Game Based Learning – Playing is Hard

I’ve managed to get to a few webinar sessions recently where people have been talking about ‘game based learning’. I’ve had even more emails from teachers about it – where to start, what to use etc., and it seems the winds of change in ‘edutopia’ are increasingly blowing in favour of using digital games in the classroom.

I’ll gloss over the soap-box, suffice to say there is – and has been – a wealth of evidence that adopting ‘gameful’ learning with technology has benefits in blended learning. Having said that, developing sound pedagogical design around any game is not as simple as it may first appear.

Yes games develop pretty much all the 21C skills we talk about (I think gamers will learn pretty much all they need without ‘learning’, just ‘playing’) but they don’t readily wrap around the tragically common ideology of education – learning by absorption. Games and Virtual Worlds crossover, some lack narrative making them more motivating others have clear objectives and sequences (just like life). Using games still requires considered alignment of outcome, activity and assessment. In games of course, they usually come with all three in a flurry of graphics, sound and immersive action. Attempting to graft Call of Duty into a History class is likely to achieve nothing, apart from the horror of parents and administrators.

To use games well, you have to understand them well – so see how they are constructed, how levels work, how the story builds. You have to sink time into them – especially if you want to become part of the sub-cultures that they create. I can’t tell you about Aion unless you play Aion, just as a movie and never replicate the motivation and immersion of a mmo – where you are the director.

In many cases you have to think how to adapt it to a new teaching strategy – and develop new resources as well as assessment. The tools needed are more complex (Blender, Unity3D, Linden Script) that hacking out another Ning; and the teaching methods need to be adapted from existing models such as scenario based or project based learning. It is worth the effort however, but it is hard. I don’t want to pour water on the fire – just to point out that the authors of new curricula online, are increasingly drifting away from earlier blogs, podcasts and wikis – and increasingly interested in the development of virtual worlds and adaptation of games, consoles and devices.

Games are perhaps being brought into focus by new devices and immersive technical developments. Increasing access to software such as Unity3D for free, or the maturation of online tutorials to learn other free Open Source development tools for meshing and object building – Blender, Scratch, SketchUp etc. and spaces to use them – Open Sim, Hyper Grid etc, with new viewers and new communities such as KoinUp.

The world is playing casual games on Facebook … social games are on consoles, hell even facebook is on consoles – and yet despite all of this – we still theorise and debate ‘games’. Immersive learning is motivating and is cultural. They rapidly achieve ‘collective action’, when many blogging communities in school barely allow communication. Be carefull about the the linguistic interpretations of talking about game-based. Both games and enquiry based is alien DNA still. Treat a game like a great novel you and run around in or bring to life. Use it’s components to augment what it is you are trying to teach – but most of all – look past blogs, wikis and podcasts and learn about avatars.

And one last note – Unlike Wikis, ‘game based’ is going to take much longer, so as exciting at is appears, game-based presents more reasons to churn than Web2.0. But that’s no reason not to try.

Churn, Sink and Drift – 21C Outcomes

Online communities – are now a  culture or counter-culture depending on your ideology. Community, culture, churn, sift and drift are the reagents of motivation and at the center of learning anything online.

Communities need culture to operate. Anyone talking about communities in an online world, cannot dismiss its cultural influences. This is however a ver spikey idea – especially to people who prefer the world the way as it was.  Big communities are more robust. In times of stress, they spin off into smaller ones rather than shattering. They are easy for newcomers to join, so you spend less time recruiting as there’s always room for one more. They are very attractive to socializers who seem to prefer their inclusive feel. Small communities are fast to develop, the community levels faster (I think there are 4 stages to community: communication, interest, practice and collective action). Small communities are more personal-friendly to newcomers. They tend to be more diverse in their interests and are far more exclusive. Explorers, risk takers and innovators prefer them.

They all suffer from churn, sink and drift.

