Open Educational Tools

First International Conference on Open and Distance e-Learning

2011-12-14T18:36:00.002+08:00

On February 22-24, 2012 in Manila, Philippines.

Website: http://www.icodel.org/home/

Suzanne Darrow's Connectivism Learning Theory: Instructional Tools for College Courses

2011-04-08T11:02:00.000+08:00

A related thesis that I have failed to cite in my project is Suzanne Darrow's Connectivism Learning Theory: Instructional Tools for College Courses (2009). I came across her work only after I have submitted my project report.

It's abstract follows:

This qualitative thesis explores the work of George Siemens and connectivist learning theory, 'A Learning Theory for the Digital Age'. Findings are based on a literature review which investigated the foundations, strengths and weaknesses of connectivism and synthesized conclusions into a knowledge base of practical applications for the college level, Instructional Technology classroom. The half-life of knowledge is shrinking, especially in the field of Instructional Technology; connectivism helps to ensure students remain current by facilitating the building of active connections, utilizing intelligent social networking and encouraging student-generated curricula. Connectivism allows the future of education to be viewed in an optimistic, almost utopian perspective, as individuals co-create knowledge in a global, networked environment (Darrow, 2009, p.ii).

Darrow tries to associate the term "digital natives" with connectivism. I wish she had taken into consideration Siemen's criticism of this concept at http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2007/08/29/digital-immigrants-and-digital-natives/ (2007). A list of works criticizing the term can be found in Doug Holton's blog- http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/the-digital-natives-digital-immigrants-distinction-is-dead-or-at-least-dying/ (2010).

Nevertheless, it's a good introduction to connectivism for teachers. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Hopefully more theses on connectivism will be shared online this year.

Project Report: Exploratory Approaches to the Design and Development of a Game for a Distance Education Course in Philippine History

2011-04-08T10:39:00.004+08:00

by
Roel Cantada

I would like to share my project report for my master's degree in distance education at the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU).

Downloads

Report
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ei3fb2b9haja388/CantadaProjectReportEbook.pdf (4.57 mb)

WIP OARs of the game
http://www.mediafire.com/file/qlew0zm3ws3v2pp/phgame1_2-8-2011.oar (15.22 mb)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/qb2377nriczm66s/phgame2_2-8-2011.oar (5 mb)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/cb7coc47ao29ydc/phgame3_2-8-2011.oar (10.44 mb)

Abstract

The project explores the design and development of a prototype video game for a distance education course in Philippine history. The project seeks to answer these questions:

What are the affordable learning actions and constraints of educational games in general and games for learning history in particular?
What production pipeline of design and development of educational games is appropriate for distance education teachers of Philippine history with meagre resources?

The rationale for the project is the following:

There is little study on courses as games in distance education.
In the context of connectivist learning theory there is no study of games as hubs for a personal learning environment (PLE).
There is no available off the shelf game for teaching Philippine history.

Open Simulator, a Multi-user Virtual Environment (MUVE) was used to create a prototype game. Formative research methods were adopted in the design and development of the game.

It has been found that the game affords the adoption of a wide range of learning theories and methods. As a PLE hub it has weak and strong affordances. In learning history it affords the following:

It affords the linking and finding of historical sources.
It affords role playing of historical characters.
It affords reconstruction of history in multimedia.
It affords the linking of game play with history.

It has also been found that teachers may impose a minimal amount of constraint on the learning path through quests and virtual objects that serve as obstacles. Items may be hidden from view (to delay use) or pointed out by Non-Player Characters. These constraints may help learners recognize affordable learning actions in the game. It may also scaffold the experience of novice players who are unfamiliar with the 3D environment.

In conclusion, series of steps and guidelines are suggested for developing educational games. It is recommended that teachers exploit the tools of the game for collaborative design and development as well as the production of reusable virtual world archives.

Appending SNAPP graphml files in Gephi

2011-02-03T11:30:00.000+08:00

Browse a Moodle forum,
Click the bookmark link to the SNAPP
Copy the export tab-graphml data
Paste in a text document with the extension .graphml
Open in Gephi and append other files.

Unfortunately tie strengts are not preserved. It may be a problem with SNAPP or Gephi, but I don't really know why.

Warning: There is an error in the graphml file export of the Moodle SNA tool. Use SNAPP instead. The error is in the following tag:

<edge source="A" target="B"/>1</edge>

The extra forward slash / in the <edge> tag causes the problem. Gephi will not be able to open the graphml file from the Moodle SNA tool.

