CECS 6100 Week Sixteen

My CECS 6100

What did I learn in this course? I learned a lot.

Well, that was my less specific answer 🙂 – so I’ll get to the more specific. I think the last question in the prompt is actually what I have been pondering this week. When I sometimes mention some innovative online teaching in the student-centered realm, I often get push-back along the line of “well, that work because of the teacher’s personality and isn’t replicable.”  If that is true, then what the instructor is doing is entertainment and not education and then we should just close shop and make a TV network rather than a college. But that wouldn’t really work, either. But maybe this bugs me because I am an instructional designer that sees the parts that are good design and realizes that the people saying this are focusing on the wrong parts. If all you see is the personality, then you might be missing some underlying promise.

But that could describe a lot in our field – focusing on the wrong things. That will continue to be a problem. However, our society is moving online more and more, so we can’t just give it up. We just have to keep pointing towards the good and pushing the bad out of the picture.

As far as what I learned in this course, I definitely expanded my knowledge of the boundaries of different tools. Games, Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, etc are all tools I have explored for education as an ID, but not as a student. So seeing them as a students gives a different perspective on what the boundaries are. So as a designer, I will push all the more to use tools within the boundaries that work best for them. Not that I now know all of those boundaries definitely – there is always something new to be learned. But when we do run into boundaries, it is best to stop and rethink rather than push through them. Some boundaries are good to push, but others aren’t.

The more that I think about it, the more I want to take instructional design in a MakerSpace type direction. That is what I hope to do with all of this. I want to get a group of people that are doing online instruction together to just think through things and try out new ideas as well as test tried and true ideas. Hopefully even bring some students into the process. UTA is working on some actual MakerSpace areas, but they take a while to finish, so I will need to think of a good way to facilitate that for now.

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.

CECS 6100 Week Eleven

My CECS 6100

Well, there is not much to say about this week’s blog. I am not as far along as I would like to be (although I think it is more because we are running behind as a class). So far there hasn’t been much feedback on the paper – probably because the due date was moved up. So far, the process has been fairly easy. This is most likely due to the fact that I have been working on this concept for a few semesters. So there was already a good list of research that I had already looked into. Hopefully this project will turn into my dissertation in some form, so that means I have already been looking into this a lot. The next step will be determining the questions for the pilot study (which I hope is still happening?). That will probably prove difficult – I don’t want to leave the questions too generic as that may not yield specific enough answers. But if i ask questions that are too specific, I might exclude out of the box solutions that I have not considered.

Generally, I take heed of almost all feedback I get, so once that happens, I will probably use most – if not all – of it. Until then, there is not a whole lot more that I can say. Since this isn’t due until next Monday, I might come back and add to this once there is more feedback.

CECS 6100 Week Eight

My CECS 6100

To be honest, I don’t really believe there is a “best” method for instructional design in online learning. Each course is different, each instructor is different, and therefore each class is different. My process is that I meet with the instructor that is going to teach a course and discuss their goals and objectives. We look at the tools that will best serve those goals and objectives, and then we create those activities and lessons. I try to push towards a more student-centered social constructivist approach, but often the instructor and students are not ready for that. So whatever social or active elements I can get into the course is a win in my book, even if it isn’t much. So, unless there is a “just get it done, because you don’t have much time before the next assignment” method, I doubt my method really matches any existing models. This is probably due to working at a University, where the analysis is pretty non-existent or based on a list from upper levels more than actual students needs and wants. Add on to this the fact that the professor always gets to have the final say on design (and can sometimes be quite inflexible).

How did I learn to design instruction? I earned a Masters Degree in ID, then started working in various jobs through the years using that degree. Most recently, I have worked as an instructional designer for 8 years now. But to survive as an ID, you have to put your theoretical perspectives aside and design what the professor wants, which is usually behaviorist in nature. So I really don’t get to design many social constructivist designs. Occasionally, if I can talk the professor into some really good group activities, that is as close as I can get. But for the most part, I am putting a bunch of content to be transmitted, learned, and assessed through papers and tests. Stimulus and response or cognitive processing…. maybe. If the term paper is designed well. Even the discussion boards are starting to feel more like a behaviorist response tool rather than an interactive tool.

To be honest, I am a little confused about the extra questions for this week, After so many years of working as an ID and studying ID on my own and in a program, I was not aware that there were many ID methods that were specifically for online learning. Occasionally I hear of new theoretical positions like connectivism that are specifically aimed at online learning, but those are not ID methods. I have been searching and can’t really find one much less six… They all seem to pretty much be designed for online and F2F. Well, more accurately they are designed for F2F and adapted for online at some point. Even this long list of models doesn’t seem to list any specifically for online learning.I was able to find the Instructional Design Model for Online Learning (IDOL) by Siragusa, but it was described as an addition to existing models, nit a stand alone one. I apologize if I misunderstood the extra questions.