Churn is the rate people leave. The stronger the community, the less churn. (schools auto-churn students every year). Most of the churn happens in the newcomer days: It’s too hard, I don’t have time, it’s not me etc., A good way to manage churn rates is to offer a trial (as in 10 days game play for nothing). This acts as safety value to ensure the community is not determined by the churn. The community does not want people who can’t strengthen it and are willing for give up revenue and size for this. Much of education is fixated on cost and size, so actually promotes churn. Education is built to churn by offering pilots and taster communities, most of which fail when the community is forced to scale to reach enterprise level. We go from a few classrooms to a few schools to a policy as enforcement. The churn point.

Sink is all about why people engage. Why people sink time and intellectual investment into learning or playing online. It is why people want to use a virtual world – or why they want to learn from YouTube. Drift is why they stop using it, or stop being interested. Community is the hook that pulls people into Educational Technology and what keeps them there. Immersion is what teachers and leaders need to be concerned with. It is rare for a politician to talk about immersing teachers in a culture of … as they have no real access to communities that do – they are not buraucrats.

The strategy of adding more hardware, more tools, more resources, more policy does not promote community of immersion. It promotes churn (I tried, and didn’t like), sink (I wanted to do it, but it was blocked) and drift (I have been using some technology, but that now I’m told its old hat).  I think that when you get beyond around 250 members of a community – you will see sub-groups forming with their own sub interests – leading and coordinating those is a whole new level. In EdTech communities; the laws of churn, sink and drift determine everything.

This is why we see teachers churning out the classrooms, sinking thousands of hours into online communities nand drifing away from the ideology and philosphies that were installed in them as pre-teachers. We love our small communities – as we reach that level of participation and action quicky (classrooms, small groups etc) and use the big communities (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) to locate them.

These communities operate at an almost intutitive level, they defend, promote, create and help constantly, the best ones do it for free and never attempt to rule the members but enable them. Second Classroom reached 250 members this week. A virtual community that now has to level up if it is going to become a big strong one.

 

 

 

 

 

The learning dilemma

Story Quest

STORY QUEST. Not only is this a brilliant idea, it represents yet another signal to the wider educational technology teaching community that virtual worlds are fast crossing over as the place to take your read/write/make classrooms. The impossible is possible, and with a clearer understanding of writing – students can experience a much more open and immersible learning environment – exploring on their own terms and raising questions that it generates. While the current fuss over Google Wave rages on Twitter, I can’t help keep asking what is it for – in the classroom. What does it do that can’t be done. I suspect Google Wave will have implications for people, but not sure how it would align with the current syllabus’ demands for information communication technology.

The great thing here is that you can not only watch that video; but step into it yourself. You prompt the action and interaction and your presence in the space triggers the events. It is designed for architects, to understand how to look at Second Life or Reaction Grid as an instructional design space that is created to meet outcomes intended, though activities and assessment. For more information, check out Jo Kay’s blog post on Story Quest, grab a walking stick and explore a new way to tell stories – and in Story Quest, there are no stupid questions.

As I begin a 6 month project in Virtual Worlds … this sim to me, shouts – this is where story’s and learning are heading …

If the shoe fits #2

Get out from behind that desk … why do you need it anyway? No one should still be relying on search to find answers and filters to block content in today’s learning environment. Students should not be asked to troll the billions of pages online by teachers who are digitally illiterate. The internet is neither a baby sitter or a solution provider, yet accepted levels of professionalism in ICT classrooms often seems that way. As shocking as searching and pasting into Powerpoint is – it ticks the ICT compliance boxes.

Year 10 and 12  students are preparing for their futures at home by using sites like Bored of Studies right now. They are not cheating, they are being ‘natives’.

If the test is so predicable that they can get the answers in a forum or as coached notes from their teach-bot then let them win – don’t blame them for gaming the system.

There won’t be a HSC student in Australia that won’t consider logging onto Bored of Studies in the next few weeks in preparation for their HSC (if they can) – but very few teachers who will give them an alternative place to log-into. If the teacher isn’t motivating them to develop deeper enquiry then students have every right to take the easy option. Just like everyone else.

Reaction creates attraction

The recent debacle over Jo Kay’s SLEducation wiki has provided a wave of new discussions around Virtual Worlds in Education. It has raises discussions around the idea that Second Life is not THE virtual world for education, just one execution of it – and what if we used something else?

