Read an article on the Metro this morning about a British martial-arts athlete training with the videogame Streetfighter.

Tyrone Robinson is one of the hopefuls for the 2012 games, and uses the game to hone his tactical and coordination skills. 

The vrtues of such games for training are extolled by Des Blackburn, Performance Analyst for  Great Britain Taekwondo:

"To complement their physical training our athletes are also encouraged, in their spare time, to play this type of game, as it is known that doing so can increase their attention span, depth perception and hand-eye coordination"

http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/game-types/fighting-games/british-olympian-uses-street-fighter-iv-hone-skills-$1272408.htm

i found the idea quite interesting, and wonder how much simulation will be used in the future to train athletes in martial arts.

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!

The interesting discomforts associated with exploring unfamiliar or previously rejected techniques for research are proving enlightening about my attitude to research altogether.  It's not that I'm anti research - though I am horrified by the distortions  to HE caused by the research assessment exercise - it's just that I only feel drawn to certain approaches to it myself.  I haven't properly thought this through before. 

Education has been my third choice of academic discipline - I changed from English Lit to Philosophy early as an undergraduate.  Research in those academic areas would probably not typically involve interviews, questionnaires, statistics or anything like that.  (None of these would have to be ruled out, though.) If I had progressed in either, "research" (perhaps scholarship?) would have involved working with texts and ideas, not people - though people could have been important as an object of study.

As an academic, the writing I have done has tended to be the low status "how to" stuff aimed at helping students.  I have several conference papers that I aim to redo to publish in academic journals, and I might also do this with some essays I've written for this course.  But my aim is to communicate ideas and possibilities rather than present facts that I have discovered.

I'm probably more interested in reinterpreting facts presented by others. Indeed, this would be appropriate for the interest I have in the changes that happen when we move activities online - I believe that they are no longer the same activities and our actions (including language use) are no longer the same as they are f2f.  This could have huge implications for education.

I think I'm feeling my way here to a philosophical stance rather than a social science one, if such a distinction is appropriate.  I've been reintroduced to philosophical ideas several times during the course and have enjoyed exploring them.  And of course Philosophy is also no longer the same online as f2f (nor the same as it was in the 70s!)

This discovery feels quite important, though when I read it over it doesn't seem to be saying much.

I've been fortunate enough last weekend to have had a go on some of the different games consoles that are currently out on the market without hemorrhaging my wallet or bank balance. A work colleague has a Nintendo Wii and my partner's brother has a Microsoft Xbox.

The Nintendo Wii (or simply "Wii" as the manufacturer prefers to market it) is currently en vogue at the moment with it's unique wireless controller and nunchuk that acts as pointing devicea that senses positions across 3 dimensional space. I got to try out "Mii Maestro" and "Handbell Harmony" minigames from the Wii Music suite and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The first thing you notice is that the wireless controller is not as difficult to operate as the dual analog controllersof the Xbox and Playstation games consoles. The second thing you notice is that there is still a degree of eye - hand co-ordination going on (something that I am not particularly good at).

Whilst I am very competitive with board and card games, I have found myself not being quite so competitive with the computer / video games as I have wanted the opportunity to test the features of the software and hardware to try and gain a better understanding how it all fits together especially where my wretched eye - hand co-ordination is concerned. The rather nice thing with the Wii was that there was six of us having a go with it - it's the social aspect of gaming that I have always found appealing and it was nice to see it here again with a computer-based game rather than a board game.

Microsoft's Xbox is a more "traditional" games console that uses the dual analog contollers which takes a little getting use to as each button, toggle and trigger performs different functions that tend to come into play simultaneously - which means hand, eyes and brain need to work together (you really begin to appreciate Prensky's (2001) "digital native" concept at this point). My partner's sons, Josh (10) and Nathan (14), opted for Colin McRae Rally 04, F1 2002 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The two racing games were very much about eye - hand co-ordination and manoeuvring the cars around the track without crashing them. The game that interested me the most was the Harry Potter game and the situation that arisen from it that reminded me of Gee's (2007) discussion about the social aspect of gaming. Josh is the most dextrous out of myself and Nathan as far as videogaming is concerned and how adroit he is at handling the controls. Josh is well versed with platform games and adventure games.

