I thought I would use a post to list a few quotes from this week’s readings. Hopefully they will be useful when I come to writing the synoptic paper :-)

Greenfield (1984) This paper is somewhat dated. However it summarises the early research of video games. Many of it’s findings are still relevant today:

• “Video games have been dubbed the marriage between television and computers”
  
• “Popular arcade games involve tremendous amount of visual action, and is may be one source of their appeal”
  
•  “Video Games are the first medium to combine dynamism with active participatory role for the child”
•  “Another concern about video games is that they are merely sensorimotor games of eye-hand coordination and that they are therefore mindless”
•  “The motivating features of video games are beginning to be put to more explicit educational use” 

Kane (2005) A General Theory of Play. Considers all the dimensions of play.

Caillois (2001) Classification of Games

Newman (2004) What is a video game?

• “Elements of the video game table 2.1: Graphics, Sound, Interface, Gameplay and Story”
  
•  “What a video game is not: a bunch of cool features, a lot of fancy Graphics, a series of challenging puzzles, an intriguing setting and story” (Rollings and Morris, 2000)
• Why do players play? “Rouse (2000) identifies a range of player motivations and expectations. Among them, three are particularly notable: Challenge, immersion and players expect to do, not to watch”.
  
•  “Video games may be understood as a form of ‘embodiment experience”

Photo Credit: tjmwatson (under CC)

As mentioned in my last post, as a child, I was a huge fan of the Commodore 64. About four years ago, I decided to purchase an old C64 on eBay and relive my youth (not sure what happened to my original?). The C64 was released in August 1982. It was the best selling model of the 1980’s. It had a huge 64KB of RAM and a graphics chip with 16 colours! It really was state of the art. My parent’s bought a C64, in 1986, with the intention of using it to manage farm accounts. This was not to be so. It took my Father 4 hours to program the machine to play ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’, let alone, create, calculate, manage and save any accounts. With so many failed attempts he gave up and passed the machine onto my brother and I. I don’t actually know anyone who used the C64 for anything other than gaming. This is where my passion for all things ICT initially began. I would spend hours working out how to programme the C64 to do very simple (and at the time, fascinating tasks) I managed to play small monophonic tunes, draw very basic pictures and of course there was the game playing. I find it incredible to think that 20 years later I am now able to do the same tasks and much more from my mobile phone! With regards to gaming I was an avid user. With 16 colours the C64 games were just fantastic! ‘Hungary Horace’, ‘Dizzy’, ‘Wheelies’ and ‘Road Blasters’ to name a few (others not the most PC in this day and age). It gives me a very nostalgic, yet strange, feeling when I set up this piece of computing history. Seeing the famous blue C64 screen, holding the ‘Run/Stop’ and 'shift' buttons simultaneously, waiting in anticipation for the game to load; will it load or willit come up with ‘system error’?

C64 Interface

 Hungry Horace Screeshot: Level 1

Photo credits: tjmwatson (under CC)

When I bought the computer some four years ago, I asked for my purchase to be delivered to the school where I was teaching. I couldn’t resist setting it up and letting my pupils see my new toy. At the time, my Intermediate 1 Biology class were working on the subject of ‘Alcohol and Its Effects’. Under the umbrella of this subtopic is ‘Reaction Time’. What better a way to demonstrate reaction time than with a good old 10 minute game of ‘Crazy Cars’ (This is a game where you have to race around a circuit avoiding other cars and potential hazards, ideal for testing reaction time!). After overcoming the basic graphics (one boy asking me, ‘but where is the car?’) the pupils surprisingly got really into the game. They were also very inquisitive as to how the machine worked (i.e. loading of cassettes and the general setup). You can now play many of the C64 games on the iPhone ,however nothing beats the real thing ;-)

The Commodore 64, such a fabulous computer of the past, they have even commissioned a classical orchestra to play the music from the games!

 Pac-Man Screenshot (iPad) Photo Credit: tjmwatson (under CC)

Pac Man was a game that I was first introduced to as a child in the late 1980s. I can't remember which computer I played the game on, but Amstrad springs to mind. The Pac-Man movements are controlled by the game player. The object of Pac-Man is to eat as many Pac-dots as you can without getting eaten by the different colored ghosts that roam around the pac maze. If you eat a large Pac-dot it will turn all the ghosts blue. When the ghosts are blue, you (Pac-Man) can in turn eat them. Fruit also appears at random points in the maze. If you eat these fruits you will gain more points.

