With some excitement, I’ve got a new project to work on called Learning In Depth, badged as LIDKIDS University. It’s not new, and I certainly didn’t create it. However, if you are familiar with Professor Kieran Egan or his work on ‘imaginative’ education, then you may have heard of this project in Canada. This very much aligns with the work we’ve been trying to do in Massively Minecraft in many ways.
There is a lot to admire in Professor Egan’s ideas for eduction. I find a lot of what he says in his books and research to be demonstratably true in computer and video games, though he himself isn’t a ludologist, nor advocating in games based learning. This then is largly how I discoverd him, though his work in imagination, and I hope we will be able to add some game-like experiences to the established work.
LID Kids is an evidence based project which will be adapted and ported to Australia with a few new twists and turns. The program itself is free, as will be the various online tools and resources to impliment and support it.
The Learning in Depth (LiD) project was begun in 2008. Within a very short time LiD stimulated interest in many countries, and implementation programs began almost immediately. The aim is to prepare resources that can help teachers, administrators, schools, and parents better implement the program, and also to give workshops and talks about the values and principles of LiD and practical methods for best implementing it.
It suits my ‘separatist’ belief that integrating ICT has had (and will continue to have) questionable impacts on improving student learning so far, and arguably a detrimental impact on imagination and expertise due rigid-governance and often in-group popularist notions of the role technology should play.
In this video, he discusses one of his approaches to learning, which are embodied in the LID Kids project by way of an introduction
If this sounds interesting, I also recommend reading this short piece by a teacher in Canada, Emily Lid in which she discusses the project within the academic frame of learning and teaching.
Comments are always welcome.