As part of the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning", this semester's cohort have been made up of 4 teams of 6 people who will work together as a team to either construct game-based tasks (for others to participate in) or take part in game-based tasks that have been given to us, as well as giving presentations to the other teams.

I am part of "Team 2" who consist of:

• Bill Babouris
• Myself
• Chris Hambley
• Eleisha John
• Marie Leadbetter
• Nicholas Palmer

I am very excited about the potential of group-based activities where the participants are at a distance and working remotely using a range of technologies like discussion boards, Skype and Second Life. It would be good to try a develop some kind of "good practice" guide that can be passed on to others who are also planning on this "virtual" approach to group work.

As a results of the "introduction to digital environments for learning" (IDEL) module and the research that I have been doing around the topic of digital literacy; I have crossed Marc Prensky's path many times over; he should also add agent provocateur to his list of roles. It started with my IDEL essay called "Bridging the Generation Gap: A Pathfinder's Tale" and this has led to presenting a talk called "The Generation Game: Exploding the myth behind the Net and Google Generations" to a number of organisations.

It's quite clear that I have issues with Prensky and the whole digital dichotomy of "natives" and "immigrants". These terms, according to Prensky, were coined by John Perry Barlow (1996, para. 12) in his "declaration of the independence of cyberspace". Prensky (2001a) and others have popularised (and added more to) these stereotypes to that they are now firmly cemented into the public domain like some kind of meme. Like Bayne and Ross (2007), I share the following sentiments which I explored in an earlier blog post:

"In the current political climate, talk of immigrants and natives inevitably evokes complexities and anxieties around migration, integration, and racial and cultural differences in Western society."

Indeed, Palfrey and Gasser (2008) want to reclaim the term "digital native" to mean something else entirely and suggests that:

“...rather than calling Digital Natives a generation – an overstatement, especially in light of the fact that only 1 billion of the 6 billion people in the world even have access to digital technologies – we prefer to think of them as a population … The vast majority of young people born in the world today are not growing up as Digital Natives.”

Prensky is rather keen on using a quote attributed to Dr Bruce D. Perry (now of Child Trauma Academy) which goes like "different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures". In earlier copies of his now infamous papers, Dr Perry went under the name of "Dr Bruce D. Berry" and it's taken 8 years and a lot of flack before Prensky finally corrects it. At the heart of Prensky's work seems to lie a lot of scaremongering rhetoric that's not backed up with any references for the reader to check his claims against, it's quite an odd thing to do considering Prensky has 3 Master level degrees behind him. It's little wonder that Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008) chastise Prensky and others after him by suggesting that:

“...proponents arguing that education must change dramatically to cater for the needs of these digital natives have sparked an academic form of ‘moral panic’ using extreme arguments that have lacked empirical evidence.”

This was echoed earlier by McKenzie (2007), using a little more sensationalist language, who accuses Prensky of being "guilty of 'arcade scholarship'". 

However, Baroness Susan Greenfield, the eminent neuroscientist and current Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, comes to Prensky's aid by suggesting that further research would be needed to see if there might be a link with the three-fold increase of the drug Ritalin over the last 10 years and the increased exposure of young children to unsupervised and lengthy hours in front of a [computer] screen which, in turn, means their young brains would get use to rapid responses (Settle, 2008).

I do agree with Prensky on one thing and that is the need for learning professionals to be able to "speak" using both "legacy" and "future" languages through the lens of "digital literacy" so that students are better prepared and better equiped to deal with the changing nature of their digital worlds.

References

Barlow, J.P. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. [online]. Available at: http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html [Accessed 26 January 2009] 

Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (2007). The "Digital Native" and "Digital Immigrant": A Dangerous Opposition. Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education. December 2007.

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), pp. 775-786. [online]. Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/bjet/2008/00000039/00000005/art00002 [Accessed 26 January 2009]

McKenzie, J., (2007). Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions and Digital Deprivation. From Now On, 17(2). [online]. Available at: http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html [Accessed 26 January 2008]  

Palfrey, J. & Gasser, U. (2008). Born Digital: Understand the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books. 

Prensky, M. (2001b). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants II: Do They Really Think Differently?. On the Horizon, 9(6), NCB University Press.

Prensky, M. (2001a). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), NCB University Press.

Settle, M. (2008). Is computer use changing children? BBC News, 15.08.2008. [online]. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7564152.stm [Accessed 26 January 2009]

Prior to the "Understanding Learning in the Online Environment" module that I undertook last semester, I had used Delicious and Connotea as my principle web services for collecting, storing and sharing bookmarks, news articles and journal articles with my colleagues and interested parties.