The Harry Potter games has dozens upon dozens of rooms that contained different types of logical puzzles. Josh would run around in each room like a headless chicken using his wand to smash open boxes, etc whilst completely missing that each room might have a special clue or puzzle that needed solving. This is where Nathan and I would come in to advise / coach / "bossing around" Josh what he needed to do. What struck me was that although neither I nor Nathan had access to the controls we were able to take a full part in the game by collaborating with Josh as to what needed to be done and how to go about it - this for me demonstrated the reflexive and critical elements that Gee (2007) was talking about in terms of learning and understanding along with group collaboration to getting the task completed. Whilst at the beginning Josh was a little irritated by our input, it didn't take long for him to see the value in it as he was able to complete tasks more efficiently and more quickly because the group was working to their strengths to get the tasks done.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Firstly you'll need to try and get back into FlashMx after a few weeks of not using it.. the shear amount of stuff you've forgotten is needed as a catalyst for distraction.

Secondly you'll need access to the internet,

Third, have something in the back of you mind that needs sorting out, in the following case it's CAD software for the Mac, at the moment is seems non exsistant.

and lastly have something really cool to do instead.

OK. the method..

Get into Flash with the following photos.

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These are two photos of a milling machine as found in a general DT workshop.

the difference between the two photos is that one has the guard down the other up.

Fairly simple and you can see where i'm going with them.. the'll go into flash as another quick fire challeng, "whats wrong" "click it" "next level" type thing

Before they can go into flash, we need to get rid of the crap in the background and replace any white space with a transparent background, called the alpha channel... i think.

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This take about an hour to do the two photo.. quicker if you're organised, infinately long if you're not.

With these two images, open flash and get really confused... realise that you've never done this type of action before and start looking on the net for a solution, find a CAD program that is used for MAC, download it and get a pleasant surprise when you see its a Virtual Lego builder

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spend a few hours building stuff and wonder if there is anyway to up the image quality with lighting dynamics.

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Find that the program you need requires two other programs and a separate utility to expand them both.

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 Get back to Flash when you realise that you're not achieving anything... although now you're thinking of different applications for the newly found software and you want to incorporate it, or at least make a Lego movie

ok so the mill..

eventually found out how to do the action by looking back at my blog and comparing notes to the past scenes I had done.

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Now I'm getting distracted by this blog....

off to play cooking mama

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

island1.kmz  

I chose Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" - the computer game that is, not the book, film, play, an episode from the TV series or, more recently, a graphic novel that have lent itself to the Christie brand - for two simple reasons:

1. I like murder mysteries and this story is very familiar to me;
2. I wanted a "gentle" re-introduction into computer gaming having been out of it for nearly 20 years. 

So, in many ways, I took the approach that Gee (2007) originally adopted and went for something that would "interest" me. If you look at Berens & Howard's (2001, cited in Newman, 2005, p. 12) gaming genres, this game sat firmly in the platforms and puzzles domain - though I would say more puzzles and less platforms. The game is definately not roleplaying, even though you are playing Hercule Poirot and it's definately not a first-person game.

Let me explain. my idea of a roleplaying game involves interacting with the other characters - you don't do this in the game. Firstly, there are short black-and-white silent movie moments where the characters "talk" via text at the bottom of the screen, in other words there are no spoken words. Secondly, the "interviewing" of the suspects also uses this silent movie approach whereby you click on the "next" button to read the "conversation" that is going on. So immediately the game isn't immersive as you are not acting and interacting, you're just reading text from the screen.

The first-person approach allows you to see through the eyes of the character and allows you to interact with objects and people. What the game does offer is 24 rooms with "hidden objects" that you have to find over 14 scenes. You are given 25 minutes per scene to find the objects that appears on the list of things to find. Some will be clues to the murder and others are just thow-away objects. After each scene, there's a more traditional slider-type puzzle to solve. So the game is promoting keen observation skills and logical thinking. I managed to complete the entire game in one sitting that took about 5 hours to complete.

Although I had successfully completed the game, I didn't feel any sense of satisfaction from completing it as I didn't feel that the game particularly challenged me; this well-known story was rather secondary and somewhat superfluous; the characters were non-existant as if they were devoid of any personality - it would have, I think, be different if the characters were allowed to "talk" so that their "personalities" were able to shine through the words that they "spoke" and the "accents" that they used to speak them. It would seem that I wanted some that went a little beyond the "gentle" re-introduction that I thought I needed. The game wasn't animated enough, it has already been documented that action-based games are more engaging that still-based games, however nice the graphics and music should be.

