On their Web-site Game Based Learning (http://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/) James P. Gee and Elizabeth Hayes present a short paper on 'Public Pedagogy through Video Games: Design, Resources and Affinity Spaces' (http://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/content/view/59/) in which they exemplify and critique the notion that informal learning outside school compares rather favourably with formal learning within.
At the heart of this article is the concept of 'Affinity Space' where people with common interests meet and interact to further their passion. Interestingly these Affinity Spaces may be real or virtual and often are not within a school or University environment. In these informal spaces learning happens in the absence of clear rules, hierarchies or social preconceptions, just the opposite of the learner's experience derived from formal learning spaces.

For these spaces Gee and Hayes advocate the existence of a 'popular culture' which delivers as they call it 'public pedagogy', often in direct competition with the traditional school pedagogy.
As a case in point for this assertion they present the case of a young unassuming girl, Jade, who attends after-school activities aimed at encouraging girls to become more technology-interested.

As Jade was competent in playing the game 'The Sims' it occured to her that it would be nice if she could wear her real fashion clothes in this simulation game. As this was a task her tutors could not help her with they pointed her towards Photoshop with the intent to create and adapt digital images of her favourite clothing and then projecting them onto the avatars in Sims using appropriate game 'mods'.
And apparently in many hours of hard work she did mange to work out not only how to do this but also to showcase it to her fellow female students; she was also asked to train those who were keen to learn how to do it themselves.

Thereafter Jade learnt how to upload her clothes onto the Internet for more people to use them thus obtaining glowing feedback and boosting her normally low self-esteem in the process.
The next natural step for Jade was to replicate this approach for the Second Life platform with the difference that this time she could actually sell her products for Linden Dollars and ultimately make real money.

Whilst she was undertaking these tasks Jade spent a considerable time within certain Affinity Spaces talking to others and reading relevant sources material. In the process Jade did not only learn the specific technical skills within the context of this project but managed to acquire several important transferable skills such as problem-solving and (online) communication, information literacy and teaching skill, and  finally how to run a (virtual) business. And all this outside the formal learning space.

This obviously begs the question - are we over-teaching during formal contact hours and if yes how can we engage students to learn more informally outside reduced class time. Because there is always the temptation by some learners not to engage in the absence of controlled and supervised learning it will be the role and responsibility of the tutor to identify appropriate activities and affinity spaces tailored to the individual learner and their project.
This way the student may transform from a consumer to a 'prosumer' on the Web i.e. a person who generates and produces content of interest to the wider learning community.

Is this what is meant by Education 2.0?

I'm hoping to write my dissertation on wikis.

Topic: Analysis of the use of wikis as a preparation for an oral debate on German history (East vs West during 1961-89)

 

 Setting: Face-to-face language teaching, students prepare for and present debate in groups

My motivation (purpose): Last semester one of the assessments was to present a debate in groups. While the students did quite well in the debates, I felt they would have benefited from a more intense preparation, reading more texts, finding more arguments for their views and generally preparing more long-term. I also felt they could have collaborated more effectively. I would like to see whether a wiki would help them achieve these aims.

 

Research questions:

 1. To find out whether students find wikis useful to prepare them for an oral debate (Method: questionnaire)

2. To find out whether the use of wikis encourages students to engage deeply with the topic (Method: observation )

3. To find out whether the students collaborate effectively while using the wiki (Methods: observation and questionnaires)

4.To find out whether the preparation with the help of wikis actually improves the oral performance (Method: observation)

Methodology: Grounded Theory using a qualitative approach, though I may include some quantitative analysis of the data from the questionnaires.

My thoughts on these research questions:

Research question 1: This is a very subjective question, and students won't be able to compare their experiences to a similar situation without the use of wikis. I would maybe need to find criteria for "usefulness", i.e. how enjoyable was the experience, how much do you think you learnt...

Research question 2: I would need to find some criteria to measure how deeply students engage with the topic, for instance number of entries, how many books were read, how much did they reflect, argue, comment etc

Research question 3: Again I would need to find criteria for measuring this, for instance equality of participation, number of comments, etc

Research question 4: This would be very tricky to analyse without comparison to a different group. I could use my experience as a language teacher to assess whether the students are doing particularly well. However, every group of students is different. Criteria I could maybe use would be: How well prepared are they , how fluently are the students speaking, how broad is their vocabulary, how knowledgeable are they, how well do they interact in speech.

 

A different problem: Using a written plattform to prepare for an oral debate
Using wikis to prepare for an oral debate will mean that students will also need to concentrate on their written skills, and this could lead to an additional research question:

5. To find out whether wikis can support learning to write in a foreign language (Methods: observation, interview with student tutor)

My thoughts on
Research question 5: Criteria for this might be number of corrections, quality of language. The students would be interacting with a student tutor to help them with the language in their wikis, and an interview with the student tutor would give additional information on how effective wikis are to improve written skills.

