Caution! Learning in Progress

I just wanted to take a second to post my overall thoughts on virtual learning environments (the concept, not the class).

Being a gamer, the concept of a virtual learning environment is pretty intuitive.  Just about every game that you have has a tutorial at the beginning that gently guides you through how to play the game.  For those of you who played World of Warcraft, I think you saw some this — the same starts off guiding every step you take, telling you exactly what to do as you go.  As you move further into the game however, things change.  You don’t get as much guidance, not everything is 100% explicit, and sometimes it’s down-right counter-intuitive.

The  thing I find most interesting though is that within gaming, those best tutorials are those that are seamless to me as the player – in other words, I don’t know that I’m being taught how to play the game.  Rather, that I’m just learning through the playing (or some close summation thereof).  Yet, at least in my project, we beat the students over their virtual heads with the concept of “YOU ARE LEARNING!” and I’m wondering about this paradigm difference between subtle learning, and clearly labelled learning.  I also see this expressed as the difference between playful learning, and ‘serious’ learning.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I can remember games that required you do math problems correctly completely outside the context of a game to get things to happen.  The one that comes to mind was a racing game in which in order to win, you had to answer a number of math questions correctly, presumably more than other drives, to win the race.  Here, again I have clearly labelled learning.  But then, I spent countless hours of my life playing games like Stars! Supernova and Warcraft I and II, and Starcraft.  Each one of those games requires incredibly complex resource management, making key decisions, and planning a strategy that can last, in the case of Stars!, months.   I think that all that play contributed more to my effectiveness in my job today than any classroom learning or clearly labelled “education.”

Some of this should sound a little familiar from Ms. McGonigal and gamification and learning. But despite being in Second Life which is itself a “game” of sorts, all of the regions that we developed lesson plans did the virtual equivalent of hanging this sign on the door upon teleporting in.  I guess my thought is – why?

Why are so many of the virtual learning environments clearly labelled as “learning,” with the implied “caution.”  I think that’s important – the caution on this sign and what I say amounts to the phrase caution being applied to anything that has an overtly learning potential.  Why do we approach learning with caution?  I wish I had an answer for that, instead of just an observation…

Larissa and I had the experience within Second Life of not only being teachers but also learners in most of the places that we explored.  Now, for Deep Down Virtual Mine, we had the opportunity to also be players, as well as learners and teachers, and I think that’s an important distinction to make.  Within the Virtual Mine, the region played (note: word choice) like a game, where you were given loosely defined goals and instructions on how to complete those goals.  But ultimately, it was up to you actually choose to complete the goals – to drive the bulldozer towards the trees or, as Jenee, Larissa and Josephine did, chase ME around the zone instead of the bulldozing the trees.

But with the other two environments, that element of play was missing.  The Etopia and Virtual Museum spaces (from my perspective) was rife with the ideology of “CAUTION: YOU ARE NOW LEARNING.”  The same with the Abyss Observatory region as well.  Larissa and I approached these environments are first with that feeling of “CAUTION” and determining what it was we were supposedly learning.  I know personally, I felt lot of frustration with that approach, especially with the environments that were not clearly defined in purpose like Etopia and Abyss Observatory.  Attempting to find the clear cut ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE LEARNING” in those regions was like finding a needle in a haystack.

Further more, the spaces had no elements of play–they had some elements of interactivity but not elements of play. The playing in the space was lost under the breadth of the “CAUTION: YOU ARE LEARNING” and we bought into that mentality.  But it didn’t last because for Larissa and I, it wasn’t effective.  Despite our best efforts to the contrary, we had issues determining what we learning in a given environment.  So eventually, we started just … playing in the environment (there’s that word again).  We would run around, click on things, make jokes, question why things were like they way they were, etc.  After we started “playing” to determine what the space had in it and less of what it was trying to tell us, things when a lot smoother in terms of planning our lessons.

There’s some irony in the idea that we used play to develop lesson plans that (out of necessity) have the feeling of “CAUTION.”

Anyway, I can’t help but feel that in virtual learning environments, we have a unique opportunity to move away from the idea of CAUTION: LEARNING and more into the feeling of “play to learn” and I just wish I saw more of that being used.  In my mind, we are still trying to use traditional modes of learning and trying to force them into an entirely new environment that might actually benefit from a less structured environment.  Where it’s OK to make mistakes and to play and experiment to learn – to learn to be “outside the box” thinkers, as it were.

