A little while back I mentioned a while back that I’d gotten myself involved in designing a cross-media or ‘alternative reality’ game for Cancer Research UK. Well things have progressed a bit since I found myself catapulted into this, and it is indeed keeping me very busy but in a good way. Mikey, one of my partners in crime on this adventure, has posted a couple of great updates on what we’ve been up to on his blog if you want a teaser: Update 1, Update 2.

Anyhow, we need more volunteers for a few roles on our team. We’ve got a little job ad up and if anybody could post the link on their blog or similiar to get the word out, then I’d be very grateful! If you know of an appropriate noticeboard of the real-life variety (e.g. at a UK university) and wouldn’t mind putting a similar ad up there, please e-mail me and I can send you one.

One of the things I am finding me is constantly hitting me is the parallels between designing games, designing learning experiences and designing web applications and software. I guess this is because all three are about designing interactions. The groups of people involved in each of the three are quite different and I’ve been in the weirdly privileged position of having something to do all with all of them. I’m sure there’s stuff that each of the groups can learn from the others, but haven’t figured out quite what yet. There are differences too. When I’ve got my thoughts together more cogently, I’ll try and write something.

Posted on Thursday 5 June 2008

In the world of games, whether multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or alternative reality games, there’s constant discussion about the differences between casual and hard-core players and the difficulties of making games that cater for both.

Nobody ever seems to make this distinction in education - you don’t hear people talking about hard-core students whose studies are a central part of their life and casual students who still want to learn but might have other priorities too. When I did my degree, I think I fell into the ‘hard-core’ category a lot of the time despite the amount of time I spent on other things, mostly running all manner of societies and going to parties. I read far wider than the syllabus and worked hard to really try to understand my subject properly rather than superficially. Recently, studying various OU courses, my motivation is still intrinsic rather than extrinsic, but I’d regard myself as a casual student. I want to learn and I enjoy having the structure that you don’t get if you just read books and the better explanations of lots of things than you could find elsewhere, but I don’t really spend that much time on my studies and they aren’t a central part of my life. It doesn’t mean that the studying isn’t important to me in some way but I have other things I want to do with the majority of my life. It’s more akin to my relationship with World of Warcraft when I played. Being a casual player didn’t mean that I didn’t care.

Yet, there isn’t any discussion of the problem of providing education to both sets of students at the same time like there is with games. This might be because the set of ‘hard-core’ students is often quite small and ‘looks after themselves’. If everybody is studying individually it doesn’t necessarily matter if some people are way ahead - they probably won’t spoil things too much for the others though they might intimidate them or distract the teacher from the majority. Assessment and collaborative activities are a more likely flash point I guess - assessment usually takes place at set times for logistical reasons which is a bit like saying you can only complete a certain quest in World of Warcraft within a certain number of months of buying the game. Some assessment is more like a competition (that is how I saw my exams at university certainly) which makes more sense, but most assessment is about mastery of some sort so it is a bit odd to ring-fence it in terms of time.

Posted on Thursday 14 February 2008

One of the reasons that I’ve been a bit quiet here recently (and probably will be for most of this year) is that I’ve been part of a team that put in an entry to this competition to develop a game to raise money and awareness for Cancer Research UK. Our entry was the one picked, so we now have lots to do to make it happen and need some help. Here’s the info - if you reply to Guy and know me, do mention the fact or feel free to contact me directly instead.

Hi there!

We’re a group of volunteers currently designing an ambitious web-based game to raise funds and awareness for cancer research. It’s going to tie in storytelling, online communities, websites, real-world events and more, creating an unforgettable experience for thousands of people while supporting a profoundly important cause.

So, we need a bit of help! We can’t offer you money, but we can offer you the camaraderie of our team, the experience of creating something awesome, the good karma of supporting CRUK’s important work and suitably glowing testimonials.

Here are the folk we’re looking for:

• PHP/MySQL developers – we’re looking for people who have a reasonable amount of experience and can write good, clean, secure code
• Design for web: designing our graphics and website, somebody who can create an eye-catching look and then implement it in HTML/CSS. Fancy UI skills (AJAX, Flash) even awesomer.
• Flash developers – opportunities to contribute to general UI and site stuff, and also create full mini-games
• Guerrilla film types: Someone with the equipment, shooting/editing chops and the visual imagination to create fantastic-looking viral video
• Productive generalists – working on a particular area of the game and making stuff happen, from arranging live events to building relationships with supportive companies
• All hands – people who can help out in the future with testing, community participation & player support, event support, and so on
• Creative people we haven’t even thought of yet. This means you!