Perhaps a better solution is to create a VNA importer for Gephi and use the scripts here http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2011/02/workflow-of-merger-and-anonymization-of.html to extract and anonymize the data. Unfortunately I'm still working on my Graduate project and I can only look into this after my project is finished.

Workflow of the merger and anonymization of the CCK09 forum datasets

2011-02-03T11:20:00.000+08:00

This is my workflow for anonymyzing and merging the VNA datasets of the CCK09 Moodle forum. I coded some python scripts to automate some of the steps. But it would still require some manual work with a spreadsheet.

Python Scripts

Download the python scripts:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/u7mo4524kfkssgg/datasetscripts09.zip (3.11 kb)

Environment:

Ubuntu Lucid amd64
Python 2.6.5
Moodle SNA Tool

I do not know if the extraction script will work with SNAPP.

Notes common for all scripts

1. This is needed for the scripts to work
add the following lines to to /etc/python2.6/sitecustomize.py

#change default python system encoding
import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

My sitecustomize.py. is included in the downloadable archive above. Backup your original file to sitecustomize.py.orig and place this in /etc/python2.6 .

2. Setting the permissions of the scripts

Right click the python script and select Properties
In Properties - Permissions tab - enable Execute: Allow executing file as program.

Open a terminal and you can issue a command like this
./extractvna.py

if you cannot change permissions then you have to issue the following command in a terminal

python extractvna.py

3. Some possible errors
If you get errors like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "anoncck09.py", line 29, in <module>
inputfile = open(vnafilename, 'rb')
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:

That means you forgot to set the nfile or input file number to the correct number of files to process.

Extracting VNA files from saved html page output of Moodle SNA Tool

1. Browse a Moodle forum,
2. click the bookmark link to the Moodle SNA Tool
3. Save the page with the export VNA data as 1.html, 2.html, 3.html in a folder. I number my folders as forum1, forum2 etc. Naming the files as number 1 to n is important.
4. Download and extract extractvna.py in a folder where the vna files will be saved. Let's say folder vna1.
5. Open extractvna.py in a text editor and change the following values.

idirectory = 'file:///home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/forum1/' #input file local url directory. Do not use /home/juan... it will result in python error. Always put a trailing slash / . There should be 3 and only 3 leading slash after file: e.g. ///

fextension = '.html' #file extensions. make it empty if there are no extensions e.g. ''. note NO space in between the quotes.

nfile = 1 #number of input files

6. open a terminal and issue the command
./extractvna.py

or

python extractvna.py

7. The terminal should scroll with the vna data being processed. If an error occurs leave me a comment about it. Make sure you have the same Python version. If it is successful it will say "finished extracting text".

8. You will have 1-n files without the vna extension in your folder.

Anonymyzing the dataset

When I anonymized the CCK08 dataset I waited until the union is complete before creating the code sheet. In CCK09 I used a cumulative anonymization method. That is, I just add new names whenever I encounter them. This also allowed me to tag new CCK09 students in the dataset.

With an existing codesheet

If you already have a codesheet then go to step 1. If not manually create a codesheet from the union of the first set of vna files first.

1. Download and extract anoncck09.py in the same folder where you have the extracted vna files. The example above is vna1.

2. Open anoncck09.py in a text editor e.g. gedit then change the following values.

###CHANGEABLE VALUES
idirectory = 'home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/vna1/' #input file directory
csfilename = '/home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/codesheet08.csv' #codesheet
odirectory = '/home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/vna1/' #output directory
nfile = 35 #number of input files
###END OF CHANGEABLE VALUES

3. open a terminal and issue the command
./anoncck09.py

or

python anoncck09.py

4. If it is successful it will say "finished anonymyzing vna files". You will have 1.csv, 2.csv, 3.csv ... in your folder.

5. Apply to other forum sets and just add names and aliases to the codesheet.

Anonymyzing a Union of datasets

1. Download and extract anoncck09union.py in the extracted vna folder.
2. Open anoncck09union.py in a text editor and change the following values
###CHANGE THESE VALUES
idirectory = '/home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/1/1union.csv' #input file directory
csfilename = '/home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/codesheet1.csv' #codesheet
odirectory = '/home/juan/Documents/CCK09/VNA/1/' #output directory
fname = 'outputfile' #filename of output file
###END OF CHANGEABLE VALUES

3. open a terminal and issue the command
./anoncck09union.py

or

python anoncck09union.py

4. If it is successful it will say "finished anonymyzing vna files". You will have a file named outputfileunion.csv
5. Apply to other forum union dataset and just add names and aliases to the codesheet.