On the module, Hamish Macleod suggested that we might like to create a Diigo account to share any bookmarks and resources around how learning could be facilitated through an online environment. The tool is very easy to use and allows you to create lists and groups. I had created a list for the learning challenge that I was undertaking at the time. I am now using Diigo to collect, store, compile and share on anything pertaining with gaming and, in particular, game-based learning - this collection can be found at the following address: http://www.diigo.com/list/heywayne/gaming

This is the first week of the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning" module. Over the next 12 weeks, we will be exploring the world of digital games in terms of ideas, concepts, issues and controversies and in particular how games can aid with the learning process - what lessons can be learnt if any? I do believe that exploration and play are the building blocks of learning.

But before we begin our adventure into the realm of gaming and the gamer-learner, we must start with that time old tradition of storytelling - the back story or rather my back story which will provide some historical context to my relationship and engagements with games.

I was never fond of traditional sports like football or rugby and as such a lot of my peers felt that I must be a misfit or something. But I did enjoy games that were created from my own imagination involving LEGO, Meccano and toy figures. This extended to the traditional board games like "Cludeo" (a personal favourite), chess, draughts, "monopoly", "snakes and ladders" (another favourite) which I played with friends and family - so the socialisation of game playing became an important aspect for me. I was very keen (and still am) on "Top Trumps" and other card games like poker, 21 and cribbage.

By the time I reached my teens, this would be the 1980s with the advent of the arcade games, like "Pac Man" (another favourite), "Asteroids" and "Breakout" and some of the earlier computer games. I owned a Binatone TV Master that played a number of rudimentary games like "Pong" and "Tennis", this was later superceded with an Acorn Electron which ran a version of BBC BASIC and allowed me to play such games as "Repton" and the near legendary "Elite" which made use of wireframe technology and was one of the first games to make use of the "back story" in the form of a mini novel. At college, I had become hooked on the game version of Douglas Adams' "The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", which was a text-based role playing game (it has since been updated by a friend of mine who went to the same college and was a collaborator of Douglas Adams).

However, these early games soon lost their appeal on me as that all important socialisation factor was missing - while some people could be engaged with the competitive nature of trying to beat the computer it lacked the camaraderie. I became aware of the role playing game genre or RPG that involved creating characters and becoming them to be able to perform a range a series of tasks or activites usually within fantastical settings that required creativity, imagination and team work. The RPG that I enjoyed the most was based upon H.P. Lovecraft's stories and was called "Call of Cthulhu". What struck me the most about this game was the narratory skills of "The Keeper" which, if played well, was atmospheric and damn-right scary - here you were completely immersed with the story and the character which you are playing. Whilst there were a load of game-based resources for this game, I had preferred to create my own "Call of Cthulhu" scenarios inspired by the works of Lovecraft, Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie and such like - if only the Internet was available at the time.

In the mid 1990s which saw the rise of the Internet within the Higher Education sector, I had developed a SF / murder mystery game called "Murder on the Aurora" which was developed using HTML and Javascript and was created to help new users to the World Wide Web get to grips with this new, emergent technology.

Whilst I don't own a Wii, X-box or any of the PlayStation variants, I have become interested in the alternate reality game or ARG phenomena which have been made popular by TV shows like "Lost", "Spooks", "Heroes" and "Torchwood - again, this plays heavily on story telling and having the gamer to "live out" the role.

That's my "back story", so let the adventure begin...

This is now Week 4 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I've been a little naughty in that I have allowed the "Learner Analysis" assignment to interfere with the LC. The "Learner Analysis" assignment is due to be submitted on Sunday 26th October and I have probably spent more than is actually necessary on it.

I am back on the "I Will Knot" website to refamiliarise myself with the knots that I was practicing before the assignment got in the way. It's amazing how much you quickly forget because you haven't been practicing to the point where it "sticks" or "clicks" into place. At the moment, I am practicing once with the knot with the aid of the step-by-step video and then a further three times without the aid of the video - the trick is to try and repeat this tomorrow without the aid of the video at all!

On the subject of the "I Will Knot" website, I mentioned to a colleague of mine who teaches Chemistry at my University and has just been appointed a Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator for my Faculty that I was doing this learning challenge as part of my MSc and showed her the website I was using. She was most impressed by it - NOT because it showed you how to tie knots in easy step-by-step videos BUT how the idea behind the easy step-by-step videos could be used to show a particular Science experiment / practical to a group of students.

This visual aspect to learning is indeed a powerful motivator, and if done properly it could instruct students better than just reading it out of a textbook.