I think if I had the option to do the lesson plans over, I would try to make them more gamified–to bring in more elements of play into them.  I think that we could have increased our student’s engagement and generally enjoyment as well as learning.  I do think that by using Second Life, we captured some of that feeling of playful learning by proxy, intentionally.  But I can’t help but think how great it would have been to have the students have to play to create a farmers market vs. a chain store, or design a transition town, or a cohousing community.  With less of the just interactivity and more the play I think is so easy to attain in virtual learning environments.

I’ve been lurking and reading everyone’s posts and I must say that I’ve learned a lot from this class, especially through my group’s project with Global Potential. Engaging people in a digital space can be difficult, but the value of doing so increases daily as our culture continues to shift into the online world. Solidifying real life connections while also appealing to a broader audience has been the crux of our project, and I think I speak for all of my project teammates that the readings helped us immensely in terms of strategy and long term goal assessment.

Personally, McGonigal’s TED talk stuck with me the most. While she has a personal stake in the investment of video games with a real-life purpose, I think her speech was innovative and I thought of it many times during my team’s brainstorming sessions. Virtual learning hasn’t been taken seriously enough over the years, and I hope that after this class we all continue to implement VLEs in our academic and professional lives. I know I will!

Have a great rest of your summer everyone!

I’ve also checked a number of other, social changes-oriented, video games (America 2049, Urgent Evoke, Deep Down, The Curfew, Fate of the World (which, unfortunately, is made only for PC usage), Inside the Haiti Earthquake , etc.). Due to lack of time, I didn’t go far in-depth in the games, but from what I could experience I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of content, complexity, actuality of some of the games. I felt bad that I hadn’t raised a habit in myself to play video games, and for me it takes much efforts and patience to get fully involved in any of them; but with proper instructions, trailers, probably some preliminary real meetups, workshops, I think, even such NOT-gamers like me would become we easily engaged in them. Plus, there are different options for starters. For instance, the documentary game on Haiti Earthquake is very simple to use (you basically don’t have to do anything, just choose a role in which you’d like to experience the events in Haiti, and take a video-tour).

Deep Down, a video documentary about coal mining in the community, impressed me with how detailed and “like in real life” its content is built. Urgent Evoke’s introductions are beautifully made in a shape of comics which is very attractive for people who grew up in a “comics-culture” and contemporary teenagers. America 2049 is more politically active adults / young people – oriented game.

As Jane McGonigal’ claimed in her Ted Talk, “Gaming can make a better world”. There is enormous potential in the whole notion of gaming. We should  remember that gaming has always been an important part of human life. As E. Fink, the author of gaming concept of culture, put it, the game is a “basic phenomena of human existence and a unique opportunity of human life”.

As for educational and social changes purposes, video games should definitely be considered as a significant element of teaching and motivating the youth.

Outside of posting in the discussion area, what venue do I have to notify the interwebs of my virtual presence?  I have this huge feeling of not existing in a classroom until I type (I feel like there’s a Cartesian analogy in there someplace … but oh well).  But even then, I’ve seen students who only regurgitate the readings directly — is that still presence?  Sure, by the LMS’s standards I’m present and active (alive, if you will) in the classroom, but that’s a very shallow definition of presence in the online classroom.  But I don’t know how I would improve it?

Me for example, I tend to post infrequently, but I’m present with the material — I ponder it, talk about to people who look at me like I’m crazy, go off on ridiculous rants trying to explain the concept of heterotopias to a group of people who’ve never even heard of Foucault. To me, I’m being very present in the material, but until I type, that presence isn’t translated — I don’t exist in the LMS till the moment of that posting.  With some restrictions, the content of my posting in the discussion board come second to the fact that I posted at all.  The content is less important than the act, when structured as today.

I’m not sure I agree with that, but I don’t know how to remedy that either.