Many of those who have been writing, developing and researching are clearly past the critical flack of the initial beach landing, have overcome the initial ‘yeah but’ barrage from the sand dunes and are confidently aligning virtual worlds and games with learning and assessment.

Unlike a great deal of Web2.0-ness, virtual worlds are long supported by a wealth of academic research to suggest they are extreamly good at motivating students and offer high quality instructional design environments for learning.

Obviously not everyone is going to explore them. The biggest barrier is that in muves the experience has to be instructively designed to create opportunities that extend beyond it and facilitate experiences that cannot be created without it – Who has the time to do that?

Well lots of people actually, not least the students we are teaching and certainly the multi-billion dollar technology industry.

A flood of educators followed Kerry Johnson’s footsteps into Reaction Grid, a community of inter-connected Open Simulators.

The discussions have not been about whether Second Life is better, but how it changes pedagogical opportunities. I am yet to hear from teen-educators that Linden is easy to deal with, or overly keen to help – quite the opposite. But Lindens notice to Jo felt like a wake up call to lots of Second Life Educators.

Maybe it was time to get past what we can’t do and look at what we can. As blog posts appeared online last week over Jo and Sean’s well established (and Linden referenced) wiki there was a flurry of new activity – not about the wiki issue, but in going right around the problem – which was all about ownership and trademarks, not community. We get the idea of trademarks by the way.

The Jokaydia Second Life community flocked into Reaction Grid and Jo Kay has established a new outpost to allow Second Life educators to explore Reaction Grid with the same level of support, resources and expert development you’d expect.

There’s also an ISTE2010 conference proposal via  Judy and Vicki Davis that was put together via iPhones and Google Docs in a few hours this week to meet the call for proposal deadline.

In the next few months, there will be open resources and open spaces in Reaction Grid created for teachers to explore with students – and this will lead to further instances of students read, writing and making things outside of them. Some will be online – and perhaps some will be downloadable – able to run on local machines as stand alone or LAN learning objects. Imagine being able to download a unit of work around Huxley’s Brave New World and run it on your nice new DER laptops using open source resources – offline. Giving students a zip file to unpack and run for homework, where they have to model mathematical problems. Virtual school in a virtual world.

Change comes from places you least expect and creates opportunities you never imagined. You get into Reaction Grid for FREE. Join us at 9pm AEST on Sunday night – because that is where the new curriculum in being crafted. You can google it.

8 ways to get teachers talking about learning

We are moving past the inertia of “the future of learning is different” discourse. We seem to be increasingly talking about how and not why, perhaps in some part fueled by government investment. It’s hard not to notice the Ruddy Revolutions (GFC avoidance) happening in schools.

Much of the orbital stuff is giving way to people seeking practical strategies and operational advice on how to implement, not if to implement. Yes there are laggards, but now there are laptops! We can move much more rapidly – if we want to. It is likely that the students are digitally literate in terms of procedural knowledge and skill with technology – but not in pursuit of academic goals. Their use of read/write and mobile remains ‘friend based’, yet public learning environments are oppositional to that idea. We have to learn about creating better scenarios for students, to build on their skills. This post is about how school executives can approach curriculum renewal.

Taking a retrospective view, looking carefully at existing units of work, allows us to consider alternative scenarios at the strategic level. All to often the PD focus is on the operational stuff – ‘how do I manage this; what tool do I need; do I have the time’. And teachers hate that stuff. Focus on the intellectual change; not the operational ones first. All you then need is a facilitator to help steer the department into deeper thinking, not skills training. The facilitators are ‘us’, so drop us an email, we can help YOU.

Consider asking departmental staff to help you evaluate an existing unit of work. They will be more inclined to do this, than learn about ‘tools’.

Questions that get people talking about learning might be …

1. What are the performance problems … what skills need to be learned by students?
2. What are realistic scenarios in which we can use this technology in our environment?
3. What are the indicators of successful outcomes?
4. What are the indicators of unsuccessful outcomes?
5. What are the descriptions of successful and fail behaviors?
6. What resources can assist us in improving the unit?
7. What is that we know, that they need to know?
8. What is that they can do, that we need to learn about?