It's Week 1 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I have set aside 30 minutes to practice the art of knotcraft. The first website I went to was "Knots: How to Tie Knots"; I was not impressed with the rather short but pedestrian instructions with the naff looking illustrations - if I was having trouble understanding how to tie easy knots, what was it going to be like with the more complex ones?

The next website, "Ropers Knot Page", has slightly longer, but equally, pedestrian instructions with rather confusing looking illustrations that don't do anything to enlighten me as to what I am suppose to be doing. I am beginning to wonder if I have chosen an appropriate learning challenge - certainly the free resources I am using are not explaining themselves very well.

My next resource, "I Will Knot", is something of a revelation to me. It uses a mixture of short, sharp videos and short, but still, pedestrian instructions. But it is the videos that work for me. When it comes to something that involves a motor skill, I am someone who likes to be shown so that I can mimic and keep practicing that skill. In that sense I could be considered as a kinesthetic learner.

This also suggests to me that if you want someone to learn something online, the materials / resources you create will be dependent upon the task / skills / knowledge / information that you wish to convey to your students.

So, do you use drawings, photographs, videos, audio recordings or text to put across something that needs to be learnt? Should this resource be passive or interactive? Can the learner work in isolation or does this require a collaborative / community dimension?

Interesting questions indeed!

Here we are again, a new term and a term module, this time it's "Understanding Learning in the Online Environment" led by the incomparable Hamish Macleod. This is my third module to date and its looking good. My only concern is that 10% of the course assessment is based upon me writing something worthwhile on the discussion board on a reasonably regular basis.

Interestingly, I have just read in Section 2 (B5) of the QAA (2004) "Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education" that students should have:

"where appropriate, regular opportunities for inter-learner discussions about the programme, both to facilitate collaborative learning and to provide a basis for facilitating their participation in the quality assurance of the programme"

One of the other assessed pieces of work is the "Learning Challenge" which contributes about 20% of the overall mark. Some of the examples of a learning challenge included juggling three balls; performing a conjuring trick; origami; writing a computer program; or tying a complex knot. Given that my sense of balance and eye / hand co-ordination is shot to pieces, any notion of doing juggling or riding a unicycle was quickly dismissed as a bad idea. Having programmed in a variety of different computer languages over the past 20 years or so didn't fill me with any great sense of desire.

The combination of not being in the scouts and being a fan of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" led to the appealing idea of trying to attempt to perform a range of knots that could have practical applications should I find myself inexplicably castaway upon an exotic island, a bit like the cast from "Lost".

Based upon Damien DeBarra's initial idea of using social bookmarking for the course, Hamish Macleod suggested that we could give Diigo a try. Unlike Delicious (which I use a lot), Diigo allows users to create public / private groups for people to collaboratively work in - sharing resources and research material. Diigo, also, has the ability to highlight and comment on pieces of text. So I created a list of bookmarks on Diigo to support by learning challenge with knots - the list goes by the unimaginative title of "Get Knotted".

So, I've got the guides and tutorials that I need to perform the difficult knot exercises; but I was lacking that one vital piece of apparatus - the rope! I dutifully went off to C and H Fabrics where I purchased myself about a metre's length of soft cord. This wasn't without incident either; the shop assistant gaved me such a funny look over my purchasing of this piece of cord. Heaven knows what went through her mind as she was serving me.

I now have everything I need for my 10 (more like 8 to 9) week learning challenge. I shall be using the blog to record my thoughts about the actual cognitive processes involved in tying a knot and the strategies that I have employed to try and master the exercises.

References

QAA, (2004). Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education. QAA [online]. Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeOfPractice/ [Accessed 23 September 2008]

It was going to be my intention to keep a semi-regular-ish posts on my engagement with the "Effective Course Design for e-Learning" module. As you can see - this didn't happen!

The first week introduced us to some of the current theories around styles of course design (Toohey, 1999) and how some of them might have been adopted based upon personal preferences or, even, encouraged by external political pressures and agencies.

Weeks 2 to 4 explored the different approaches, that were:

• Traditional or discipline-based approach
• Performance or systems-based approach
• Cognitive approach
• Experiential or personal relevance approach
• Socially critical approach

Using a combination of different readings and a wiki to collect and collate thoughts about the readings, looking for real-world examples of these different approaches in action and suggesting additional resources to help build up a coherent bank of knowledge - I found myself quite enamoured with the socially critical approach that attempted to look at a particular issue that needed to be debated and discussed with a view to making significant changes to how that issue was currently operating.

Whilst I felt that this module would be enormously valuable to me as a learning technologist who is advising and developing staff to use the University's learning systems like Blackboard to the best of their abilities - I also felt hampered that I didn't have enough traditional teaching experience to actually get to the nitty-gritty of some of the concepts and ideas that were presented. Something that would have quite a profound effect upon my assignment.