For the purpose of the course, I downloaded Pac-Man "lite" (the free version) for my iPad.

I think this is a great little game for testing reaction time and small scale problem solving. However in terms of learning, I am not sure exactly what the player *is* learning? I guess there is a certain amount of physical finger coordination to be learned and perhaps the Thinking Correctly Under Pressure (TCUP) theory, but how could this be applied in another context? Perhaps when playing sport and choosing your tactics?

As Greenfield (1984) states video games are "merely sensory motor games of hand-eye coordination"; quite a sweeping statement but applicable in the context of Pac-Man and many of the basic games of the era. Other similar games of the 1980s that spring to mind Hungry Horrace (the first computer game I owned for the Commodore 64) and the Dizzy Game series (more in another post)

How things have changed with touch-screen technology and augmented reality just some of the things that I am looking forward to investigating further during this course :-)

Photo Credit: tjmwatson (Under CC)

Hello fellow students and tutors!

I thought I would use my first post to (re) introduce myself. Sorry if you have already read my introduction on the discussion board!

The Games Based Learning module is my fourth course. I am also studying the Research Methods course this semester. After these modules I am hoping to go on to the dissertation. I was a teacher of Biology and Science for 7 years. For the last three years I have worked in project management (ICT classroom based initiatives and VLEs). My current role is elearning community facilitator for the Scottish Traveller Education Programme (STEP). My current project is called eLearning and Traveller Education Scotland (eLATES) I am supporting, coordinating and managing the deployment of Glow (the Scottish Schools Digital Network and VLE) for mobile and Travelling Children. I would class myself as a *casual* gamer. As a child I was a huge fan of the Commodore 64 computer. More recently I was involved in a number of games based learning trials in the Primary Classroom (2008). These included the use of Sony PSPs as tools for learning and also using Desktop PC software such as Media Stage and CrazyTalk.

I am looking forward to exploring the potential that digital games have to enhance learning experiences for all ages and sharing practice, knowledge and experiences with others on the course :-)

More information about my online life can be found on my website: www.tessawatson.com

Please feel free to leave me and comments or questions (positive or negative!)... They are what makes blogging so worth while :-)

I try to visit the Online Educa Berlin every couple of years because it is really the largest conference on e-learning. This year there was almost 2.200 participants from 108 countries. The largest delegation was naturally from the Germany but on the second place were the Danish then the Finnish and on the forth place  the British participants. I like Educa because there are lots of ways there to meet people and talk to them. Apart from exhibition booths, there are discussion session, topic lunches and informal gatherings. There are always good keynote speakers and sessions cover almost all possible topics.

This year keynote speaker was Talal Abu-Ghazaleh who talked about "Learning for All in the Digital Age". He said that changes and repairing isn’t enough, that we have to be creative and re/invent new things in education. Routine thinking isn’t enough and we should give more time to creative thinking.

Second keynote was Adrian Sannier with “The third way”. His presentation was quite a performance. He is skilled orator. He was also saying that we should reinvent the culture of traditional institutions otherwise emerging institutions will blow them away.  The only way to survive is to make cultural change in the institution. He pointed out three issues:

• Team Sport- no more individual teachers working for themselves and the only owners of specific information
• Keep score- if we prepare and design content, lectures, courses we should measure how they behave
• Fix what’s broken

 Last speaker was Charles Leadbeaterwho talked about learning strategies for changes in our approaches towards knowledge society. He shared his experience about education he gathered travelling arounf the world. In many places in the world (Africa, India, South America) education is very important as it brings, along with technology, a hope for better tomorrow for this people and they consider education almost as religion. Education provides them with choice in their lives. It made me think on Croatian education system. Have we forgot about  the importance of education? It seems that we care less about it then before. Another important issue he was talking about was that in education we should try to pull people into by motivating them and not pushing.

Afterwards I have listened presentations on the future of academic conferencing where presenters shared their experience and ideas in organizing online conferences. Especially Interested to me was conference to be held next year "Follow the Sun" as it will be fully online conferences using Adobe Connect, Second Life and Moodle.

It was interesting, are we going to abandon 2f conferences? Certainly existing model of f2f conferences (sessions with presentations) doesn't meet expectations of participants any more and there has to be more additional program and interactivity around it. Is the Online Educa going to be only online next year? 

