Three years ago, I was involved with a project in East Lothian which looked at the potential of the Sony PSP as a tool for learning. Here are a few shots of the kind of activities we used the PSP for: 

• It doesn't appear to gauge the current ability of the player as well as a game like ‘My Word Coach'  for example.
• It keeps thinking that my written ‘8' is a ‘2', my ‘7' is a ‘1' (it won't give me time to put a score through the ‘7'- first game where my writing has proved to be problematic)- I consider myself to have pretty good hand writing, but possibly not when under pressure.
• It has a really annoying repetitive tune (and I have never said that about any game before- I am getting old!).

Here is quick insight into what I think of the Nintendo DS.

My Word Coach- This game is brilliant for learning spelling and developing vocabulary. It is very cleverly designed. It adapts to the individual learner therefore setting a learning pace. If you make lots of mistakes, it will challenge you with an easier level and vice-versa. Last night I showed this game to a very fluent colleague of mine. I imagine that tonight's challenge will be quite hard! The only thing I dislike about it is the fact that each round of words is timed. Timing is fine in exam conditions, but in an exam you are not actively learning. The time/pressure factor is something that I think can stall learning- but I guess that is one of the basics of game playing.

• Potential-First impression is that these machines will have more potential in the primary sector and probably more of an impact on boys than girls.
• Interactivity- You are actually writing. I found this similar to writing on an interactive white board. You are using hand/eye coordination, not just moving a joy-stick and clicking.
• Communication-They can connect to other DS machines allowing users to communicate and play each other's games.
• Size-They are compact- anytime anywhere learning.

Crazy talk is an application that allows the user to take an image (or portrait) and digitally bring it to life. Here is  my five minute attempt- [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=2103633650100969" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

I hope I don't look and sound like that in real life!  :P You can edit lots of features though I only had time to play with a couple of facial expressions and the voice morphing (for the time being). This software will be fantastic for encouraging writing; what is a character without a script?!

iClone is another piece of software that allows you to edit and personalise your own avatar, create scenes, edit lighting effects and character emotions. It is similar to Media Stage. Here is my five minute attempt:  [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/tZ0AwljO6CU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] If you look closely you should see that the avatar's face is familiar (I don't think I look too dissimilar!)   ;-)

I know my clips are pretty silly, but this stuff is really fun! I can see it really enthusing and engaging youngsters- They will be learning without knowing it. 

This blog post is a collection of thoughts and notes from two papers which discuss Secondlife.

 Notes from Paper 1: Pedagogy and Learning in the Virtual World of Second Life®

By Leslie Jarmon, Ph.D.

Second Life is an extremely dynamic online platform that offers its users endless opportunities. As Jarmon (et al) discuss:

"Teachers and students are creating ways to integrate other computer-supported communication and research tools into their SL activities. They are importing image collections from Facebook, MySpace, and flickr, forming study groups in Google groups, importing spreadsheet data for genetics class, importing PowerPoint materials, linking to standard web URLs in SL (called SLURLS), connecting with RSS feeds, creating video content, and streaming digital audio." 

The table below from Jarmon (et al) paper summarises the costs and benefits of SL.

Notes from paper 2: The Theatre of Performance: Potential for Role-Play Training in Second Life

Morse, Littleton, MacLeod and Ewins

Image: Holyrood Park in Second Life 

Study investigates the potential of role play within SL for use in employee appraisals.

• Standard avatar costumes provided
• Involved Students from MSc in eLearning
• Real life role play involves immediate interpretation of, and reation to signals from others
• Online text based role play allows for more time for reflection, and potentially the time to consult mentors or others during a scenario without others knowing,
• Virtual worlds may offer advantages in connection with motivation and play
• Online roleplay potentiall allows for greater suspension of disbelief during a scenario than in real life equivilents.
• Identity exploration takes us beyond the physical notions of passport, fingerprint or iris. Exploring one’s own identity and perhaps experimental identities, and thus being prompted to consider how others might react or think, is the essence of this enquiry. The ability to imagine the situation of another could be extended by rehearsing to be an ‘other’ personality. 
• Virtual worlds, including Second Life, offer opportunities to explore these different ‘ways of being’. One can create a new physical representation, character and, to an extent, skills and attributes. The environment can change over time. Both text and voice can be used to exchange and interact. For participants there is creativity and potential for experiment. What is the impact of creating such identities?
• A person’s ability to create, interpret, and evaluate the models underlying the simulations plays a large role in his or her ability to use them wisely (Prensky 2009, p4).
• Good initial learning should promote good practice, but poor skill and understanding may require both unlearning and re-learning (Lewin, 1951; Becker et al., 2006) – an expensive business for all concerned

