CECS 6100 Week Fourteen

My CECS 6100

The future of educational games…. I really don’t know if  can say. It seems like for the last 5-6 years they have always been on the “emerging in 1-2 years” list. But they never seem to quite do that. They will probably at the least stay in their niche, at least for the immediate future. At some point, virtual reality will take hold in some form (holograms, occulus rift, etc) and take games themselves to the next level. When you as the user can be fully immersed, I think there might be something there for simulations. For skills and information, I’m not sure if there will be much more in the future. It seems to take a lot of time and money to develop a game. But with educational games, you have to force certain ideas and concepts in their. That sometimes seems to take away from the game. When designing a pure entertainment game, the game play can follow what ever looks “cool” and/or makes sense. Why did we go talk to a giant turtle at the end of Level 10 of World of Warcraft? Because it looked cool and carried the story forward. But sometimes that is not the educationally valid option.

I’m not fully sure if we can study them to determine their impact. The game environment and the classroom environment are just so different. I enjoy games and feel that they do develop skills and knowledge to some degree depending on design, but I’m just not sure we can prove anything other than student preferences and differences in what is learned. For example, in a standard classroom there are ways to communicate specific tasks in a behaviorist fashion and then test the transfer through a standardized test. I don’t see facts like that transferring the same in games. But I could see skills like collaboration and problem solving skills.  But you can only really “test” those by having gamers accomplish tasks in the game. How can you compare those to similar tasks in a classroom?

New technology always seems to have backlash, so I assume there will be. I think that if you focus on what games can be used for (collaboratively or individually solving problems), the backlash will come from those that are more behaviorist in mindset. They will want the standardized test results and won’t be able to get that from a more constructivist learning design that would seem to pervade most games.

World of Warcraft was fun and frustrating. I enjoy games like that, but there was a huge learning curve. Ultimately, however, most of the learning was about the game itself. I really only ran into one huge problem to solve on level 9, but Google helped me solve it when I realized that I had missed a hidden quest. That would have been nice to have known that was a possibility. Overall, it was good…. but I died a lot. Combat just seemed like a very slow process where I never really knew exactly what my weapons would do. I’m having trouble trying to figure out how a game like this could be turned into a true educational game. Maybe if the problems to solve became less and less structured or obvious as you advance, there would be some use for problem solving skills. Maybe if we had to work together to solve problems, there would be some collaborative uses. I could also see some uses for teaching other about cultures.

Basically, everything I learned was about the game and the story in the game. The quests that we completed really catered towards teaching us skills to survive that specific part of WoW. I learned how to kill various mythical creatures, how to pick up objects, how to walk across giant ropes, how to hop on poles (even though the game seemed to do most of that for me), etc. I learned these through trial and error, probably with a lot of constructing going on. Skills and ideas learned in a past task were used to complete ones in the future. Maybe there was even an aspect of social constructivism if you consider the input of various characters… even though most of that was pre-programmed. But, the main method for learning probably came down to stimulus and response (despite all of the attempts at problem solving). You die during an attempt to complete one quest, and your response is to try it a different way.

Overall, I did enjoy the process of learning how to play World of Warcraft, even though it took a huge chunk of time and I am now behind on other classes and projects in this class 🙂

CECS 6100 Week Thirteen

My CECS 6100

This week I was at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies conference. New tools, programs, and methods for teaching on social media were everywhere. I also heard stories of courses that used Facebook or Twitter being shut down left and right. One even at the school that I work at.

To honest, I am not comfortable telling instructors that they can’t teach with Facebook or Twitter. I feel that if we say something like that as a school or university, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We say that we want to teach students how to be life-long learners. We say that we want them to keep learning after the course is over. But then to say that they can’t learn in one of the largest websites in the world? How is that teaching them to be life long learners that should be constantly learning where ever they go?

Of course, if I were to talk to instructors about how they use Facebook or Twitter, I am sure most of the time I could come up with a dozen other tools or systems to use that would be as good as or better for the learning objectives they are shooting for. One of the reason I like the idea of heutagogy is that the focus is on teaching learners how to learn, not what to learn. So you don’t go to Facebook as just another outlet for the instructor to pass along what you are supposed to learn (like they would on Blackboard or email or other tools). You would use Facebook as one of the tools that help you network with experts that can help you learn what you want to learn or can connect you with others that can help.

At Sloan-C, Twitter was most definitely the tool de jour. I remember just five years ago trying to bring Twitter hashtags and back channel to a conference that I was the CIO for. The resistance was crazy. People hated the idea of encouraging people to Tweet during sessions. They should pay attention! And then to have a certain tag for each session? How dare we let possible critique out into the open! We can’t let anyone know there are people that aren’t happy.