Merging the datasets into a union dataset using OpenOffice.org spreadsheet.

This part will be very tedious if you have a lot of data.

1. Open each anonymized csv
Select Character set: Unicode (UTF-8)
Enable separated by space and text delimiter ".
2. Create a new spreadsheet with separate worksheets for node data and tie data. Copy every node data and tie data to this spreadsheet for merging.
3. Select the data columns minus the headers i.e. *Node data, ID posts; and *Tie data, from to talk strength.
4. Then sort the data with menu-Data-Sort.
5. When the names are sorted you will see the duplicate entries. Sum the numbers and erase the duplicate entries.
6. In another worksheet copy your node data and tie data then save as csv.
7. Select field delimiter space and text delimiter ". Disable save cell content as shown.
8. Open the saved csv file and remove the quotes from the headers. *Node data, ID posts; and *Tie data, from to talk strength. Otherwise you will not be able to open the file in Netdraw.
9. Rename the file extension to vna and open in Netdraw.

Building the orientation area of my Philippine History game project

2011-01-31T08:45:00.000+08:00

The biggest problem that I have seen in the virtual worlds that I have visited is the emptiness of the world. It's not that there is nothing there, sure there's lots of prim buildings and signs. But there's no avatar around. Sometimes one would teleport in or fly around but would immediately teleport out again.

This is the reason why NPCs are important. They could alleviate some of the loneliness and stress associated with being alone in a world. Unfortunately the NPC module of Open Simulator 0.7.x is broken. And even the functioning module in an earlier version needs a to improve, especially in the persistence of attachments.

The only solution that I was able to come up with is to create cut-out figures and use greeter scripts as a temporary substitute. What I did is I created my character avatar, then took a snapshot in green screen.

Greeter cut-out

I then created a texture for a prim by adding alpha channels. Then used it on a simple box prim. Btw. any resemblance to anyone living or dead is not intended. I just played with the appearance sliders to come up with a look that differs from the default avatar Ruth.

Then I combined the Who_touched_me.lsl and VERY_SIMPLE_GREETING_Script_by_Jester_Knox.lsl greeter scripts. So whenever an avatar comes close or touch the cut-out it will say something. Greet, give info, or a quest.

Landing zone of the Orientation plaza

In addition to a greeter I put HyperGates in the orientation plaza that will serve as a time machine that will teleport students to the themed regions. Textures for the rings are from the Astria Porta Stargate. I replaced the scripts since I'm only using a standalone sim (and have no need for hypergrid teleportation) with a simple teleporter that uses OsTeleportAgent().

The booth near the greeter is a Sloodle Enrollment booth.

Hopefully when the NPC module is fixed I can replace these cut-outs.

Ego networks as a measure of performance in a forum

2011-01-20T08:19:00.000+08:00

Whenever I think of online forums in a course I think of the I Love Lucy chocolate assembly line skit. In a very active forum it is very difficult to keep up and get an overview of your performance.

This is specially difficult for a distance education teacher who is trying to monitor the performance of his/her students. How do we know that we are spending more time on one student and forgetting others. In the preceding posts I pointed out that isolates are a good measure of triaging assistance to students who cannot keep up with the forum. Another measure may be ego networks. With it, a teacher could easily spot with which student he/she is not interacting enough with, and which student he/she is spending too much of his/her time with.

Here is a toy graph of 13 nodes to illustrate my point.

toy graph

By isolating the ego network (distance=1) we can see below that the teacher is only able to reach 6 students (50%) directly.

ego network

Clearly you can easily spot the students whom you will need to give your scarce attention to by looking at your ego network in context below.

ego network in context

Download toy graph dataset and open with Gephi:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/m4rq3eenkdb4949/toyego1.gephi (22.85 kb)

References:

Ego networks. Available at http://www.analytictech.com/networks/egonet.htm.

Ego networks in Hanneman, Robert A. and Mark Riddle. 2005. Introduction to social network methods. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside ( published in digital form at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/ ). Available at http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/C9_Ego_networks.html.

Gephi has improved a lot

2011-01-15T08:04:00.000+08:00

Gephi, an open source visualization software has improved a lot lately with their 0.7 beta release. I did not use this before because it could only create graphs and not analyze them, but now thing are looking quite good.

