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Leapfrog Institutes & Serious Games Reformatting Education For New Relevance


Via: Education Futures – Global Leapfrog Education

The
Leapfrog Institutes aim to build positive futures for PreK-21 education and the communities that they serve.

Sponsored by the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota and its partnering institutions, Leapfrog is a paradigmatic jump into best case uses of existing and edge technologies in hardware, software, and intellectual formats.

Leapfrog institutions relentlessly disrupt themselves to compete successfully in the global knowledge and innovation economy. They work ahead of the competition in teaching, research, innovation, and service. They avoid playing catch-up.

Leapfrog creates the future in the present based on what is found over the horizon. Leapfrog first acts to create proximal futures, and then solidly grounds the most promising futures within the present.


Leapfrog principles may well become the conceptual framework for Educational Serious Games development, making use of advanced technologies to emulate leading edge work forces, including a shift from memorization and innovative modes of knowledge distribution.


Education Futures is the repository of Global Leapfrog Education. The editor, John Moravec, Ph.D., an Innovation and Integrated Technology Coordinator at the University of Minnesota and Director of its Leapfrog Institutes, is also the co-founder of the Horizon Forum, a PreK-17 round-table on the future of education, and a founding member of the Education Futures Laboratory (a joint initiative between researchers at the University of Minnesota and FLACSO-México).



He asserts that changes in the global economy and the global society mandate an immediate adaptive response on the parts of education service systems.

Cultural and temporal simulations offer dynamic, open source approaches to reformatting education for new relevance in the 21st century.


Vigorously and imaginatively pursued, such simulations can permit educators and their students not merely to adapt to industry, business and government, but to leapfrog ahead and share in their leadership.


The paradigm invention associated with such changes focuses on knowledge production emanating from three broad cultural resources: tradition and legacy; spontaneous emergence and evolution; and intentional creativity.