Now, of course, all of those things are normal. I think that between the CECS 6100 use of social media and the Sloan-C use of Twitter, I gained dozens of Twitter connections in just a few weeks…. but almost no Facebook connections. Not sure why, but people still treat Facebook as a system that is a bit more private that Twitter. Or maybe my Facebook settings made it too difficult for people to find me.

I think the question of whether social media should be used in education really comes down to… shocking…. design. If you want to use it for strategic communicative actions, then there are probably other tools that work better. Of course, currently you can have other tools auto-post content to Twitter or Facebook, so in some ways you could use it as a mirror to reflect strategic communications to learners in whatever form they choose, but those would still point back to basic empirical transfer of information from teacher to learner. Probably the best way to use social media in learning is for constative communicative actions. People are getting used to arguing on Facebook and Twitter already, so why not try to teach them to do so in a respectful, academic manner? The trouble is that any social media system will have limitations that would have to be considered in design. Twitter has the 140 character limit and rarely gives you good context for replies. This could be frustrating for learners, but also a good exercise in creating short, understandable points. If a person can’t understand what you were replying to or what you are saying, then you need to re-think your response. Facebook allows longer, more robust responses – but these responses are often displayed out of order. And when even when displayed in order, the lack of threads can make it difficult to know who is responding to who. So, again, the constative communication would require that learners make their responses clear. Other tools, such as Flickr, Blogs, YouTube, etc would be better suited for dramaturgical communicative actions – but the design of the lessons surrounding these would need to be flexible enough to allow students to express themselves in a manner they feel is best. That is why I like the idea of assignment banks – allow students to choose what tools they use to prove that they have achieved the learning goals. This also means the instructor has to release some control of the course design in order to achieve this level of learner-centeredness.

Ultimately, I think that control is one of the biggest barriers in using social media effectively in learning. If you are just using social media to extend the control over your class into other corners of the Internet, then students will probably not be interested in it. If you are using it to release some of the control and allow students to become participants in a more social constructivist paradigm, then you might be on to something. After all, there is a reason these tools are called social media. They don’t really work any differently than any other tool if you use them for broadcasting content. Blackboard works as well Facebook or many, many other tools in that regard. To truly use these tools to their full potential, an instructor would have to embrace the paradigm behind them.

However, this might be very difficult for instructors or even administrators who are used to more controlled, behaviorist environments. So in some ways I understand why there are certain people going around saying that you can’t use social media tools in education. They believe in an orderly transfer of knowledge from expert to learner, and therefore think that every tool must work the same. But on the other hand, you have some ultra-constructivist instructors that just jump in and let chaos reign with no real idea what to do. Therefore, I think the best use of social media is to either 1) teach students how to use the tools as one way to connect with others and become life-long learners, or 2) use the tools in a learner-centered social manner that allows the learners to have a good deal of control over the experience.

CECS 6100 Week Twelve

My CECS 6100

Personally, I do find social media tools useful for learning. Often, that learning is informal, but it can lead to formal learning. I find that the interaction is useful. Even though it is not perfect, you can still accomplish a lot of interaction with the other students that are engaged. This can be helpful if you need to discuss something, but the class meeting is still days away. The same could also be said about group projects. In another class, my group members will wait for days and days just to have a face to face meeting to decide things we could just decide in email in a day or two. There just seems to be this resistance with some people to asynchronous communication. I would agree with anyone that says there are many problems with email communication. But the trade off is that you don’t have to wait until everyone’s schedule clears to make decisions.

I say all of this even though I am not a huge fan of asynchronous communications. I would prefer to meet and work. But as problematic as asynchronous communications can be through Twitter or email or Facebook, the affordances over come those annoyances – at least for me. In a way, I guess you could say that my personal preferences for certain outcomes still drives my feelings about the usefulness of social media. I value the increased speed of communication that social media can provide. Someone else may value the affordance of the clarity that face to face interaction brings. I guess you could really twist the affordances and benefits to really meet your personal preferences depending on how you want to look at it.

Facebook groups would be more useful if Facebook didn’t have a weird habit of messing up comment order. For some reason, “pages” will just not show comments in order all of the time. Even if you choose to show “most recent”. It really makes no sense. You could always use a group instead, but then you have to set some pretty strict settings to keep the conversations private to that group. Its like groups are designed to bring in as many people as possible (which is not always conducive to learning), but Pages are designed to focus on the content posted by the page owner but not the people that Liked the page. I would make it so you could have a more private group that keeps comments straight but also allows the group/page owner to have more focused posts if needed. Which, I guess they do somewhat have with pinned posts. But even those hide the comments too much.

The biggest problem with Twitter is following which tweet is a reply to which other tweet. The website itself is making that possible, but other plugins and mobile apps that aren’t made by Twitter not so much. So I would make most interfaces for Twitter display the Tweet that you are replying to under the Reply Tweet itself. Kind of like Facebook does that for comments on older posts, but with focus on the new Tweet instead of the original Tweet. If that makes sense.