If you want to help make the magic happen (and we know you do!) email Guy at guy.lewis.parsons@gmail.com letting us know a bit about yourself – skills, experience, any stuff you’ve made, what you’d actually like to help with, where you’re based – and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Posted on Thursday 14 February 2008

I went to the Eduserv OpenID event in London last week which I enjoyed.

I’ve always really liked the idea of OpenID. But it niggles me that I’m not using it yet. If somebody like me whose is geeky and who spends a fair percentage of their life on the web hasn’t got round to using it, then it’s hard to believe it will take off with ‘normal’ people. Each time I encounter the problem of registering for a site, it’s less effort to just register than to figure out using OpenID with it, despite the fact that I know that technically I have an OpenID already. The idea of using OpenID for whitelisting is a nice one, but I’ll have to wait until my friends use OpenID and web sites support that sort of thing.

I think OpenID is still interesting for education however for rather different reasons than it might be interesting outside education. Multiple usernames and passwords aren’t an issue for us. We give students a username and password and tell them to use it. Most universities have sussed out single sign-on to a reasonable extent and I don’t think having a university-specific username is something that keeps students awake at nights. The fact they might redirect their university e-mail elsewhere doesn’t mean that they begrudge being given a username.

The problem that OpenID can solve for universities is that it is a pain to have to integrate every new bit of software with that single sign-on system. If they can link their single sign-on to OpenID, for any software that supports OpenID, that expensive job pretty much vanishes. It would also make bottom-up use of more diverse software easier (although the folk at the top who like to manage risk won’t necessarily like that). From that perspective, I think it could make a genuine practical difference - it’s easy to dismiss the issues related registration as solvable by administrative resources, but in practice what almost always happens in practice is the lone lecturer ends up doing it all themselves.

This doesn’t solve all the problems of course. There’s the issue of synchronisation of data (sounds trivial, but you really don’t want to be asking students to register with their name if you want even a small proportion to match the one that they used for their university registration). Universities also like putting people in groups and restricting access of things to certain groups. This is often over-zealous, but also often reasonable. There’s a pedagogical conflict between giving students a safe environment in which to make mistakes and motivating them by giving them authentic environments for their activities. There are probably ways though you could have directories of OpenIDs for different groups - and not having to worry about authentication too would make them simpler than the current systems of that nature.

I think if education does pick up on this sort of things, there could be the interesting result that it might be what pushes OpenID mainstream - if students get used to using OpenID while at university then they might start using it elsewhere. I’m not sure how quickly education will pick up on these sort of things, but it only takes one university to have a success story for others to copy.

Posted on Monday 12 November 2007

I was at a couple of meetings earlier this week related to JISC’s ‘Design for Learning’ programme. There was a fair bit of frustration voiced there about the linearity of the LAMS software which lets you create ’sequences of activities’ for your students (with the fact that there’s no way to go ‘backwards’ in LAMS exacerbating this).

Although I didn’t hear it articulated, I think there were probably actually a few separate sources of this uneasiness - whether a student might know better than the teacher how they learn best, whether different students will learn best in different ways and so more flexibility is needed, whether the restriction of freedom for a student has some psychological effect which has pedagogical implications, and whether the use of LAMS discouraged students from ‘learning how to learn’.

This last one is the interesting one I think. The desirability of ‘learning how to learn’ is hardly contestable, but it’s rarely explicit in university curricula, maybe because it’s so tricky to assess. As a result it’s up to the individuals teaching to decide on their approach, leading to the great ’spoonfeeding’ debate. This discussion is made all the more heated by the those who think that the best way to get people to learn how to learn is throw them in the deep end. Of course, learning how to learn isn’t everything - you need to have an idea what’s worth learning in the first place and that’s something entirely different. Teaching yourself stuff can be harder too - if you’ve deliberately signed up for a course to save yourself some of that effort, there’s nothing more annoying than a tutor who refuses to teach you the content because they think their job is to teach you how to learn instead.

But suppose that you decided that you explicitly wanted to teach your students to learn how to learn, how would you actually go about it? I think you need to start with thinking about what happens when you decide to learn something. You’ve picked up various strategies for learning things in the course of life: by the way you’ve been taught, by trial and error, from advice from other people. Then, when it comes to learning something new, you make a choice, effective or otherwise, of some sort from the mix that you’ve absorbed over the years. After that you hope you’ve got sufficient mix of confidence, discipline and motivation to follow that strategy through and you get ready to tweak it when you spot that it’s not working.