A great PD day pulls units to pieces and realigning them with enquiry driven learning, augmented by available technology. During that day, you can introduce minimal and small Web2.0 tools. If they can’t use it in 10 mins, don’t talk about it. The first experience that teachers need is a familiar one; where they have an immediate win – and end the day talking about the design of learning being collegial. From that point you can start to develop their ideas into a professional development programme – without calling it PD.

Aion Video Podcast Episode 3: East Meets West

Digital Story telling is now a very valuable skill. Not just for film makers who make these kinds of clips, but because those in the clip are critical thinkers. This podcast is about the process of creating motivating games – though incremental improvement or peer offerings and new narratives. Aion has been in the wings for a long time, and over the last year there has been an opportunity not just to pre-order the game, but to be part of the development journey. This podcast (one in a series) is a great example of how story telling is evolving. Podcasting in the classroom? Perhaps the first steps to a career in film or game? “It not just the game or the action, it’s the challenge that keeps players coming back” – that would be a great thing to say about classrooms.

more about “Aion Video Podcast Episode 3: East Me…“, posted with vodpod

Reflective Writing 1-2-3

‘REFLECTION’ is a word closely associated with 21st Century Learning. I thought I’d write a post on how to improve critical literacy though a 3 step adjustment to read/write activities in the classroom.

Watson (1997) says “Reflection encourages students to – self examine, self-asses and evaluate their own practice. Without reflecting, the student is at risk of practicing in a manner if unquestioned routines, accepted directives and/or rote learning.”

This short observation highlights the need for students to question, not simply to recount or answer declarative questions with read/write tools. There is bountiful research that suggests talking about what they are doing, not just what they or others have done, encourages the conscious practice of discussing the consequences of their findings and actions.

We need to ensure that testing for prior knowledge is more than asking declarative questions at the beginning of a (lesson or tutorial) learning instance. The facilitator should be conscious of three stages of reflection and also consider selecting different tools to achieve this. For example: Use a combination of micro-blog, game and video. This also encourages students to explore a more diverse media landscape.

1. Reflecting before acting – preventing unnecessary errors. Making sure the student is aware of the outcomes being sought. Asking students to predict the activity, talk about their expectations and possible fears as the activity is revealed to them. What can they do already and show you? What skills are they missing that will help them? This can be though a series of microblog posts for example – as the teacher begins to reveal the activity though providing readings or given them mini-tasks to complete – not just delivering content.

2. Reflect during the activity – use methods to monitor their actions during the event in order to maintain contextually appropriate performance and effort. This is often though feedback from the software itself – such as sound, images, scores etc. In a game this is in-built, but in a MUVE it has to be designed. Teachers need to pay close attention to this phase, to ensure the learner is challenged but not frustrated by poor feedback, or not understanding the importance of it in the learning sequence/pattern – from the teacher or the software.

3. Critically review their actions and experience after. This last action is dependent on recall. Technology often allows recall to occur as events are recorded in some manner such as a blog post, or screen shot. Self and peer assessment to deconstruct the learning process should be combined with encouraging the student to record that event and use that evidence to support their critical reflection.

The outcome,  activity and the assessment should not be limited to a predicted performance. “I think they’ll be able to do it” or “I think I can teach using that”. Design the task so that the student can modify it (up or down), to negotiate their curriculum and perhaps explore incidental or peripheral ideas outside core curriculum content. This might mean making a video, interviewing people, performing a role pay together with text based activities.  Pacing the activity also helps, changing the emphasis from one activity to another to allow you to uncover more about the learner. Keep the tools VERY simple, look for ready-to-learn solutions, so that students learn to select their own tools to demonstrate their learning. Consider that when you first start using read/write media – you students will have little idea what to do and the social dynamics are all over the place. Most games will train you to operate effectively individually rather than in a group -which is much more complex. By default you have ‘groups’ of learners … but initially, this is a good way to learn more about them as individuals, which you can use later in wider approaches.

Ref: Watson S. (1997) ‘An analysis of concept experience”. Journal of Advanced Nursing, vol.16 pp 1117-1121.

Web2.0 – A Guide for Teachers

via Judy. Great communication, personal feel and great method in leading you deeper into thought. Loved it.