CECS 6100 Week Seven

My CECS 6100

So what do I think are the benefits of using a structured space for learning and teaching like Canvas? well, it really still comes back to the design of the lesson. For example, students will find it very beneficial to find all of their content in one space, but that convenience will not matter if the content is not well-designed. I found that I had some difficulty really designing my module in Canvas just because I was not familiar with the system. I am not really even totally sure that I created a well-designed lesson. Of course, this can be overcome with practice and patience. And maybe that is just my bias as an instructional designer. This just shows how my lack of knowledge was not able to take advantage of one of the benefits of the structured system. But, back to the benefits, I do feel that the design of the interface in Canvas is better than many of its competitors. The structure also provides a very straight forward map for students to follow as they progress through course material. The structured environment also provides for a centralized course communication and assessment space. Some courses require students to email assignments in one place, contribute links to a database in another space, and then take certain quizzes at testing centers (yet another separate space). This can cause confusion as students have to figure out which service to use when completing different assignments. The centralized location solves many of these issues.

How well does the structure of an LMS fit with my theory of online learning? Again, it probably comes down to design. You can add as much or as little content as you want, so there is nothing that would exclude a social constructivist lesson design. Additionally, the available tools – if taken advantage of – would really enhance social interactions. Virtual meeting spaces, discussion forums, wikis, and other tools would be some of the possibilities available to instructors to help foster social construction of knowledge. The big problem with social constructivism is not really the tools available but the resistance of students. When students are accustomed to having content handed to them to be memorized and regurgitated, the social constructivist paradigm can be a shock to the status quo. Of course, the structure of Canvas could possibly lend to helping lead students from more guided lessons at the beginning to more constructed lessons at the end. So, in a way, I guess I could look at Canvas or other LMSs as bridges that could be used to scaffold students from behaviorism into a constructivist paradigm. Moodle was intended to be a social constructivist design from the beginning, and it looks like Canvas has taken a lot of their design ideas from Moodle. So overall, I would say that the structure fits well as long as the instructional design is solid.

CECS 6100 Week Six

My CECS 6100

So I would say that it is very difficult to develop a research method that matches my theory and any curriculum that I create. Life really doesn’t like to fit into neat boxes all the time. Sure, some people are good at re-framing reality to match their theory, but I have never been one to be able to do that. Well, I will when the assignment requires it, but we all know that you have to sell your ontological soul on a regular basis in order to make it through a doctoral degree 🙂 So that really becomes the issue when you go for something more pragmatic or even constructivist in nature. It seems to me that it is a lot easier to get a bunch of numbers out of research. Its more accepted to publish along the lines of behaviorism or even cognitivism it seems. Social constructivism seems hard to prove decisively. People may feel that they constructed knowledge…. but did they really? What if they are really just still operating on programmed responses from the relational stimuli that they were taught growing up?

But, I guess taking a step back, it would be fairly easy to design the research if you had a willing instructor or two. Create lessons that require social interaction to solve an issue, ask a bunch of good qualitative questions, code, and evaluate (that could be the instructional designer in me talking). So I would guess the difficulty comes in convincing the wider academic community to accept your evaluations. Quantitative people would want the numbers, test results, etc. And maybe you can add that in to a social constructivist lesson…. but would that really be the appropriate assessment method? The goal of social constructivism is to construct knowledge together, not individually score well on a pre/post test. So if a constructivist-based lesson produces higher gains in scores, that is more of an interesting byproduct. The real measure of the success of social constructivist-based lesson is the constructed knowledge, something you really can’t quantify. Even when you ask the right questions, you still only get a limited picture into the learner’s minds, which could be biased, distracted, etc. That would seem to be the difficult part – how to turn this research into something that would be beneficial (publishable?) to the field in general. At what point does a constructivist learning study turn from “interesting case study” into “something that others could benefit from learning about”? Maybe figuring that out will be part of the learning curve of becoming a scholar.

CECS 6100 Week Five

My CECS 6100

So, this week we are reflecting on the feedback we received. First of all, the peer feedback. It was pretty… non-existent? Maybe because I went first, or maybe because of the new interface we were using. I know I often tried to type up some input, but the conversation moved on before I could finish. Or then again, maybe I dug into combining so many fringe theories with one or two major theories that they just weren’t sure what to make of it. That is a distinct possibility – I’m not always what I make of it.

Instructor feedback was good and I agreed with it. It is going to be difficult to convey my theory quickly and easily to people. I worked on a sentence in my conclusion to attempt that quick summary, but I am still not completely satisfied with the outcome. But it is getting there. I hope to hear more about the ideas I strung together, especially if they will work out together.

I can’t really say a whole lot about what I disagree with because there just hasn’t been that much feedback yet. I’m looking forward to it when it is available.

The feedback so far has helped me to know that I am on the right path. When you are streaming ideas together, you are never really too sure if you have made some good connections or are just off on some deceived tangent. I may ultimately be deceived about everything, but at least there is something in my ideas that are connecting. I hope to explore those further in the future.