Some problems coming to mind re. potential dissertation topic: it would be necessary to compare 2 sets of learning, 1 in an online role-play and 1 in a face-to-face role-play. This presents some difficulty, not insurmountable, in being able to observe both sets of learners. But... much more importantly, there are simply too many variables in this project, as it stands at present: let's say that the online participants are more active than the F2F learners. This could tell you about:

• their personality
• the strength of the teacher
• the time they take their lesson
• etc etc etc

So... the project will not be explanatory. If it still runs, it needs to be exploratory, and would simply measure participation in the online role-play.

Bigger problem still: when I taught in Japan, despite the reputation of Japanese learners for being afraid of making mistakes, I had few significant problems in getting learners involved in F2F role-plays. This came down to skill of teacher and sensitivity too.

The dissertation could be significantly scaled down so that it focuses only on wiki role-play (my idea from the OLL course). A new question would be required, and very probably the (ill-conceived) Japanese culture idea should be scrapped.

Reading this week's papers from Pat Kane (2005) amd Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) were a sheer joy and delight compared to the James Newman chapter the other week. I think the issue between these three writers is one of how an argument is being presented to the reader. We start with Sutton-Smith (1997) who sets that scene by explaining that the meaning or definition of "play" is fraught with ambiguity with various philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, etc. describing the essence of "play" in different ways that relate to their particular disciplines.

It's astonishing to learn that for such a "simple" concept of "play", or at least perceived by many to be a "simple" concept, has academics from a multitude of disciplines trying to place "play" within some framework or other - indeed, I don't recall any of the theorists mentioned by Sutton-Smith taking an holistic and all-encompassing view of "play"; this is something that Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 6) sees as a weakness and Kane (2005, p. 40) also picks up on when he talks about the "third culture" or polymathism ("Homo Universalis") before the arts and sciences had a parting of the ways. I was also intrigued by Sutton-Smith's view that play "has temporal diversity as well as spatial diversity" when he talks about the likes of the World Cup and the Olympics. Sutton-Smith (1997, p. 9) offers "seven rhetorics", which Kane (2005, p.39) describes as:

"...ways of thinking and talking about play that express a certain vision of human nature and culture, and which can be deployed by everyone from teachers to generals, hackers to CEOs ... [which] imply both a very modern and a very ancient vision of humanity."

The "seven rhetorics" are:

1. The rhetoric of play as progress
2. The rhetoric of play as fate
3. The rhetoric of play as power
4. The rhetoric of play as identity
5. The rhetoric of play as the imaginary
6. The rhetoric of play as the self
7. The rhetoric of play as frivolous

Kane (2005, p. 48) makes an interesting statement whereby he says "the moment of play is identified as a generator of originality, energy and new development" that made me think of Google's European offices in Zurich and the "Homo Ludens" that occupy it.

Kane's "manifesto" is about a lifestyle, an attitude, a state of mind, a way at looking at the world and the people and artifacts in it that strips away the rigidity and drudgery that has been hampered by a mechanistic, industrial mindset of the Victorian age. Education is still built around this hidden curriculum of "preparing people for the workforce".

There's this wonderful allusion to Jean-Dominique Bauby's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" where Kane (2005, p. 46) quotes surrealist Luis Bunuel: "Somewhere between chance and mystery lies the imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom". Bauby suffered a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome (the diving bell) and would use his imagination (the butterfly) to escape his biological prison.

Both Sutton-Smith and Kane position play not as a "trivial, frivolous, silly" waste of time; but as a powerful, natural human asset for learning and discovery through highly creative and imaginative interactions with the world and the people who live in it. Whilst the games industry has shown how people can become immersed in the world of games and are developing skills through experimentation, practice and from other players, so now Education needs to look at this phenomena and translate this into practical, everyday use fit for a classroom be it real or virtual.

Update

Have just learnt that Pat Kane is one half of the late 1980s, early 1990s pop duo Hue and Cry and maintains a blog called "The Play Ethic" and is using Twitter to share his thoughts and resources around his concept of the play ethic.

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.

Kane, P. (2005). The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a different way of living. London: Pan.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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. 

I'm a little bit behind with my reading for work as well as this course.  Coming to this blog is probably displacement activity (along the lines of it's not worth starting the reading now as I have to go for the train in 15 minutes).  However, I think it's worth recording how I feel about stats before I start doing them.  The fact that I only loaded my software yesterday (noting that I should have done it before the end of January) suggests some reluctance. 

I haven't done any statistics for a long time, but I can see that one of the things I'm reading for work contains some.  I don't think I'm phobic about statistics - I just worry about their use and the claims attached to them.  But it's actually better to know something about it all if people are likely to misuse statistics, especially if they are making spurious claims based on accurate statistics (but false premises). 

I did use numbers even in my very qualitative autoethnographic study - I created a concordance file in Word which helped me count my references to particular themes and thus see what a student "noticed" more frequently than other things.  It was a starting point when I had a lot of data and didn't know what to do next - it helped me to create categories and also a useful index.  It was of more interest to my examiners than I thought it would be - part of the argument about how you claim your data are data.

So I'll keep that in mind when I'm number crunching!  I've more to say on this but my time's up. 

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

Carrying out a Masters dissertation research project is basically a learning exercise, preparing one to go on with research in the future (Hamish - discussions board).

Don't necessarily plan to conduct any further research in the future. Is doing the dissertation worthwhile for me? Perhaps not.

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