Afterwards I moved to session on e-portfolio. I hoped there will be some talk about  using e-portoflio as the assessment tool but the main emphasis was on e-portfolio as a tool for self presentation to the future emplyers. There were statements that use of the e-portfolio increased tutors’ knowledge of learning in the other areas of course, about raising potentials of e-portfolio and so on. Presenters were mostly new in that field and that were their first experiences. I was interested especially in presentation “Mahara E-portfolio networking Platform as a Tool in RPL”

Well, you might ask what is RPL? It states for Recognizing Prior Learning. Presentation was from Helsinki University of Applied Sciences. They have started to use Maharain autumn this year and presentation was about Mahara as a very short course how to use it. They were talking about possibility to connect Moodle and Mahara and that in new Moodle 2.0 there is a possibility to export data from Moodle to Mahara. I know that the Finnish people are very advanced in the development and use of technology but in this case we (the University of Zagreb) are better. We have integrated Moodle and Mahara almost two years ago and we have single sign on. We offered this tool to the academic community and are trying to pull them into it. We have users who use it for self presentation but our focus is now to show them how it can be used in teaching and learning as an assessment tool. Well, when I shared my experience with the audience lots of them were surprised that we have been using Mahara for so long already. E-portfolio is not quite a new tool but it seems as it still has to be discovered. Discussion moved to topic of how to use it as a tool for self presentation to the employers and how to connect schools, labour market and employers.

On Friday plenaries were divided on the Academic and the Corporate sector. There was strong emphasis on the corporate sector this year and there were even sessions  called "Business Educa".

I followed the Academic plenary. I would excerpt presentation from Josie Fraser. She was talking about digital literacy's and learning communities. Did you know that number of users on the Facebook has increased from February to July this year for a 100 millions and that there were 500 million users in July ? Number is increasing rapidly. That is 19% of entire European population.

She also stated three models of literacy:

• Functional
• Socio-cultural
• Transformational

She has defined digital literacy as digital tool knowledge+critical thinking+social engagement. Digital literacy is a life long practice with skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices.

There are always a lots of exhibitors. I would say that news are exhibitors from Africa and I was positively surprised with number of Polish exhibitors and their ICT solutions.  They have developed the tool for plagiarism which can be integrated in Moodle.

I went to the Business Educa session to see how different are these session from others. I have chosen session called "Learning in three dimensions, maybe four" . Besides f2f speakers there were announced two virtual speakers. I said announced because technology misbehaved :)) We waited and waited  as they tested and tried to connect but at the end we could hear one speaker briefly through someones' notebook and that was that. They have tried to connect them through the Skye but it didn't work. Well, when we finally focused on the f2f speakers we have lost concentration. There was a presentation about games, should we be doing them at work ? Speakers says YES as they help to learn new and unlearn the old context. So everyone, get the Call of Duty and learn :))

To me, new "discovery"  is Bert de Coutere from IBM, Belgium. He has written the book on "Homo Competens" which I'm reading at the moment. He said that with virtual worlds geography is history and we have "death of distance". Well, he has certainly read Virilio. We are moving into immersive world. Also they have made training courses for their managers in SL. They have created rooms there people are sitting at the table as to make them feel as the part of the group. I especially liked the world map which they have put on the floor and participants standed on the map at the place where are coming from.

We have been given a couple of research papers for critically evaluation. One of them is by Dunleavy et al (2007) which looks at the "value addedness" of the one child per laptop (OLPC) project. What struck me here is that there are similarities between the OLPC initiaive and that of our partly JISC funded project, iBorrow. Whilst the OLPC project is ensuring that there is a "laptop per child" and iBorrow is about "borrowing a laptop" - the similarities here are one of transformation (or at least potentially).

Our students have a choice of using one of the 200 netbook devices or one of the 120 fixed desktop PCs - which ones are they drawn to and under what circumstances? They have relatively free reign in a large learning space (incorporating library, cafes and student services) the size of a football pitch across three floors - which means they have a choice as to where to work, learn and play with these netbooks - and again, which zones are they drawn to and under what circumstances?

Which leads us to another set of interesting questions:

• What kind of affordances do these devices bring?
• Are they indeed "value added" or something else?
• Does the combination of group work and mobile devices differ from that of group work and fixed devices?
• Does an "underworld" of virtualised peer support exist in these groupings?