It appears to even have tools to merge datasets. It also has ability for time slicing. :-D I will explore this further later on.

What we need now is for Moodle forums to be able to export node-tie data in GEXF format (Gephi's native file format). They also seem to have a flash viewer that can be put in a Moodle plugin, server side called GEXF Explorer. If this is correct all the pieces needed to come up with a periodic graph visualization tool for Moodle forums is there. I think the best solution is simply to access Moodle's forum database for user id, post and reply data and come up with a page that allows server side visualization and export to GEXF for offline analysis. I don't think analysis should be done server side as it would slow down Moodle. It could be done if there is a dedicated server doing the number crunching.

By taking advantage of Gephi's dynamic data attributes the user can select a time period for analyzing data in a dropdown box, let's say daily, weekly, or monthly.

An additional improvement on tie-node data gathering for the Moodle forum is to have a filter that will parse nicknames like @John for John Doe. When a user types @John the editor will display somewhere (e.g. a block maybe) an offer to associate @John with another user e.g. John Doe, John Deer etc. Then the nickname @John or an image icon can appear in a cloud block so that the poster can simply click on that to insert a nickname. The filter will then insert a node-tie tag that identifies @John with John Doe. Example is when Jane Little replied to Peter Potamus' post but added a reply to John's other post in the post body. Then the filter can tag the reply to John as @John<displaytext="@John" userid="123" username="John Doe">. The from data can be taken from the reply user id. This way we do not have to do content analysis to find lost ties.

The question now is who's willing and able to code this Moodle third party plugin?

Would an online forum network survive the absence of a facilitator?

2011-01-13T09:28:00.042+08:00

This question came to mind while I was musing over the establishment of the Internet. The Internet was designed as a network supposedly to survive a nuclear attack. That is if one or a cluster of servers are hit, the rest of the network will still function.

So I thought about how this idea applies to a social network in an distance education online forum. Would an online forum network survive the absence of a teacher/facilitator? And a related question is, what structure of a network will continue to allow discussion and sharing of ideas among students even if the facilitator is absent?

A few toy graphs may shed light on these issues. So in this post I will talk about the instructions that teachers give in an asynchronous discussion activity and its possible effect on the social network of students. Then I will look at the structure of the CCK09 forum 1 network without a facilitator.

The first scenario for an online forum activity for a distance education course would have the following direction from a teacher: Each student should post to the forum.

If this instruction is given, and in my experience with undergraduate students, the students would just post a new discussion each work and ignore their peer's work. This would then result in the following graph (or non-graph).

Toy graph 1

Toy graph 1 shows nodes only, it has no ties and the average degree is zero. What is the degree? The degree of a node is number of ties pointing in and out of it. In a graph with edges but without arrow heads (direction) the ties pointing in and out from the other node is counted as one. Toy graph 1 is not a network at all. Students speak pass each other, there is no sharing of ideas. If the teacher is removed, it would not matter at all since there is no discussion anyway.

toy graph 2

Second scenario would have this instruction: The teacher will post a question/issue at the beginning of the forum and each student is expected to reply. At minimum, this will yield one reply from each student. It has an average degree of 1.6. In toy graph 2 above, teacher x is at the center of a star cluster. If we remove the teacher then the graph degenerates into the following with an average degree of zero.

toy graph 2b

Clearly this is the same as toy graph 1. The network did not survive the absence of the teacher.

Third scenario is what we call a complete network, i.e. wherein every node is connected to every other node. The toy graph below has an average degree of four.

toy graph 3

If we remove the teacher from toy graph 3, the network's average degree drops to 3 but it is still a complete network. The network survives the absence of the teacher.

toy graph 3b

Let us now take a look at CCK09's forum 1. The average degree of its social network is
3.7. When the facilitator is removed from the network the average degree is 3.5. The graph without the facilitator is below.

original forum 1 network, n=71, average degree = 3.7

forum 1 without facilitator, n=70, average degree = 3.5

I'd say this is a rather healthy online forum network. But with a total node of 70 minus the facilitator it could still be improved.

BTW the network property of average degrees falls under network cohesion.

How to get the degree of each node in Netdraw. I can't seem to find any facility for reporting averages in Netdraw. So it will cumbersome to do this in Netdraw with a large network. With a small network click on Analysis -> Centrality measures. Then click on the right panel. Select the Nodes tab and in the dropdown list select and select Degree. You will get a list of degrees in the network.