Some people take to this like a duck to water, other people don’t. With the people who don’t, I guess making the process more explicit might help a lot of those people as well as encouraging them to reflect on the process (something often easier said than done), but one of the barriers may also be having a repetoire of good possible strategies at your disposal. So there probably is maybe some value in exposing people to good strategies (and things like ‘asking an expert when you are stuck’ are perfectly valid strategies) - a type of ’scaffolding’. Encouraging lecturers to explain how they themselves learned the material in question is probably a good thing too and I really like Jill Walker Rettberg’s worksheets too.

Technology multiplies the number of strategies available enormously, so if you’re trying to teach people to learn how to learn then you can’t ignore technology. I realised this reading ‘In Their Own Words‘ on the train home this week. I’m not sure I was the audience it was aimed at - I didn’t find any surprises and recommendations like ‘explore the potential of emerging technologies’ aren’t exactly magic panaceas (but I do understand too that part of the point of sociological research is to find out if ‘obvious’ stuff is in fact true or not). But the booklet does paint a nice picture of the different ways people choose to use technology to help them learn. It would be nice to somehow collate different strategies people use when they want to learn things - making those strategies explicit seems like a first step to helping people to learn how to learn. I suspect this might be what the ‘PLE movement‘ is getting at too - you create your own set of techonolgy-based strategies. The thing that excites me is how by creating new technologies you can give people new strategies, but figuring out what’s already possible and sharing that in a sensible way definitely seems like it might be worthwhile too.

Posted on Friday 26 October 2007

One of the questions that you often see in surveys of students is ‘How much IT would you like to be used in the teaching of your course?’ or a variation thereof. This question really puzzles me, because unless you’re a luddite, how you can you answer it in any sensible way? Surely it depends so hugely on how the technology is being used that any generic answer is meaningless? And if you’re half-thinking ‘how are they going to use my answer’,your response will probably hugely influended by whether you think it will be used sensibly and what your previous experience is of how teachers have used technology.

Posted on Saturday 20 October 2007

I don’t like the term ‘digital native‘. It’s not that there aren’t generational differences or that there isn’t something in the concept: it’s more that it strikes me of being a horrible simplification of what is actually going on.

My first issue with the term is that it is very poorly defined. How do I tell if somebody is a digital native? Indeed, am I one? (Oh, and do people really exist who print out all their e-mail rather than reading it on the screen?) If it is based on technology exposure and use, are there different types of digital natives? An obssessed computer game player might not be a MySpace addict and vice-versa. Is the concept about literacies more than computer usage?

Or would the definition be more meaningful if it were related to psychology instead? Does you require some sort of addiction to instant gratification to be a digital native? A tendency towards continuous partial attention? A certain lack of fear of experimenting and failing at things? A preference for inference over deducation and dislike of learning step-by-step? And are these things independent or not? Can one prefer ‘random access’ but not operate at twitch speed? Is there a binary divide or are there different degrees of ‘digital nativeness’? There’s also the question of whether there is there a definite link between technology exposure and these psychological aspects. It’s perfectly plausible that playing lots of computer games when young might change your brain, but that’s different from it actually being true.

The next thing that bothers me is that much of the evidence of prevalance of digital nativeness in our youth is anecdotal. Somebody’s kid has twenty windows open at once on their computer, or a student listens to music while doing their homework (didn’t we do that fifteen years ago?). We know pretty much everyone of a certain age uses MySpace and a few other things certainly, but I haven’t seen anything at the type of level of detail that really tells us what the situation is. Without a sensible way of deciding if somebody is a digital native or not, then it’s also hard to tell the extent to which digital natives exist in other generations. I’ve certainly got friends of my age who are constanly on facebook, who play lots of computer games or who find it hard to put their mobile phone down. Teenagers don’t necessarily have a monopoly on such things. I’m a little bit sceptical too because some of my own (equally anecdotal) experience. I remember a couple of years ago discovering that nobody in my class of first year students had heard of wikipedia. One of my students didn’t have a clue what to do when I told the class to open the web browser and go a particular URL. I’ve also encountered teenagers who didn’t live on a diet of computer games and are slightly nervous about using computers.