To comment on LMS, I feel that it is a good tool for companies if they are into why and how it would be able to use the programs.  However, now every company will be able to use, will schools have more of a use for it versus advertising companies?  If so, where is the drawback to these systems, are they for educational purposes only?  Here, I do not agree to disagree, I just have a lot of questions that I would think depending on the company, I would have my answer, but I am not sure.  Thoughts

The Jane McGonigal’s talk about “Gaming can make a better world” was, WOW, she is really passionate about gaming and learning.  I can see her point about why she wants to conduct her research in having the Internet become more of a gaming world then an informational one.  In the latter part of her talk, she spoke about individuals being categorized into four things: urgent optimism-extreme self motivation; social fabric-trust to play a game with someone; create that bond, trust, etc; bliss productivity-happier working hard and epic meaning.

To comment on McGonigal, I like how she looked at all avenues of why she wanted to research this, instead of “ok playing games are fun”.  Here research showed why individuals (using that term more often then kids) to illustrate that anyone who loves games can benefit from it.  I am not a gamer myself, but if I was shown what I was learning from a game, then I would be able to understand her point.  This would also help visual learners or anyone who can see what someone is talking about through more pictures then words and visibly understand what that person is saying.  Do I think that gaming will progress over the next decade, yes.  But it is up to companies and individuals alike to see that take place, how will our kids look to us, when we mostly learned through books (and even before the computer), to a world where kids will only turn to the computer, will they revert back  to the books to learn as well?  Only the future can explain that answer.

What is interesting about Full Sail in terms of LMS, is that they actually opted to design their own LMS from the ground up. It is a unique LMS to be sure. One of the most user friendly, from the student’s perspective anyway, that I have seen to date. Much more graphic user interface, very streamlined in terms of functionality – very clean, no confusion. As a novice to such environments, I was able to jump into it and gain mastery very quickly. Some of my classmates had a little more difficulty. While at Full Sail, although we studied other LMSs from a theoretical approach and got to see them demo’d, much like this course, we didn’t really get to work in or design in an LMS.

By the time I graduated in 2009, the school where I teach had decided to adopt Moodle as a part of their lab support, with the eventual goal of integrating the online learning environment more fully with their in-class sessions. I was uniquely positioned to jump in on that process from the ground up. I am now the Moodle administrator at my school and have probably been in Moodle almost every day since 2009. And I am still learning stuff… My company is cheap – they will not pay for additional Moodle training for me, so I am self-taught – I figure out stuff as I go.

In my second year at the New School, I have now worked with Blackboard, both as a student and as a TA. I have come to this understanding of LMSs…

I compare them to what I know well and teach – video editing (I am an editor and Avid Certified Instructor and teach editing). Take three of the top video editing software applications: Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere. Each of these apps has slightly different functionality and features, different icons for tools, different lingo. But they all have to basically do the same thing, because they are all video editing apps. Learn one and you’ve essentially learned them all – although you might have to do a bit of mental translation while you learn the new app and the best way to use it.

Or even think of it in terms of gaming, like Second Life versus World of Warcraft. There are commonalities. Even though there are differences, once you learn one app, you have a knowledge and experience base to draw on and compare the two, which helps you learn the second app.

LMSs are no different. That said, each will, of course, have strengths and weaknesses. But to effectively compare these, we have to think about what LMSs are designed to do.

They are what they say they are: Learning Management Systems. Which is essentially content management systems that create a portal through which courses can be accessed by the student, instructors and admin. For the student they provide easy access to all assignments, grades, and a central hub of communication. For instructors and administration they provide the ability to re-use all course content and resources from course to course, flexibility in design and development, centralized organization and course management, and accountability and tracking. I can look to see which students logged on when and did what at the drop of a hat. Grades are tracked and reports can be pulled – admin likes that, but it is useful for tracking students engagement from the curriculum designer/instructor perspective as well

All of the LMSs I have worked with have these functions: the ability to upload audio, video, and text files (both instructors and students), the ability to embed links to outside sources, discussion forums, wikis, blogs, email, and usually IMs, the ability to configure and customize a homepage (to varying degrees), and a host of other tools for providing assignments, grading, tracking etc.

On a side note, most of the LMSs I have worked with allow an administrator to enable or disable most of the above tools and functions (and others too numerous to mention) in settings options. For example, I usually disable students ability to customize a course homepage because I need everyone to be seeing the same thing for trouble shooting purposes and to make sure EVERYONE can find the same resources based on the instruction notes I’ve written and made available.

