Tonight we started off by talking about a couple of books of interest:

• For The Win by Corey Doctorow – young adult fiction, set in the near future, investigating themes of power, politics, economics and poverty through the lens of gaming. Intensely absorbing, packing with learning and lots of fun.
• How Children Succeed by Paul Tough – a study of the psychology, sociology and personality of success. Strongly suggests that character is more important than IQ when it comes to success, and that character can be both taught and learned.

When you arrived last week, I was watching The Internet’s Own Boy (a tragic true story I can’t recommend highly enough). Interestingly, it’s focus (Aaron Swartz) was good friends with Corey Doctorow (author of For The Win above) and Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons, which we have been using in our work).

Moving on, we used a new learning strategy, Free Learning, pioneered at my school, with the aim of increasing student motivation, freedom, passion, choice and independence. Free Learning was inspired by, amongst other things, the video below:

To start with we used ICHK’s Free Learning materials to finish up last week’s Epic Wallpaper work, before moving on to some other units, including Web Design 101 and Sell A Teacher.

The 90 minutes rushed by..but it seemed you did not want to stop learning. Please feel free to continue with your free learning projects during the week.

No classes next week, but the following week we will move onto app design on Tuesday, and then our final session on Thursday.

Free Running thumbnail image by Alexandre Ferreira on Flickr under CC BY.