Supposing that we can come with a sensible way to frame digital nativeness, which I don’t think is inconceivable. Then, we have the issue of whether there are differences in how we should teach digital natives compared to digital immigrants. Again, I get frustrated by the lack of concrete evidence that I’ve been able to find (if there is any, then I’d love to know!). My instinct is that engaging activities and quick feedback cycles would probably be appreciated by everyone. The digital natives might just be less tolerant of bad teaching. It’s also important to realise that many computers games may be ‘random-access’ in some senses but highly structured in others. Proper research is important because without it, there’s a danger that the digital immigrants will read that digital natives behave in a certain way, and then make incorrect inferences - the ‘they send texts a lot, therefore we much teach by text’ syndrome. Personally, I feel that from a practical perspective, if you do want to figure out how to teach digital natives, then you probably have to try to become< one, rather than observe from afar. Otherwise, it's a bit like trying to understand French culture without ever having learned any of the French language.

Even if there is a difference, there's the political issue of how you deal with such a difference. Do you have separate classes or forever discriminate against people not privileged enough to have had access to computers during their youth or who are re-entering education at any older age? Also to what extent should we preparing our students for the huge majority of workplaces that aren’t yet ‘digital native’-friendly? Just as importantly, although you may learn useful things from computer games and the like, it’s not totally clear that every aspect of digital nativeness is automatically to be desired. Mindfulness has its place, a certain appreciation of when delayed gratification is worthwhile is worth learning and multitasking often reduces productivity. Sometimes it’s better to stop and think about what caused that bug rather than putting the debugger onto it, or to think about the issue that everybody is blogging about rather than just reading what everybody says in search of the holy grail. Maybe it’s< better to concentrate on the conversation you’re having with the person< in front of you than to answer your mobile. If this phenomenon is partly some sort of Skinnerian addiction, then maybe we shouldn’t be encouraging it - we might want to avoid the ‘institutionalisation of short attention span’. If they are having withdrawal symptoms, it’s not surprising that today’s generation don’t like the slow place of much teaching.Students may not like following through logical arguments, but is that a good reason why they shouldn’t learn to do so?

Posted on Saturday 20 October 2007

I sometimes wonder if the publishing industry will go the way of that the music industry clearly is, but I’m not sure. Self-publishing with the likes of Lulu is obviously going to become more common but there are important differences.

Most people who write books don’t make much money out of them, at least directly, and hopefully don’t expect to. Publishing companies are akin to venture capitalists. They make lots of deals where the writer signs away the lion’s share of the profits in return for the investment in editting, distribution and promotion. The publishing companies hope that a small but sufficient percentage go on to be wildly successful and more than subsidise all the flops. Some publishers may have slightly have ‘flatter’ models than that but that’s my general impression of how it works.

Now that distribrution and promotion are much more things that you can do yourself, you’d think that publishing companies would become redundant. However, there’s an important difference compared to the music industry - people are impressed by published authors not just by people have written good books. Having been able to persuade a publisher to let you write a book on a subject makes people think rightly or wrongly that you are an expert. Somehow if an academic put a self-published book on their CV, I don’t think it’d be seen in quite the same light as one published through more conventional routes. I’m also sure the fiction publishing houses aren’t getting any fewer manuscripts submitted. I’m not sure what exactly is going on there psychologically, but something is, and it’s one of those things that will change overnight. The annoying thing of course is that you still have to play the publishers’ game if you want that kudos.

I think there are probably going to be two categories of people who self-publish: folk who know they are going to get large sales and realise they can make more money by self-publishing (as the 37 Signals guys did) and people who have discovered that finding a publisher is too much hassle and are more interested in sharing what they’ve written than being able to say they’ve had a book published. I’m ignoring the extreme long tail here - the self-published books for niche audiences where there was never any expectation to sell more than a few dozen copies. That sort of things will obviously grow in the same way that photo albums will probably soon become a thing of the past.

I think the people who get ultra-enthusiastic about the idea of wiki textbooks sometimes forget why people write conventional textbooks. Writing textbooks takes a lot of time and if you’re going to do it well, you probably want some real recognition for it. I’m sure there are exceptions, but the wiki textbooks that I’ve seen aren’t on a par with the books that cost me twenty or thirty pounds when I was a student. It doesn’t mean that wiki textbooks aren’t something to aspire too - lots of people in the world can’t afford textbooks, and a low-quality textbook may be better than nothing. But for people who can afford textbooks, I doubt they are going to be a magic replacement.Wikipedia content gets very hit and miss as soon as you get to genuinely academic topics. There’s also the fact with a wiki textbook, it’s easy to end up with the blandness that happens if you ‘design by committee’. Wikis usually work best by having structure for people to fill in and as result there’s a tendency for wiki textbooks to be rather derivative. Writing a textbook is very different from writing an encylopedia entry too - learning material is a different kettle of fish from a reference material and requires a different type of attention to detail. You can’t compare with open-source sensibly either - writers also don’t have the self-incentive of getting to use what they create and contributing to a wiki textbook isn’t going to be an opening into real textbook writing or make academics regard you more highly.

