Amid the carnival of EdTech excitement you'd be forgiven for forgetting that our digital technologies are still just tools, added to a bag of tricks that has accumulated over millenia.  Sure, there are some tools we'll probably never go back to (punch cards? slide rules?) but then there are the work horses that have survived for a reason, like pencil and paper.

Educational interface design

Read More

10-year Survey of Online Education

A new report by the Babson Group and the College Board has tracked ten years of online education in the United States revealing that over a third of higher education students now take at least one of their courses online.  Most staff view MOOCs as more of a way to learn about online pedagogy than as a sustainable long-term mode of operation, and although online education is growing, higher

Read More

ELearning for Healthy Minds

A growing number of learning programs dedicated to psychological wellbeing are finding their way into schools and workplaces across the globe.  This is probably due, in part, to the concern over technology-induced stress and mounting scientific support for the value of practices like mindfulness and meditation.

This new type of education has begun to manifest digitally in the form of mobile

Read More

Caution: Color, culture and convention

As designers of learning experiences, we know that color can have a powerful impact on learning. It can improve recall, understanding and appeal when used well. But it's easy to forget how culturally embedded color meanings are.  Americans, for example, can forget green is only the color of money in the US. While red indicates debt and downturns in the financial world, it's prosperity in

Read More