• Potential participants were identified on the basis of having some employment experience and thus some possible direct experience of performance appraisal in the workplace, and were approached individually after class. Voluntary agreement to participate was secured from 10 people who indicated some such experience, either as appraiser or as appraisee

   

• The argument for taking role-play online is that the fantasy environment that can be created there can contribute to the realism of the role being played. The virtual environment can both augment the narrative of the exercise by the addition of an appropriate backcloth and props, and can remove the distraction of known faces and mundane surroundings.
• While our observations indicated a high level of engagement on the part of the participants in the task in hand, we also observed an important element of 11 disengagement which we would like to discuss, and which we intend to build upon in subsequent studies.
• person engaged in the role-play was able to react, out of character, to social interaction in the role-play without that reaction interrupting and contaminating the ongoing narrative
• Gee: Three Identities, real world identity, virtual identity and projective identity
• One future area for exploration and development will be to design approaches to online role-play that allow us to harness the potential of this projective identity.

Image: Role Play Appraisal 

 In my area of work in schools, SL is not a platform that we would consider utilising. The primary reason for this comes down to child protection. As you will see in the image below, *all* types of people can use Second Life. There is a lack of control, over who children potentially can interact with and means that it simply isn't possible to take such a risk. It could be argued that we are not teaching our children to be aware of online dangers and be responsible for their own online behaviour, but that is for another post and possibly my dissertation!

I

Image: Indecent man in Second Life  

I have begun the planning of the format for my review assignment. Here are a few images of this weekend's subjects hard at work! :-) 

Statement from the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s consultation document on a UK e-learning strategy: We believe that technology should follow the learning and teaching objectives and not the other way round. Cousin, G. (2005).

Cousin argues that statements such as these neglect the fact that the technology and the mediums through which education is conducted are themselves the pedagogy. Second Cousin argues that technology should not be considered merely to be in the service of humans. Statements such as these he argues block our view of the full potential of computer technology for education purposes.

In this respect I believe that Cousin makes a good point because education is no different from any application domain for technology. Many of the life style enhancements we have experienced over the centuries have come as a result of experiments or accidents that had unforeseeable results. If education policy makers make an effort to find out what technology experts are getting up to and creating, and consulting with them as to the potential benefits of latest developments for education, they will undoubtedly come up with ideas that would enhance pedagogy in ways that education practitioners wouldn’t even think of.

30 years ago when PC’s did a fraction of the number of calculations the modern PC can perform, and before someone thought of linking them all up using the telephone system so that information could be shared and retrieved on a global scale, I doubt that education policy makers included in their list of objectives, giving every teacher and student an email account where they could replicate documents, and exchange and share them in a manner that was more efficient than what was available using paper alone at the time.

The point is that technology can create teaching objectives that pedagogy hasn’t even thought of yet. That is why technology should work together hand in hand with pedagogy rather than technology being seen merely as a tool.

Rather than defining the objectives and then asking; Can technology help us achieve these objectives?  We should be asking: Where is education at the moment? Where is technology at the moment? Now what are our objectives taking into consideration what technology can do for education?

Keeping our identities everywhere, even in education:

This also relates to the question of our evolving identities. 4000 years ago, I would not have been able to learn anything because of my bad eyesight. My glasses or contact lenses today are an important part of who I am. In the same way as I wouldn’t have been able to do this e-learning course if it wasn’t for my digital identity though the internet. Cousin points out that:

Every kind of technology is an extension of our nervous system, which imprints out imagination with the realm of the possible.

By appreciating this concept of our evolving identities with technology, and that our identities should be part of who we are in every walk of life, and because our education is an important part of our lives, we should therefore develop our teaching practices to walk hand in hand with our identities. If I went back 4000 years into the past, my teacher might have said to me that those things on my eyes are witch craft and I have to throw them away! Similarly today, some teachers might frown on students having their mobile phones switched on in class today, even though they might be using them to take notes or even to record the lecture.