In weeks 5 to 7, my peers were put into groups (and named after fruit) to discuss, devise and develop a miniature "learning event" around a topic or theme that was of interest to us and using one or more of the approaches that we had been looking at for the past 4 weeks. The other members of the group would then take part in the "learning event" and feedback upon it. I wanted to do something that involved the socially critical approach and was rather inspired by the work done by Turnley (2005). I wanted my participants to look at the developments within the so-called "Web 2.0" phenomena and how that would impact upon and enhance their research practices - I called this concept "Research 2.0", being a pun upon how people have used the notion of versioning to try and attempt to describe something that was different (and in some cases better!).

I used the Holyrood Park Elgg site to deliver the event and asked my participants to write a little critique - whilst they said that they enjoyed it; it was debateable as to whether any actual "learning" occured. These experiences would then form the basis of the reflective report - the feedback from that report suggested to me that I was being overly ambitious with what I wanted to achieve, especially with my lack of teaching experience - so I had probably chosen an approach that was best adopted by someone with considerably more teaching experience than myself.

Week 8 looked at assessment and how that was partly defined by well constructed aims and learning outcomes. Weeks 9 to 10 covered course evaluation and course usability; again my peers could have chosen which topic to spent 2 weeks exploring in some depth.

Finally, in weeks 11 to 12, we spent that time working on our assignments which involved writing a course outline; a course rationale that explained our thinking and some semblance of a course that was constructed within some kind of learning environment. Despite the rather good mark for this assignment; I personally felt that I didn't spend enough time to do the course any justice - illness, project meetings across the country and a much needed holiday got in the way of that.

The big thing that I learnt from this module is that online courses don't start with the technology - it begins using pen, paper, a whole lot of thinking and several cups of coffee later as to what you want to try and achieve with the course and what you expect people to get out of it, in terms of what is learnt and what you want them to experience and how you challenge their thinking in the process. 

References

Moon, J., (2002). The module and programme development handbook. London: KoganPage 

Toohey, S., (1999). Designing Courses for Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Turnley, M., (2005). Contextualized design: Teaching critical approaches to web authoring through redesign projects. Computers and Composition. 22(2), pp. 131-148.

THis is the first blog post in Holyrood Park for me - just to test out how it all works

Whilst almost all official mention of these tests has disappeared from the Internet, they remain in my thoughts*. The tests only reached the pilot phase of development, and I was lucky enough to be placed in one of the schools that had been ear-marked for testing. They were aimed at year 9 pupils, or those at the end of their compulsory Key Stage 3 ICT programmes.

This test was a first for many schools as it delivered the exam in the form of an on-screen assessment. The software was a mock up of a traditional GUI interface such as Windows XP or Mac OS X. Pupils received their test questions ‘via email’ (time released by the software) in the built in email client. The aim was to put to use all the skills they should have learnt during their 3 years of ICT classes.

As recommended by Bull and McKenna (2003), the students were exposed to the new software environment up to 7 weeks before the tests for around an hour per week (more if they wanted) in order to familiarise themselves with the layout of the applications and the available tools. Many (senior) teachers criticised the tests as they thought it criminal not to test students in the environment that they had learnt in – in my school this was Windows XP. They assume that will be the only environment that the students will use outside of school in the workplace, therefore question the need to ever learn a new environment. This simplistic view of ICT from senior management (and curricula level) is one of the reasons I have moved away from teaching it this year. If anything, the use of a new software environment helped us (as teachers) to identify those students who had been learning surface level routines in XP, rather than a deep understanding of what they were actually doing.

From the reading I have already conducted around this topic I can tell that this environment was an innovation in CAA. Firstly, it shied away from the traditional MCQs and Boolean questions that would be expected, in favour of contextualised tasks. This was made possible by the sophistication of the assessment system, which was also to check the file structures and contents at the end of the exam and keep a record of how students performed specific tasks. One downside was that there was no instant feedback for the teacher or student as the marks had to be independently moderated for anomalies.

Just before the final pilot went ahead in May 2007, it was announced that the tests was not be introduced compulsorily as expected for summative exams, instead they would be made available for formative assessment as and when teachers and students were ready. Probably a wise decision as there would be no real benefit for this kind of summative assessment for the pupils’ learning or the teachers’ teaching. The primary role of the summative test would be to provide accountability and fuel more league table competitiveness.

In summary – this is a good and useful assessment technology which was partially introduced with less than useful intentions, but held its own in pilot testing on a fairly wide scale. This type of software will be a useful assessment tool for early stages of ICT education.

 

* One of the remaining official documents can be found on a secondary school server here