In my experience, the limitations of an LMS in any given situation have less to do with the LMS and more to do with the user. Most instructors are poorly trained on their LMS and do not use all of the features, but instead figure out work arounds that may actually work against them and their students. Many instructors and students perceive LMSs as being too structured, yet often without that structure students are lost and confused. LMSs are also often perceived as lacking in interactivity – again, I think this is a misconception based on inadequate instruction on how to make LMSs more interactive and somewhat based on a misguided notion that interaction on multiple levels all the time equals good instruction. Focused and guided discovery learning works most effectively when there is an underlying structure and LMSs can provide that structure.

From my perspective as student, teacher, and curriculum designer, here’s my ideal scenario:

Use an LMS for what it is great at: organizing structure, tracking, content management – fully utilizing audio, video and text based files.

Use other web based 2.0 tools for heightened interactivity and user control of content: for example, most if not all of the tools we’ve explored in this class. All of which can be linked through the LMS course.

This is a model I attempt in my own work professionally, as well as what my team is attempting in our group project. A melding o the strengths of each environment – which effectively minimizes the weaknesses of both and allows for different types of learners (and teachers) to be satisfied with their experience.

I like to think of the LMS portal and course as a physical structure through which all course content can be accessed. That structure is more like a gazebo, rather than a house. Rather than being locked into four walls, you’ve got a roof and some pillars, but air (or resources) flows through.

As far as the LMSs we’ve looked at in class: Canvas seems very similar to Blackboard in terms of organization and structure, as well as functionality, with a more graphic user interface, and a little more media chops. Blackboard is the old guy in the room and has great functionality, but not a lot of personality. In many of my classes at the New School, either my classmates or profs have complained about Blackboard. I do not have a problem with it. It comes down to users and user perception to me. Those profs who have used Blackboard well and creatively have got a lot of mileage out of it and have been successful, those who didn’t understand it, typically not so much. I think this phenomenon extends to students.

But in learning and designing for users, perception counts for a whole helluva lot! As a designer, one cannot design for the most adaptable users. One has to make the DESIGN adapt to MOST of the users. And the consensus is that BB sucks…. (technical term there…).

Moodle – well, I am most familiar with this one. I work with it everyday and I have my own personal Moodle instance on my server. I like it because it is open source and fairly flexible, and easy to learn. It seems to not be as structured as either BB or Canvas, nor as graphic driven as Canvas – but it can be made to be so… I like the fact that you can download Moodle yourself as an individual and start your own online learning portal. I am using my Moodle instance as part of my thesis development and have linked it to my WP blog and my virtual media education center in SL.

We are also using my personal Moodle instance for our final project for this class.

Happy to let anyone from class jump into it and play around BTW – in between playing WoW of course…

anyways – my 2 cents…

I apologize for not being as diligent with my reading responses! Here are some thoughts I’ve been meaning to share regarding some of the readings from the past few weeks:

LMS: I liked Siemens’ article on LMS and their weaknesses as it clearly spelled out why people like myself have such a hard time learning from one. My UMS class last fall relied heavily on Blackboard participation, and the class would have benefited from many of the suggestions Siemens posits. I do think that LMS are useful, but unfortunately are ill-designed for interactivity and for learning overall. Google+ has the potential to be a really great alternative to LMS as it has tools for interactivity via the Hangout, tools for self expression and for sharing. It will be interesting to see if and when it will be used as such by professors from here on out. I also liked Moodle and mySakai a lot! Much cleaner and user-friendly than Blackboard. The New School should look into switching to one of them!

Virtual worlds in education: Jane McGonigal’s TED talk was fascinating. When I was younger, I played video games all the time but I never really thought about what skills I was learning from it besides the essential combinations and permutations of A+B+Up arrow+Down arrow I know many people who love gaming and would have benefited greatly from the educational and forward-thinking games McGonigal has created (the one real “educational” game I ever played was called Math Blaster and it was just as boring as it sounds). It would be really cool if the games McGonigal mentioned got more publicity, as it would be interesting to see how a larger segment of the gaming population would react to them over time. I think that learning in an immersive virtual space will be greatly beneficial for the next generation of students, who are growing up with smartphones, iPads and the like.

