It’s that time of year again! Here are the most popular posts (according to WordPress, anyway) from the blog.
- Khan Academy and the mythical math cure
- Games that encourage student teamwork and collaboration
- Happy Birthday Logo!
- 8 Big Ideas of the Constructionist Learning Lab
- Engagement, responsibility and trust
- Halo 3 shines harsh light on games in education
- Khan Academy – algorithms and autonomy
- Back to school – games for collaboration and teamwork
- Compare and contrast: using computers to improve math education
- Treasure trove for constructivist classroom projects
These are a mixed lot – for example, #3, “Happy Birthday Logo!” is about the 40th anniversary of the Logo programming language. As much as I’d like to believe that there is a massive resurgence of interest in children programming in Logo, it’s MUCH more likely that people are searching for birthday clip-art and stumble on this post. It’s also the case that for #6, “Halo 3 shines harsh light on games in education” the mere mention of the immensely popular game “Halo” drives a lot of traffic. There are some interesting statistics in that post comparing the sales figures of Halo to the expectations for educational software, but I’m assuming that’s not the primary draw.
However, the traffic for #2, 4, 8, and 10, are all pretty on target. I believe that these articles do reflect interest in constructivism and a yearning for information about how to make classroom activities more authentic. I can see that the time spent on these articles by the “average” visitor is much higher. Someday I’ll get around to calculating a different popularity metric for my posts, something like page views multiplied by viewing time so that the really popular posts reflect viewer interest, rather than just Google searches gone astray.
And of course, two of my Khan Academy posts made the top ten. The debate about Khan Academy is still going on strong, and has made it into the mainstream of American mass media. Although it’s nice when an educational topic does make it into the mainstream, it’s not so good when it reinforces the blandest and least interesting teaching myths. Oh well, I suppose we could all be reading more about the Kardashians!
Sylvia
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