I should say that a couple of years ago I did buy one of those interactive DVD games that you play on the TV. I purchased Agatha Christie's "After the Funeral" which was intersperse with video clips from the TV show, games and puzzles and linked together by David Suchet playing "Hercule Poirot". Whilst this game is not action-based like the computer game, it had the added bonus of the video clips and David Suchet as Hercule Poirot talking directly at you, which gave the impression that you were in the game rather than outside of it. There is definately something to be said for computer games that have animated action sequences rather than still ones.

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.  

Newman, J. (2004). Videogames. London: Routledge.

Points to ponder

• “ There are many good principles of learning built into good computer and video games” (Gee 2004)      
• “ Content has never been king, it is not king now, and is unlikely to ever be king. The Internet has done quite well without content, and can continue to flourish without it.” (Odlyzko 2001)       
• “The typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being” (Lesk 1997)

In my own experience I have found that focusing too heavily on content narrows the range of users (since learners have varying interests) while focusing too heavily on interactivity at the expense of content may leave learners feeling ‘cheated’ (as they have to fill gaps in information on their own). Even the most interactive 3D movies with superb graphics that pull you into the movie, will only engage you so much if the storyline is poor (Anyone who's seen My Bloody Valentine can attest to this).

A common complaint about early car racing games was that you felt that you were really driving, but there simply wasn’t that much to do.  It seems amazing that so much is being paid for access, without paying as much attention to the thing being accessed as to the ability to access it (or not) via their own means.Odlyzko argues that connectivity is more important that content in modern communication industry.

Does this assertion that “most of the money is in point-to-point communication” represent opportunity or an obstacle for the future of digital learning systems? It begs the question: Should we focus on what is learnt, or on how and where it is learnt? Are gamers looking for a good plot, a rich world to inhabit or are they looking for interactivity – the freedom to connect and choose their own modes of access? Finally, should so-called “educational” media be designed for the person (pulling users to their content), or for the systems (targeting the most popular networks of connectivity)?   

Meeting the need vs. meeting the user? In a sense these are not issues unique to digital learning. All forms of learning encounter the need balance content with interactivity. But I hesitate to use purely commercial criteria as a measure of the effectiveness of media, particularly in the context of learning. Surely the content of a good game include skills and problem-solving abilities, more than mere information. The challenge is to see how educational “information” be integrated in a meaningful and engaging way in digital games.

References

Gee, J.P. (2004) Learning by design: Games as learning machines. Interactive Educational Multimedia, 8 (April 2004) 15-23.

Lesk, M. (1997) How much information is there in the world? Unpublished paper, available at  http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/diglib.html!.

Odlyzko, A. 2001. Content is not king. AT&T Labs Research. http://www.research.att.com/amo

Although I have been keeping up with my course readings, writing regular posts into my blog and doing a spot of game creation using Google Earth, this course has given me an opportunity, or is that licence?, to reacquaint myself with computing / video / arcade games that I haven't really touched since my very late teens.

My peers have come up with some rather wonderful web-based games that include the sublime Grow v.1 by Eyemaze and the wonderful Fantastic Contraption; both of which enchanted me and brought out a child-like wonder in me (not seen since 1999) much in the same way as the "Living Books" CD-ROM series did in the early 1990s with Mercer Mayer's "Just Grandma and Me" (1992). Then there is the ingenious Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race, described as a "Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game" though I would say that it would have more in common with the "six degrees of separation" idea and would seem to lend itself nicely to Prensky's suggestion that the, now irrelevant, digital native have hypertext-like minds - all I can say is that I found it frantic especially as you are up against the clock.

For my part, I have also reacquainted myself to the classic text-based "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" game which is now online over at BBC Radio 4 and graphical. I also did something that I haven't done since my late teens and that was to buy some computer games for the PC that were on sale. Like Gee, I went for something that interested me and were of very different gaming and literary genres - Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile", "Lost" and Clive Barker's "Jericho".

Tune in tomorrow for a report on my experiences with the "Death on the Nile" game.