Richer media: I am more of an “old-school” academic, by which I mean I prefer tangible objects such as books to e-readers such as the Kindle. However, as McLuhan’s hot and cold media continue to blend in our technology-centric culture, I can see the benefits of having a class Wiki as discussed in Havenstein’s article, much like the one we use in this class. I really enjoyed the “Why Heather Can Write” article as well. Fan fiction has become incredibly popular and has become very well-written for the most part. If one thinks about it, online fan fiction is really just creative writing 2.0. While creative writing in schools has unfortunately taken a downturn, it is heartening to see that the internet has become a place where young kids can improve their writing skills and learn the importance of grammar, syntax and editing.

Play and presence: I think that the Play Ethic is the predecessor for McGonigal’s TED talk. It taps into what I believe is a universal truth- we are more productive when we are having fun. Engaging students online can be challenging, and the problem with the LMS many schools rely on is that they do not engage the user and they aren’t fun. However, I think that many people unfortunately find learning and fun to be antonyms, and the Play Ethic (in my understanding anyway) did not provide a viable solution for it to be incorporated not only in the professional sphere but in the academic one as well.

Sorry for rambling!

1) here is a great article that a friend of mine wrote on ICT and education: http://www.ictworks.org/news/2010/08/30/10-worst-practices-ict-education and it, to me, sums up the problem of the technology bully pretty well.  no matter how much people say: put learners/teachers/whatever’ers first the *draw* of a tech (whether it is the OLPC or a specific new LMS) has some weird, magnetic effect that tends to draw projects away from their impact goals and into ‘output’ goals.  What is the difference?

in my work *impact* is something harder to measure and a lot less sexy…it is something like

1. “80% of girls in minority population X have access to job opportunities
2. *because* they have literacy skills
3. *because* they have had this great exposure to education
4. *because* we put an innovative project together using new technology
5. *because* of that new technology.

That is a fairly long causal chain.  *output* goals usually just stop at “we have put an innovative proejct toegether using new technology *because* of that technology.  It’s a lot harder to measure the impact – and to say that it had anything to do with a particular project – of an engagement.  Anyway – that is its own whole long discussion, and something that I am very happy to write more about – but where it intersects with the LMS’s is, exactly as Siemens says, that just because a technology gives administrators access to great metrics doesn’t mean those metrics measure anything.

My organization is exploring locally manufactured, rugged computers for kids to access 'connectivity.' even here the danger of being driven by technology is huge. Photo: Fabian / 2011

In my mind a good “system” for “managing” “learning” is a system that works for a teacher.  not a system that works for every teacher, but for a specific teacher.  When I teach, I use certain tools to organize my time.  Those tools are different now (teaching grad programs) than when I taught highschool.  but they are still my tools.  Other teachers who i know use other tools to “manage” their learning spaces.

This can be as simple as “i use a notebook with each of my classes in different sections” vs. “i use google docs  - and i think your notebook is sooooo analog” to being a bit more granularly linked to types of teaching methodologies, evaluation metrics, how a syllabus is set up, how one works with students.  But for those to be good choices for a teacher they have to be choices first.  I would not imagine a school where the administrators tell the teachers “here are your binders- everyone use the blue folder section to store your own personal thoughts on your students and the red section to store your grades, and each day write your thoughts about your favorite thing in the yellow section” as a very pleasant place to teach and learn – but that is, often, how LMS’s are constructed.

The “customizable”ness of moodle is fine – but you are still asking a teacher to think in a certain way – or maybe giving a choice of a set of ways in which they can think – but it is still an imposition and it’s an imposition which is led, by the nose, by technology.

The second point (2) is that these *technologies* themselves are often led by big corporate.  I am, at this moment, fighting with a large private sector hardware manufacturer.  They want my organization to use their software.  they will give it to us for free. they want to put our content on it.  doing that would then lock us into *also* using their hardware.  this would mean that any projects moving forward would have our content, but in their proprietary software, on their specific hardware.  which means we suddenly can’t scale these, can’t adapt them, can’t extend these online learning projects without working with this specific company.  that would be criminal.

For this reason it is our policy (my team, anyway) that everything we do must be on open source software (so moodle would be ok) but also must be working with open-licensed content and must work on whatever hardware exists in an ecosystem.  This sounds logical and obvious but many, many (almost all) education / tech projects do not start out with these principles in the foreground.

chris