Our online Youtube and Facebook identities are part of who many of us are today. And instead of seeing them perhaps as distractions that have no place in the proverbial classroom, maybe we should see them as opportunities.

Shifting focus from the teacher to the student:

Our identities have expanded and they will continue to expand as we find new technologies to enhance our lifestyles. It is difficult therefore for an educational institution to be able to judge the most suitable method of education for individuals. Some students may prefer traditional learning methods at varying levels of tutor involvement, or some may prefer general guidance on learning requirements and goals and to be given a range of choices to achieve those goals.

If I were to define a student of the 1970’s, I would say:

Student (1970) = “Body(With everything included)+Books+Pen+Pencil+Paper+TV+Radio”.  

On the other hand:

Student (2011) = “Body(With everything included)+Books+Pen+Pencil+Paper+TV+Radio+Mobile Phone+ Laptop (MS Word+ PowerPoint+ Excel+ Notepad+ Mediaplayer+Computer Games + …..) +Notebook+Ipod+Ipad+ Internet (Facebook+Google+Twitter+WebCT+Email+Wikipedea +…..)”.

I could go on and the list is just going to get longer, the tools and options available to students to learn are increasing, and it is only natural that education establishments recognize this, and recognize that all this innovation cannot fit tightly into teacher led approaches otherwise teachers and student s would simply go insane.  Students must be allowed to make their own choices based on their own identities, and therefore learning has to become more flexible with student choice being at the heart of it.

 “Rather than integrate tools within a single context, the system should focus instead on coordinating connections between the user and a wide range of services offered by organizations and other individuals. Rather than interacting with the tools offered within the contexts supplied by a single provider, the PLE is concerned with enabling a wide range of contexts to be coordinated to support the goals of the user.”  Wilson, et al (2007).

 And of course this needs to be done with the guidance of the teachers because there is a great deal of information out there and students can easily become lost:

“The sheer abundance of idiosyncratic information on the internet can produce nomadic leaners who succumb to an endless search for a knowledge oasis rather than enter into the process of digging for one”  Cousin, G. (2005).

The huge variety of sources of information, and the ease at which this information can be found on the internet can easily lead to distraction. Whereas prior to the digital age when all that was available to us was our teachers and books, the learning process was a much guided one, confined by the learning material and methods at hand. It was more focused. I can find virtually anything about everything through my web browser today. Therefore self-motivation and teacher guidance we can argue have become more important than ever before so that students remain focused on what is important.

References:

Cousin, G. (2005). Learning from cyberspace in Land, R. and Bayne, S. (eds) Education in cyberspace. London, RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 117-129.

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Johnson, M., Beauvoir, P. Sharples, P. & Milligan, C. (2007). Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 3/2.

There is something solemn and awe-inspiring about famous people voicing their opinions in public. It is even more so when famous authorities in a given field voice their opinion in their book, with the bibliography section full of learned texts and a few intellectual heavyweights in the list of people thanked. I see something gravely dangerous, however, when an unquestionable scholar gives his/her private opinion on a subject only roughly related to his/her field of expertise. The danger, obviously, being wide acceptance of the scholar’s authority in the new subject based solely on his/her fame.

This, I truly believe, is the case with Hubert Lederer Dreyfus, professor of philosophy, particularly renowned for his insight into phenomenology, existentialism, Martin Heidegger’s understanding of “Being” as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/). And it’s this last bit that can make some believe incontrovertibly in prof. Dreyfus’s expertise in whatever subject connected with computers. The bigger, then, was my relief to read an academic article by Burbules, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, supporting my few concerns and adding many more of his own. From overgeneralizations, through ignorance of certain benefits of on-line interaction, through demonization of the internet as such, Dreyfus builds a very grim future for e-learning. What is perhaps the most striking to me as a teacher is prof. Dreyfus’s readiness to criticise matters of education while it is clear his views are based on elaborated comparisons and philosophical assumptions rather than classroom experience and knowledge of pedagogy. It is no wonder, than, that Dreyfus is reputed as a Luddite (http://www.beingintheworldmovie.com/ph-dreyfus.html), trying to oppose not only the inevitable but also the beneficial.

It is true that as a representative of a 1983 generation and a student of this course I am to a large extent biased by my conviction of the importance of omnipresent technology. And I acknowledge the fact that critique of the new is as needed as producing experts in the field. Still, I find more restrained commentaries such as Ray Land’s much more acceptable.