I have a lot to think about and mull over before I finally hand in my project proposal in April 2010 - the trick here is to keep the research question(s) tightly focused.

If you are interesting in delving deeper into the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, author of "Being Digital", founder of MIT Media Labs and founder of the OLPC initiative provides a nice summary of what the initiative is and the some of the issues of getting the project off the ground. James O'Hagan's blog "1 Laptop : 1 Student" offers some "stories" and case studies taken from practitioners of the initiatives.

References

Dunleavy, M., Dexter, S. & Heinecke, W.F. (2007). "What added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning?". Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23, pp. 440-452.

My University is involved in phase two of JISC's Institutional Innovation Programme:

"This programme represents a £13.08m investment aimed at supporting existing institutional strategies by providing solutions to institution-wide problems, based upon proven practices, technologies, standards and services. The solutions will act as exemplars to other institutions by demonstrating innovation and good practice, and building knowledge and experience, which can be shared across institutions."

One of those projects is the Academic Social Networking project which is being developed by the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge. The project itself "aims to bring some of the affordances of consumer social networks to teaching and learning".

What is interesting to me, and possibly to other students on the research methods module is that CARET collaborated with Flow Interactive, an external company, to investigate whether commercial user-centric design (UCD) techniques could be transferable and be used within a Higher Education context.

As the research team suggest, user-centric design is different because:

"...it explicitly, constructively and actively includes users in the design process from a very early stage."

One of the key features of their particular methodology is the notion of "design personas" and how it enabled them to:

"...identified trends or patterns in user behaviours, expectations and motivations, through conducting a combination of diary studies and interviews, and how this formed the basis of our personas. Having these personas enabled us to focus the design effort on supporting user goals. Also, where traditionally a designer might have lists and lists of requirements, personas allow one to prioritize these requirements to the degree these personas would find them important, offering more clarity."

Moreover, the research team at CARET have published their UCD methodology into a rather useful and compelling handbook for us lucky reseachers to peruse and may even offer a new approach to conducting research with our key stakeholders.

I have been thinking more about my intended research project as well as bouncing ideas and talking to colleagues about it as well. One of the recurring themes was a person or a groups relationship to and between space (physical, virtual or both?). These relationships could occur between:

• Student to Student
• Student to Peer Group
• Student to Tutor
• Peer Group to Peer Group
• Peer Group to Tutor

It reminded me of some journal articles that I read as part of my "Space, Place and Technology" wiki articles for the "Psychological and Social Contexts of e-Learning" module. Specifically, this regards Nova (2005, p. 119) who proposes that when "dealing with the concept of space in collective situations", it should be considered through the lens of a number of dimensions:

• Person to Person
• Person to Artefact
• Person to Place
• Space, Place and Activity
• Space and Artefacts
• Space and Time

The "Space, Place and Technology" wiki articles are now converted into an "as is" electronic paper version on Issuu, if you wish to find out more about these dimensions. We can represent these dimension using the following illustration.

What we are looking at are fixed physical spaces are depicted as solid circles whereas transient physical spaces are denoted with dashed circles. Each circle is inhabited by people with some form of information and communication device like a desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone or PDA; also present are a number of "artefacts" represented by the orange star and the green diamond - these "artefacts" could be a chair, table, books, or Interactive White Boards. As depicted in the diagram, some "spaces" can overlap and be shared. Each information and communication device is connected to one or more virtual spaces as depicted by the computer servers inside a blue dashed cloud formation. These virtual spaces could be blogs, wikis, virtual environments, web pages and such like.

In terms of thinking about methodology, some ethnographic approach could be considered, but as Cousin (2009, p. 109) warns us:

"At first sight, it might seem that anyone can do ethnography but doing it well requires familiarity with a theoretical field, a set of research skills and perhaps, above all, ... an 'enlightened eye'"

Cousin (ibid) goes to say that "ethnography is not so much about studying people as learning from them". In their joint Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in Creativity project called inQbate, the Universities of Sussex and Brighton have created "two creativity zones" which offers "exciting opportunities for students to work in spaces that foster collaborative, self-directed and experiential learning".

The methodology for capturing how students reacted to and interacted within the space and with eachother was to use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This is a relatively recent qualitative approach developed specifically within psychology by Jonathan A. Smith, a Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. IPA concerns itself by:

"...trying to understand lived experience and with how participants themselves make sense of their experiences. Therefore it is centrally concerned with the meanings which those experiences hold for the participants."

