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You can use this page to email Katrin Becker about Death to Deadlines.
About the Book
From the randomness of grades to allowing students to re-use work from other courses, this book takes a critical look at our revered traditional practices. I've been teaching for 40 years now. I suppose that many people begin to take a longer view of their work once they've been doing it for as long as I have. Some years back, in parallel with my going all in with my gamified approach, I began to ask some fairly fundamental "What If" questions, Such as, "What would happen if I DIDN'T have deadlines for the work in my classes?
Some of the answers I found surprised even me.
Table of Contents
- And So It Begins
- My Two Favorite Questions
- Death to Deadlines
- On the Randomness of Grades
- New Methods: 5 Ways to Make Marking Easier
- When All You Have is a Hammer: New Tools
- Glass Half Full: It All Adds Up
- Appropriate Practice
About the Author
Katrin is an award winning, internationally known expert in the design and analysis of Serious Games and in gamification in the classroom. She holds two Computer Science degrees and a PhD in Educational Technology. She is a certified instructional designer with a graduate certificate in serious game design and research. She has over 30 years of teaching experience and has taught CS, videogame design, DGBL, and technical writing. Her teaching innovations have been internationally recognized and she is widely published. She designs and develops eLearning in all sectors, including educational and advertising games. Her recent game, Gene Rummy is a card game to help people learn basic Mendelian genetics. She is also the author of two books; one on the technical aspects of simulations and games written for non-technical people (Wiley, 2011, LeanPub 2018), and another on choosing and using digital games for the classroom (Springer, 2016). Her current book, "Reni" is a memoir written by her mother, who grew up during WWII in Berlin. After that she will turn her attention back to teaching and learning, with Death to Deadlines: Gamification and Other Subversive Thoughts on Formal Education.
Finally, to counterbalance a very digital life, she runs a small farm where she has been raising rabbits, waterfowl, and other animals for over 25 years. This farm forms the basis for her “Ducks in the Classroom” program, which provided eggs for hatching in classrooms locally from 1988-2012, and information on school hatching projects globally since 2001. It also accounts for occasional bit of poo on her shoe.