Oasis Skateboard Factory

I came across an amazing article about alternative education today. The school is called the Oasis Skateboard Factory and is located in Toronto. It promotes education through skateboarding and street art.

The curriculum as I understand it is essentially based on teaching business and entrepreneurial spirit through skateboarding and street art. It teaches kids how to create their own boards and art and how to use their skills to create their own business opportunities.

People from the community are brought in as guest lecturers to talk to the kids about starting their own businesses and how to use their skills to create their own jobs. The kids earn credits like they would in any high school except that they're actually excited about their school work which means they want to go to school and that is something generally reflected in their marks.

Here are links to both the push.ca article and the National Post article. You can also find out more about the school from their blog.

Liz Coleman's Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education

I was doing my usual TED circuit today and came across another brilliant video about education. Liz Coleman stands up for generalized education and collaboration. It is something I have found schools have had trouble doing. Although there were a few courses at OCAD that allowed for the interaction with other disciplines it wasn't until last year that you were even allowed to take courses from other disciplines without fighting tooth and nail for it. I think this is a video that should be watched and thought about carefully because it should be the future of education and perhaps other schools should start to sit up and take notice.

TED 2008 Visualization

I thought this might also be worth a look. It shows how you can get a very quick overview of an idea with a few small pictures. It also introduces some new collaborative technology which I am always a fan of.

Click here for the full book of images and links to the technologies.

Tom Wujec: 3 Ways the Brain Creates Meaning

This is a short video I thought I would share about visualization and the brain. As my research led me into both of these fields I thought it was appropriate.

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering

You'll find that there are a lot of posts about education on this website and it's because I believe in new and different ways of teaching and learning. This is a video about allowing kids to tinker to learn. He doesn't restrict the children to simple tools like safety scissors and tape and glue, he allows them to use real power tools to build real objects. This is a short video so you only have to set aside about 5 minutes for this one.

Visual Thinking Models

Today I thought I would post a link to an article about different visual thinking models. The link I'm sharing with you is created by Aaron Williamson. The article talks about different ways of structuring content in a visual way and the ways different people might approach subjects visually.

The link to the content is here: http://shiftandshare.com/?p=83.

The website also seems to have some other really interesting topics related to visual thinking so I would encourage some snooping around once you've finished the article.

Hiatus

I know that it has been over a month since my last post and perhaps many of you may think I have abandoned this blog for bigger and better things. I just thought I'd write a quick post to assure you lovely readers that this isn't the case. After my grad show presenting a lot of this work I hopped a plane for Europe. Since I got back I have been mostly focused on finding a job so, once things settle down again and I have found myself a nice secure job the posts will again become more frequent as I will actually have time to spend finding more interesting pieces to share.