As one gamer has said, “In a game, you want to learn because you’re playing it, and if you didn’t want to learn, why would you be playing it?” (Selfe & Hawisher, 2007, p. 1). For this very reason, games are uniquely powerful tools that help teachers understand how to build empowering lessons and shape how students…
Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand…
A roleplaying game is part improvisational theater, part storytelling, and part game. It is played by a gamemaster who runs the game and a group of players who pretend to be characters. These characters are created by the players, given a history and personality, and then further defined by a set of statistics that…
The standard DNA 'prism' is a gel electrophoresis column, that is, a long tube filled with jelly through which an electric current is passed. A solution containing the scissored stretches of DNA, all jumbled together, is poured into one end of the tube. The DNA fragments are all electrically attracted to the negative…
‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an…
First and foremost, we crave satisfying work, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts. Second, we crave the experience, or at…
Our sense of touch tells us quite definitely that one body is hot and another cold. But this is a purely quali- tative criterion, not sufficient for a quantitative descrip- tion and sometimes even ambiguous. This is shown by a well-known experiment: we have three vessels con- taining, respectively, cold, warm and hot…
[The] weakness of biological balance studies has aptly been illustrated by comparison with the working of a slot machine. A penny brings forth one package of chewing gum; two pennies bring forth two. Interpreted according to the reasoning of balance physiology, the first observation is an indication of the conversion…
When Sabrina was little, she had a vivid imagination, like most children. (She still does!) We all had a lot of fun pretending, playing games with imaginary creatures and friends. That is a healthy part of learning and growing. Rather than tell Sabrina that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus were lies, we told her that…
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid…
But we also have some more direct evidence for the idea that children learn like scientists. Alison and Virginia Slaughter, one of her students, looked at three-year-old children who didn't yet fully understand belief—children who still said they had always thought that there were pencils in the candy box. Then, over…
In the Dark Ages, the religious orders of monasteries were the bearers of our culture. Much of this knowledge was contained in books, and the monks took care of them and read them as part of their discipline. Sadly, science is no longer a calling where scientists are the guardians of knowledge, but rather has become a…
the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don