Notes on Edu Gaming Conf. P1

The New Media Consortium hosted an online conference on educational gaming last week (November 7 & 8, 2005). I was privileged enough to attend. Posting a few thoughts about what I saw, heard, and yes, learned would be useful to organize my thoughts and also share these ideas with anyone interested.

• The educational model of gaming, particularly Massively Multiplayer Online (Roll Playing) Games (MMO[RP]G), is about motivating learners, training learners, and helping educators better understand the processes of peer support and social aspects of learning.
• Many claim that processes lend themselves to the educational game arena better than content heavy subjects. IOW, the process of how to dissect a frog might be a better candidate for a game than learning the names of the frog’s organs. I have my doubts whether or not this is true. Many games seem to have the capacity to help learn or motivate us to practice content heavy subjects. And who is to say where content ends and process begins?
  
• There are at least three main methods for bringing games into a curriculum: 1. a commercial game that is useful to the subject matter (e.g. Doom has been used in military training). 2. a commercial game that is useful to build community (e.g. World of Warcraft for collective work towards a single goal). 3. developing a game yourself (or with IT help) that specifically addresses your instructional needs (e.g. yet to be released Ancient Spaces). These were the main ones, but our pedagogical imagination is the true limitation here.

The future seems wide open with possibilities. I’ll need to look into more titles to see if currently available selections could be of use to those in Iowa.

Scanning Money

So my new scanner arrived yesterday. And I naturally had to see if it's true that Photoshop would refuse to open a scan of a $20 bill. It did refuse! Kind of impressive and a little annoying. This is the error message received:

"This application does not support the unauthorized copying of banknote images..."

It goes on to direct users to the rulesforuse.org website where the rules for use are in fact given. They are quite restrictive and include size of original specs.

So I returned to Photoshop and changed the target size to 50% of the original bill. Sure enough, Photoshop opens the image. Kind of slick. But still a little annoying.

As a work around, I was pleased to see I could scan and open a 1200 res image in Fireworks. But how long will that last since Adobe has purchased Macromedia?

There are many discussions and tips and tricks out there. Here is one such link to Freedom to Tinker.

WebCT Anchor

Some of the simplest web page activities become rather tricky when put in the WebCT environment. Like the anchored link -- the link that jumps down or up to a particular spot on your web page. Here is a little trick I recently found to create an anchored link on your WebCT homepage. Say you want to link from a button (e.g. Office Hours) at the top of the homepage to a position at the bottom of the homepage. And say you have three sections on your homepage: an upper textblock, a tool area, and a lower textblock. Your lower textblock contains your office hours preceded by the following anchor name:

<a name="officehours">

In a normal webpage you would simply include the following anchor link code to jump down to a position in the same page:

<a href="#officehours">Office Hours</a>

But in WebCT we have all kinds of javascript going on that needs dealing with. So the simple anchor tag needs to be replaced with the following slightly more complex code:

<a href="javascript:void(self.location='#officehours')">Office Hours</a>

This seems to work well in Campus Edition 4.1. Not sure about 6.0. Cross that bridge when we come to it.

Collaborate

I recently started working on a collaborative project with my brothers. We all live in different states: IA, CO, GA, WI, and OR. Communication has been initially email, but soon we will move toward Skype for more immediate discussion.

Already, in the course of the emails, we have chosen the roles we are willing to assume to potentially bring the project to life.

I never had much luck with group projects as a student. As an instructor, I used them all the time. I found them to be exhausting, but fruitful when I managed them well. I also found most students reacted with grunts and whines when I announced a group activity. With my brothers, I seem to have loads of fun working as a group. So what gives?!

The participants comfort with strangers is an obvious place to start. Our learners are likely not very familiar with each other and when you ask them to do even the simplest tasks together there are nervous feelings to overcome. There is pressure to appear intelligent and cool.

As the instructor you can model interactive behavior. Help your students appear intelligent and cool. Try responding to simple questions with more questions and "Your question got me thinking..." Try incorporating more collaboration with special attention to the roles each student will play and their ability to comfortably share in the process.

Diff Persp

Diff. Persp.

I used to be a foreign language instructor. I taught Chinese. It was relatively common to encounter students who did not practice good language learning skills. All sorts of reasons and conditions exist to explain this (not the least of which is there seems to be a horrible misconception that Chinese is impossibly hard to learn). At times, however, I found myself lost when good and great students failed to comprehend seemingly simple concepts. To gain some perspective, I signed up for Banjo lessons.

Maybe you will disagree, but I did find many interesting similarities between language and banjo study. Constant and consistent practice was one. And interaction was another. You can learn more from playing with people in an hour than you can in a week locked alone in your room.

That’s the background story. Now, while I am rusty both in Chinese and banjo picking, I am gaining skills in design and interactivity. To further my knowledge I recently signed up to experience an online course for myself. Already, the student perspective is illuminating. Being in a position where I am expected to learn material online with a group of online people all organized by an online person has provided some insights.

1. Discussions are connective. I really do feel a part of a group, and this is just the first week. Maybe I am lucky and have a communicative core, but the instructor does an incredible job at pointing to other posts to answer student questions. He also gives time for students to help other students. He encourages this and praises those who help.


2. What’s next is so obvious. There is no question about what needs to be done and when. Repetition of instruction is not intrusive. Or maybe I like it since the repetition is usually designed with a “remember:” It’s just one word, but it allows me to skip the section if I do in fact already remember.