To finish my short disquisition I wish to reveal a comparison that comes to my mind when thinking of Dreyfus. Namely, I picture him as an experienced and mature sports journalist and a commentator. No matter how great his authority and expertise in the sport is, however, he still has very little chance of becoming a famous footballer or even a football team manager.

I appreciate Dreyfus’s book nonetheless, mainly for reassuring me why I want to be involved in e-learning at all.

I have been talking about this game for quite a while both online and off line. It was the first game that I bought for my iPad some six month ago. It is a traditional 'Physics' type game with a really user friendly interface. The aim of the game is to get the marble or other object to hit the red button using the simple laws of gravity. Here is an example  (level 5):

 As you can see, the red button is located at a height. When the marble is released, it fals from the port hole (top left) and drops down to the ground level where it pops off the ramp. Though it gains a little bit of height it is no where near the height of the red button. Therefore, the player must use some objects. The objects available in each level vary and can be seen at the top left of the screen. In this case, there are three long blocks. The player must arrange these blocks so that when the marble falls, it hits the objects which in turn hit the red button. Have a look at the next screen shot below:

 Here you can see the blocks arranged. When the marble drops hopefully it will hit the blocks and as they collapse, they in turn will hit the red button. See next screen shot:

As you can see, the marble has hit the blocks and causing them to tumble and hit the red button meaning:

Each level varies in the number of objects, number of marbles and number of obsticles that must be passed in trying to hit the red button. It requires thought, skill and precision. I found this game particularly addictive but wasn't sure why. This brings me back to thinking about last weeks reading. As Malone (1980) mentions edit in his paper-

What Makes Things Fun to Learn? Heuristics for Designing Instructional Computer Games

• "In order for a computer game to be challenging it must provide a goal whose attainment is uncertain
• In a sense, the very notion of “game” implies that there is an “object of the game”
• Uncertain outcome- A game is usually boring if the player is either certain to win or certain to loose.

Four ways to make the game uncertain:

1. Variable difficulty level

2. Multiple level goals (score keeping and speeded responses)

3. Hidden information

4. Randomness"

Thomas Malone (1980)

- All of which are prominant features of Gravity HD.

When I was teaching, my subject was Biology and Science. If I think about the Science curriculum (specifically Physics) I think that Gravity HD could be used to illustrate/enhnance  learning in a number of ways. If we look at Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence: Science Experiences and Outcomes, we can see how a digital game such as Gravity HD may be used:

• "Through everyday experiences and play with a variety of toys and other objects I can recognise simple types of forces and describe their desired effect.
  
• By investigating forces on toys and other objects I can predict the effect on shape or motion of those objects"

As part of the Digital Games Based Learning course we have been asked to write a review of a game. I am considering using Gravity HD. I was  thinking about producing a small video clip of the game rather than use endless screenshots. Though I am still in the very early stages of my planning, I would welcome any thoughts from any teachers out there

:-)

Notes from Week 3 Readings

Both Malone papers provide excellent basic theories of Games Based Learning. Although written some thirty years ago, the principles remain the same for digital games today. This post is a summary of the mainpoints.

What Makes Things Fun to Learn? Heuristics for Designing Instructional Computer Games

Thomas Malone (1980)

• In order for a computer game to be challenging it must provide a goal whose attainment is uncertain
• In a sense, the very notion of “game” implies that there is an “object of the game”
• Uncertain outcome- A game is usually boring if the player is either certain to win or certain to loose.

Four ways to make the game uncertain:

1. Variable difficulty level

2. Multiple level goals (score keeping and speeded responses)

3. Hidden information

4. Randomness

• Extrinsic fantasies depend on whether or not the skill is used correctly (see diagram below)
• Intrinsic fantasies- not only does that fantasy depend on the skill, but the skill also depends on the fantasy(see diagram below)

Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games

Thomas Malone (1981) 

This paper largely focusses on what makes computer games fun (intrinsic motivation) and the sysems behind the game.

• Game- Darts: diesigned to teach elementary students about fractions
• 8 differnet versions of the game to find out which features made the game enjoyable.

• Boys liked the fantasy of arrows popping ballons and girls appeared to dislike this fantasy
• Fantasies can be important in creating intrinsically motivating enviroments
• Implications for designing enjoyable user interface- the appeal of computer systems based on three categories: challenge, fantasy and curiosity (see below)