I am not really considering IPA but it does demonstrate some of the deep and rich approaches to data collection and analysis. What has caught my eye, however, is something called Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) which is a theory about the link between attitudes and behaviour. TPB is a quantitative approach developed by Icek Ajzen, a Professor of Psychology at Amherst, University of Massachusetts. It was Siragusa & Dixon (2009) paper for the Ascilite 2009 conference where they were using questionnaire items related to components of the TPB to determine students’ attitudes and planned use of ICT-based instruction. Like any methodology, TPB has its' advocates and detractors.

It has been suggested to me that I could develop a case study. But in the meantime, I think I will look into TPB to see if it has any real value.

References

Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2007). Research Methods in Education (6th Edition). New York, London: Routledge.

Cousin, G. (2009). Researching Learning in Higher Education. New York, London: Routledge.

Norton, L.S. (2009). Action Research in Teaching & Learning. New York, London: Routledge.

Nova, N. (2005). "A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration". PsychNology Journal, 3(2): 118-148.

Robson, C. (2002). Real World Research (2nd Edition). Malden, MA; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.

Siragusa, L. & Dixon, K.C. (2009). "Theory of planned behaviour: Higher education students'
attitudes towards ICT-based learning interactions". In Same places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009. Available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/siragusa.pdf [Accessed 02.02.2010].

So here we are at last, the sixth and final module that is "research methods". I know that I would like to do my dissertation on learning spaces as my institution has just opened it's doors to a new Library and Student Services centre called Augustine House. If you want a feel for the place, there's an interactive floorplan that you can view and there is also a special Flickr set (compare these against the previous library provision). Incidently, anyone wanting to look at different examples of learning spaces that are situated across the UK can view JISC Infonet's Flickr pages.

JISC (2006) informs us that learning spaces:

"...should be able to motivate learners and promote learning as an activity, support collaborative as well as formal practice, provide a personalised and inclusive environment, and be flexible in the face of changing needs." (p. 3)

However, as the JELS (2009) report found out, there is very little by way of evaluating the effectiveness of learning spaces and a fair bit of research would be needed to begin to understand what is going on. Temple (2007), in his literature review, is particularly scathing on how little we understand such spaces:

"...if the curriculum in higher education is a set of experiences, that a student inhabits, experiences that that arise from a student’s interaction with his or her ‘learning environment’, then any attempt to trace the influence of one particular thread of experience may well be doomed..." (p. 69)

So, over the last 18 months I have been involved in a part JISC-funded project that is part of their Institutional Innovation Programme, which:

"...represents a £13.08m investment aimed at supporting existing institutional strategies by providing solutions to institution-wide problems, based upon proven practices, technologies, standards and services. The solutions will act as exemplars to other institutions by demonstrating innovation and good practice, and building knowledge and experience, which can be shared across institutions."

Our project, which we called iBorrow, has deployed 200 location-aware (re: wireless) netbooks within Augustine House which students and staff can "borrow" just by taking them out of the recharging cabinets as if they were picking up a book from off a shelf. One of the many things that we want to see is if it can provide a large-scale demonstration of how thin-client notebooks with location-aware technology can enable us to not only provide "no fuss" access to a full range of software and learning resources but also effectively manage the configuration of the facilities within the large flexible learning spaces of Augustine House.

As part of my preparation and understanding of learning spaces, I have managed to fill three A4 box folders of papers on the subject as well as looking at the notions of "place" and "space" under the auspices of environmental psychology. To help me make sense of all of this information, I have devised a mind map (click on the image below to enlarge) that covers a large number of themes (and I suspect that I have only scratched the surface).

References

JELS. (2009). A Study of Effective Evaluation Models and Practices for Technology Supported Physical Learning Spaces. Bristol: JISC. Available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/learningspaces08.aspx [Accessed 21 January 2010].

JISC. (2006). Designing Spaces For Effective Learning - A Guide To 21st Century Learning Space Design. Bristol: JISC. Available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2006/pub_spaces.aspx [Accessed 21 January 2010].

Temple, P. (2007). Learning Spaces for the 21st Century: A review of the literature. York: The Higher Education Academy. Available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/lr_2007_temple [Accessed 21 January 2010].