Matthew Spira's Page

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About Me: One of the particular challenges in EFL environments is students having sufficient opportunities to get "repetitions" to communicate/interact through the medium of English. Two of the universal challenges for all organizations/schools involved in education are resource constraints and bureaucratic imperatives. These arguably shape the reality of education as much as anything else. For example, "student-centered" learning is a buzzword in the field, but in reality often little more than that. For me, however, emerging technology and new conceptual paradigms for the question, "What is learning?" offers the promise of making the individual- connected together to one another, to functionally infinite content and to limitless opportunity, in open relational, not closed hierarchical, ways- the genuinely true center of the learning process. I am particularly interested in game-based learning, structured virtual worlds, spaced repetition transactional models of knowledge acquisition, and sensory mapping for content delivery.