3. Discussions are casual. I thought I might have some issues here. The instructor described the discussion area rather rigidly, but he was quick to praise humor. And he is familiar and not afraid or too cautious to use emoticons or SMS abbreviated text (lol, omg…)

I cannot recommend enough the idea of revisiting an old perspective: learning. You might just learn something.

My Learning Style

From http://www.learning-styles-online.com/

Looks like I need to work on my Social learning skills. This online quiz is free to use and even has an option available to registered instructors to create Groups. You can then send your students to submit their answers to the quiz in order to gather some class specific learning style stats. Pretty slick. Wouldn't it be nice to know that the vast majority of learns in your English Comp class were low verbal, but highly physical and social?

Now I wouldn't advocate catering to their every learning style. As if that would ever be possible anyway. But if I was in your class struggling with a group assignment perhaps a quick glance at my results would cause an instructor to say, "Hey, Al. How are you getting along in your group? Are you finding you have tasks as a member of the group? Do you feel like the group is helping you? Do you have some pictures you might share with the group to further the assignment?"

That might be great. That kind of push -- touching upon my strengths to bolster my weakness -- would make learning very productive.

ppt

I was never a huge Powerpoint fan. The extension itself *ppt* sounds similar to how I felt about it. Never much enjoyed professors' and colleagues' presentations with Powerpoint. It wasn't all their fault. The classroom designs were bad -- often making the black/whiteboard unavailable when the screen was pulled down. The presenter was faced with the acrobatic act of juggling powerpoint and chalk and papers and everything. And then on top of this, they would often just read their slides. Not good.

I think things are better now. Rarely do I see presenters reading Powerpoint slides. And the pen tool, along with better classroom designs have alleviated much of the juggling act. I am seeing more Powerpoints developed for outline reviews and flashcard type interactions. Works for me.

Except when these same ppts are then slapped online. These files can be huge. The outline format no longer works well as the crucial information and anecdotes that were the driving force behind the slides are now missing. The flashcards might still work, but I am quite certain there are better methods for flashcard delivery via the web. *cough* flash *cough*. Some instructors tell me they want students to print out the slides prior to class for note taking ease. This doesn't work for me. It's the graphic equivalent of making someone download a Photoshop file to see the images on your web page. It's a completely unnecessary step. *pppppt*

My quick solution: For printing, create a pdf file (four slides to a page). For flashcards look into StudyMate ($79-$139). For slide presentations, look into FlashSpring ($149).

Discuss Discussion

Most instructors understand the need for interaction in learning. They see results in students who are most active in class; they feel results in their own thought provoking research. Interaction in the online arena is largely accommodated by asynchronous discussion boards (DB). There are other methods out there, but DBs are by far the most popular. They are relatively easy to implement and track. And most CMSs offer built in tools.

I have managed some rather successful as well as marginally tolerable DBs in my courses. And I have seen some impressive as well as depressive applications since. Here are some observations:

*Topics/Folders add an essential degree of organization. As moderator, you will need to do some moving posts around to make sure they are in their proper place.
*The instructor as moderator need not provide all the answers. If peers aren't helping each other, ask them to.
*This is a social environment. Loosen up the language style a little. Allow for socialization to occur.
*Encourage student posts by asking them questions, re-directing questions, taking polls, play devil's advocate, praising interesting posts (publicly and privately), and sharing personal anecdotes.
*If you have a dead discussion, jazz it up with photos, a game, extra credit, video, audio, ...

Basically, don't give up on your DB. To take away one of the few means of interaction in an online course will only hurt your learners.

Dig. Natives

There is much in the literature these days about digitally native students. I started reading Educating the Net Generation edited by Diana Oblinger and James Oblinger. I can only recommend the first few so far, but those first few are well worth the time it took to download.

But with all the discussion on the Net Gen. It seems I still hear from faculty that they fear moving to online environments because the students will not be able to utilize the high tech. It is a serious concern. Many of our students do not own computers and therefore are less likely to be digital natives. However, if we ignore these students lack of digital prowess we continue to do them a larger disservice. As there are reading and writing labs on campus, I would also like to see a digital skill building labs.

Help desks are great, but they do little to educate and build skills and confidence in the student. They solve the problem (hopefully) and the student moves on. Microcomputer classes are super, but only if students take them. I expect basic computer skills are a part of the grade school and high school experiences. If they are not, then plenty of students are being left behind.

Course Packs (E-packs)

A growing number of textbooks are (optionally) packaged with web-based materials called Course packs or E-packs. Mostly, I am not impressed. However, like most temptations in the world of computer assisted instruction, there are some cool items. I suspect though that these cool items are not used much by students. It's awesome to have a sound assisted glossary (especially for medical terminology courses), but I wonder how often they are used.

Some E-pack notes.

1. Many publishers host some of the e-pack files on their own server. If you don't want that, you will need to talk with your textbook rep. Sometimes they will accommodate this request and give you all the files.

2. Many publishers use e-packs as a means to ensure students are buying new books. They will require students to purchase access codes to view the course materials. Ask your textbook rep. And test your course as a student!

3. You will need to spend time filtering and possibly reorganizing material. Testbanks will contain questions that are poorly worded, or cover materials you find less important. These questions were not necessarily created by teachers.

4. Giving students tons of prefabed materials can have a negative impact on motivation and interest in your course. Keep asking yourself how these materials are increasing interaction, and how they help prepare students for what they will eventually do with these skills and knowledge.

Welcome

It's early and I just set up a new blog for reasons not completely clear. But I believe communication is crucial and this is a form of communication. I also believe breakfast is a necessary step in the morning. So before I launch into thoughts on instructional design and how-tos for yours and mine, I will eat some toast and cream cheese.