Marking the wikis

In order to motivate students to use the wikis I would give them a goup mark for the wiki. This needs to be thought through. It could be a mark for the end product or several marks at intervals (though this would cause a heavy work load). Criteria might be number of contributions, comments, corrections, richness of content, correctness (of end product).

Important: I need to remember though that the written wiki and the oral debate are two different tasks and require different skills. So research questions 1-4 just refer to preparation of the oral debate, whereas research question 5 leads to a different area.

Would it be better to just concentrate on questions 1-4?

I do think question 5 is quite interesting as well.

 

 

All comments are very welcome!

 

Know Your Island

This is the name of the game we have chosen to put forwad as our Google Earth team project.
Its aim is to test the user's geographical knowledge of islands.
However instead of just looking them up on a world map in this exercise you will be given the opportunity to 'fly' along parts of or its entire coastline.
The learning objective is to concentrate on the coastal features as the user will be traveling a predetermined path for about a minute. Certain geographical features such as the extent of agricultural land, rocky coastline, sandy beaches and marshland will provide important clues, as will the degree of habitation (towns/cities) and the presence of ports, bridges or jetties.
The game can be played individually but also as a group, competitively, based on a point score:

Rules
The rules are as follows:
1. Click on the file link at the bottom and play back the flight tour; if you can't work out the island repeat the flight, a maximum of four times
2. If you have not identified the island after the fourth time select the 'Places of Interest', and 'Borders and Lables' option from the Layers feature in GoogleEarth and try to identify the island using the landmark names
3. If you have not been able to identity the island at this stage start 'zooming out', one incremental step at a time until you know its name.
Points awarded as follows:

1. If you recognize the island on the first tour you get 10 points, if you recognize it after the second run you get 8 points, at the third attempt 6 points and at the fourth time you get 4 points.
2. If you need to switch on the landmark layers in order to identify the island you get 2 points
3. If you have to make use of the 'zooming out' option you will get for each incremental 'zooming out' a penalty point, for example if you zoom out one increment and then recognize the island you get get -1 points, if you need to scroll out three increments you score -3
4. Note down the score for each island you identify and move to the next one
5. Total the number of all points during your island hopping to obtain a final score
6. The person with the highest score wins

P.S. Is is recognized that there is a strong local bias within this game hence the choice of islands should be adapted to the nationality/residency of the player. For example local versions of the game may be created for particular countries such as Greece, Spain or Denmark.

Target group: GCSE to A-level Geography students
Below is the example of the first island tour, called Island1. Click on the file to launch GoogleEarth:

island1.kmz  

I liked this paper's no-nonsense approach (and it was written in a style I could access easily). Several good bits of content:-

From the paper:-

 The essence of the challenge for all educators in the 21st century is to get the learners to:-

• read more widely
• see more clearly
• think more clearly
• (why am I thinking of the song "Day By Day"?)
• challenge authority on every occasion
• more importantly get learners to challenge themselves

 The aim is to promote the free-flow of information and ideas in the interest of all and to promote a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

 Information Literacy is the ability to deal with complexities of the current information environment - it must

• subsume all the skill-based literacies but not be restricted by them
• not be restricted to any one technology / technology group
• centre around understanding, meaning and context

 So much e-learning remains as e-teaching (the provision of lecture material online) - is this due to poor information literacies amonst the tutors?

 The "information literate" are those who know when they need information and are able to identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively use the information to address and resolve problems

 The Australian Information Literacy Standards

An information literate individual has learned how to learn and is able to:-

1. recognise a need for information
2. determine the extent of the information needed
3. access the needed information efficiently
4. evaluate the information and its sources
5. incorporate selected information into their knowledge base
6. use information effectively to accomplish a purpose
7. understand the economic, legal, social and cultural issues around the use of information
8. access and use information ethically and legally
9. classify / store / maipulate the information generated
10. recognise information literacy as a pre-requisite for lifelong learning

I sorry but I found this paper rather dull although it did contain some little gems of information I could use.

Firstly, Barrett attests that most graduates did not have a clear sense of their research aims at the start of the process - they fumbled about and were guided by colleagues, tutors and supervisors. This is so good to hear as I am usually in the same boat. The important thing here is that this is probably when most of the searching of libraries and whatnot occurs - so that searching can at bet be unfocussed and at worst be blind fishing. Without good IL skills the period of fuzziness is probably an awful lot longer than it needs to be.

The second little gem was that most students lack personal collections and substantial subject expertise. Again, I thought I was alone but so many people I have spoken to lack a personal collection or just have haphazard piles of documents in cupboards or piled on desks. From this knowledge I feel I can make best use of the web-based personal catalogues offered by del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl It, Zimbio and the like. All the tools are there - we just don't use them. I shall catalogue all my piles of paper.

Hellfire!

What a paper to start us off on! It was like pulling teeth but I got there in the end I think. A good (content) opener for the course as it provided so much food for thought.

Intertextuality has to exist otherwise we would have to write everything de novo each time - scientific advances would be limited to the lifespan of any one scientist.