So I’m a little bit of a sceptic about whether things will change as rapidly as we’re seeing with the music industry unless something happens to put self-publishing psychologically on a par with conventional publishing. It’s possible some inbetween models such as my friends at reverb are trying to do might have a place although I’m not sure how scalable they are. Whatever does happen though, I’m really looking forward to seeing a greater variety out there because of self-publishing that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

Posted on Monday 15 October 2007

I’ve just been watching a documentary film on BBC2 called ‘Beautiful Young Minds’ about students competing for places in the British team for the International Mathematics Olympiad. It was a good film, but it was also mildly frustrating how the film inevitably focused in on the people most sharply on the autistic spectrum and reinforced stereotypes unnecessarily. When I went to the training session at Cambridge when I was in the sixth-form, one of the best parts was the bright, fun company. It was wonderful finding other people interested in mathematics to talk to about it, but we talked about many just as interesting things and it was one of the first places where I felt I naturally fitted in. I don’t remember it feeling competitive but then I don’t think I was ever a real contender for a place on the team. I could often answer IMO questions but not consistently enough. I was mostly just relieved that I wasn’t ten times more stupid than everybody else there and that I could make genuine contributions to my team’s attempts to solve problems.

The training session was incredibly intensive experience. The few breaks you had were spent trying to solve various ongoing problems we were given to look at. We were divided into teams of four, who we did things together with for the length of the training session. Most of the time was spent solving problems, discussing problems, showing our solutions to the others. I suspect, the main aim was to fire people up to go and do lots of work on their own later. It was at home, struggling, often for days, on old questions and other problems that you slowly made progress. It wasn’t anything like the sort of learning that you did at university. It was more like learning to write better. There aren’t epiphanies, and I think to a certain extent, you just have to do lots of it, and it’s only looking back on what you did a year ago that you see the progress that you’ve made. Every problem that you looked at was new and any heuristics for solving problems had been inculcated long ago. The sort of learning that I was doing back then was not like the sort of learning that I ever remember seeing described in educational research.

I’d forgotten the huge number of hours I spent back when I was younger, just trying to solve problems, not trying to actually learn anything specific per se, partly for the sheer pleasure of solving problems and the satisfaction when you did finally figure one out, and partly because I knew somehow that I was imperceptibly getting gradually better at doing so. I don’t remember being tempted to look up the answers ever and I suspect that I’ve lost that patience since. Those days and hours spent are one of those things that probably has had a long-lasting influence on me somehow, but that you forget because it’s in the past. Watching the film brought back memories

Posted on Sunday 14 October 2007

A few things that have caught my eye lately:

• The School of Everything - this is a site that I’d really like to succeed, and it’s been done nicely enough that it might just. It’s a place to find people willing to teach things. Somehow, it didn’t suprise me that the guy behind it is an Ivan Illich fan.
• Help Me Solve This Mystery seems to be somewhere between an ARG and something more overtly educational. I haven’t looked at it closely, but it’s really nice to see people trying to experiment with that type of media educationally. I’ve learned tons about all sorts of things from landscape gardening to Christopher Marlowe from doing the Logica Armchair Treasure Hunts and it’s way more powerful than learning things traditionally. I think part of the challenge with these sort of things is how to reach a broad enough audience to make the huge effort involved feel worthwhile, especially as it’s hard to make these things replayable. They also don’t also sit naturally comfortably with the formal education system of course. I’m also keen to see what happens with Let’s Change the Game.
• Donors Choose is a site asking for donations for classroom projects. There’s something surprisingly satisfying about being able to see a list of specific projects to choose from.
• MathTran - this is a bit niche, but it’s a major milestone in terms of enabling people to do maths on the web I think. You include a javascript file, and then include a tag with the appropriate LaTeX for the maths you want to display in your HTML and it displays for you, no plug-ins required by the viewer. I can’t tell you how much easier this would have made my life a couple of years ago.

Posted on Monday 8 October 2007