Newspapers of ten translate the "official" laguage of politicians and the like into the vocabulary of the the day-to-day spoken word (or rather the newspaper's interpretation of the spoken word). Why do they have to do this? Is it that "official" language is not digestable by the masses or are we losing the ability to understand "proper" vocabulary? I fear I do not know the answer to this!

From the paper:-

 Many non-commodity institutions are being drawn more and more into the commodity model and the matrix of consumerism - they are under pressure to "package" their "commodities" and "sell" them to "consumers".

 Presuppositions (based on prior texts of the text-producers or by other texts) can be manipulative as well as sincere - they are a good way of manipulating people as they are very difficult to challenge.

 A genre is not only a particular text type but a particular process of producing, distributing and consuming that text

 A discourse is a particular way of constructing a subject matter. E.g. Medicine is an area of knowledge constructed from a technological and scientific perspective unlike that of "alternative medicine"

Although this paper was a good read I do feel that it took an awfully long time to say not a lot.

Reading the paper did improve my understanding of sequential and cultural contexts in speech utterances and the importance of considering these when analysing dialogues.

Understanding the relationships between conversation participants helps understand the conversation through analysing the dialogue - are the participants on an equal footing or does one have some sort of superiority over another? This would change the giving and receiving of an utterance.

From the paper:-

 There is no point looking at a single utterance without considering their place in the local sequence of utterances and there is no point just looking at their sequential place if the contextual details are available. Contextual knowledge is a luxury though

 The analyst must know the cultural as well as the sequential rules for the use of certain utterances to correctly analyse the dialogue

I enjoyed this paper a lot more than I thought I would - although it got a bit techie in some areas I think I got a lot ot of it - mainly the highlighting that any discourse is a product of its participants. Those participants bring to that discourse their own expectations and histories, what had led them to have tose expectations, and external influences such as institutional / social policies and discourses.

Reading this paper has made me quite excited about doing some actual discourse analysis. I know I've got a lot more reading to do first but I think I'm starting to understand the complexity of the subject and intend to have a fisrt bash at things quite soon - I think I'll record one of my sessions at work next week and see what I can do about analysing it.

Good things I got from the paper - the actual process

Analysis of the teacher-pupil discourse

• Looked at how the teacher and all of the pupils interacted
• Was there any encouragement / discouragement? What forms did these take?
• How was discourse encouraged / discouraged? Did these change from pupil to pupil / over the time of the study?
• How much did each pupil talk and did this change over the course of the study?
• Was the students' talk "useful"? Did it use the vocabulary of the subject or help others in the class forward their understanding of the subject?

Analysing the teacher's intentions within the discourse

• Why did the teacher behave the way she did in the classroom?
• Where some pupils encouraged / discouraged more than others? If so then why?
• What were the teacher's expectations of the discourse and were these satisfied? Waht are the sources / aspects which have defined the teacher's expectations?
• How controlling was the teacher in the classroom? Did this have an effect on the discourse?
• What assuptions were made by the teacher in the classroom and did these have an effect on the overall discourse?
• Are there any sorts of pressures acting on the teacher which could have / did have an effect on her in the classroom/ If so, how did they manifest themselves?

Alignment of teacher's intentions with policy / institutional discourse

• Did the teacher's actions support the policies of the institution / society or not?
• How did policies and institutional discourses manifest themselves in the classroom and did they affect the classroom discourse in a beneficial / detrimental way?
• Did the teacher manage to achieve or advance the curriculum requirements or not? How? Why?

So much food for thought!

I ended up quite disappointed with this paper - it started out quite well and then just sort of fizzled out and I'm not sure that the so-called paradoxes were paradoxical enough to write a peper on them. I feel that they are more like "considerations" than bases.

The best part of this paper for me was the discussion about the over-romanticising of the idea that the provision of material will overcome the digital divide in some sort of magic way - it will, prpobably, actually increase the divide. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink! Also, so much of the world don't have the basic access so providing them with more things they can't access with help not one jot!

I did like the idea of not just throwing away the old traditional literacies though - use them as building blocks and as an access to the digital / information literacies required in a digital future.

From the paper:-

 Does the possession of multimedia literacy or the lack of it create a new divide between those who have it and those who don't? Will it make those who do not have the literacies into passive consumers of pre-packaged information?

 What is the relationship between traditional literacies and the new multimedia literacies? This question needs to be addressed if those with weaker IL skills are not to be left behind / out

 Competence in traditional literacies are often the gateway into new literacies.

 "We strive towards post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition" - I hate this comment! It makes us sound as if we have been languishing in some sort of knowledge-poor Dark Age and the industrial age has been over for about 50 years or so - comments like this are way too late!

http://eduspaces.net/antmcneill/weblog/243247.html

I tend to use 'text' in a loosely literary/cultural theory way to designate pretty much any sort of signifying practice: adverts, songs, newpaper articles, television programmes, txt msgs etc. 

Whenever I use it, i'm reminded of my first reading of lit theory and the blurring of the opposition between the particularity of literary texts and the general textuality of the culture.