I think the average degree is equal to the product of the nodes and their respective degrees, divided by the total of nodes.

The total nodes will be displayed at the bottom of the right panel. In toygraph 2, the total nodes is 5. Then to get the number of nodes per degree unselect all check boxes and reselect one by one. Watch this bottom panel for the total nodes per degree cluster.

In toygraph 2 there are four nodes with 1 degree, and 1 node with four degrees. Multiply and sum and there are a total of 8 degrees in the network. Then divide by 5 (total nodes) and you get a 1.6 average degree.

Of course when you look at the network majority of the nodes have a degree of 1 and there is no node with a degree of 1.6. This shows why looking at the graph is as important as calculating average network properties. Be that as it may the average degree is still useful for comparing networks.

Download:

vna files of toy graphs (1.42 KB)

Comparison of CCK09 and CCK08 stats

2011-01-12T08:51:00.027+08:00

Table 1: Comparison of number of participants in CCK09 and CCK08

Forums	CCK09 New Participants	CCK09 Total Participants	%	CCK08 Total Participants	%
INTRO	114	166	86.01	501	93.30
GD	3	12	6.22	165	30.73
1	44	71	36.79	83	15.46
2	25	50	25.91	61	11.36
3	21	40	20.73	48	8.94
4	11	27	13.99	28	5.21
5	19	37	19.17	42	7.82
6	10	20	10.36	30	5.59
7	9	19	9.84	25	4.66
8	8	23	11.92	85	15.83
9	8	17	8.81	28	5.21
10	13	27	13.99	24	4.47
11	12	17	8.81	35	6.52
12				29	5.40
TOTAL	130	193	100	537	100

Chart 1: Comparison of number of participants in CCK09 and CCK08

Table 2: Comparison of posts in CCK09 and CCK08

Forums	CCK09 Total Posts	CCK08 Total Posts
INTRO	508	1292
GD	52	1405
1	257	312
2	180	316
3	178	453
4	96	138
5	228	271
6	76	112
7	38	132
8	71	261
9	61	146
10	142	88
11	49	153
12		119
TOTAL	1936	5198

Chart 2: Comparison of posts in CCK09 and CCK08

Table 3: Comparison of isolates in CCK09 and CCK08

Forums	CCK09 Isolates	%	CCK08 Isolates	%
INTRO	47	28.31	179	35.73
GD	1	8.33	3	1.82
1	3	4.23	0	0
2	1	2	1	1.64
3	1	2.5	0	0
4	4	14.81	0	0
5	0	0	1	2.38
6	2	10	0	0
7	1	5.26	1	4
8	1	4.35	1	1.18
9	0	0	2	7.14
10	1	3.70	0	0
11	4	23.53	0	0
12			0	0
TOTAL	30	15.54	123	22.91

Chart 3: Comparison of isolates in CCK09 and CCK08

Basic statistics on CCK09

2011-01-11T08:50:00.000+08:00

Table 1: Forum participants in CCK09

Forums	CCK08 Group	CCK09 Group	Participants	Participants (%)
INTRO	52	114	166	86.01
GD	9	3	12	6.22
1	27	44	71	36.79
2	25	25	50	25.91
3	19	21	40	20.73
4	16	11	27	13.99
5	18	19	37	19.17
6	10	10	20	10.36
7	10	9	19	9.84
8	15	8	23	11.92
9	9	8	17	8.81
10	14	13	27	13.99
11	5	12	17	8.81

TOTAL	63	130	193	100

In table 1 above, the CCK08 group are participants who attended CCK08 and reenrolled in CCK09. The CCK09 group are new participants. This is based on the assumption that CCK08 veterans did not changed their names.

Chart 1: Forum participants in CCK09

Table 2: Frequency of Posts in CCK09

Forums	Starting Posts	Replies	Total Posts
INTRO	166	342	508
GD	5	47	52
1	35	222	257
2	18	162	180
3	21	157	178
4	10	86	96
5	10	218	228
6	8	68	76
7	7	31	38
8	11	60	71
9	4	57	61
10	10	132	142
11	26	23	49

TOTAL	331	1605	1936

Chart 2: Posts in CCK09

Table 3: Isolates in CCK09

Forums	Participants	Isolates	%
INTRO	166	47	28.31
GD	12	1	8.33
1	71	3	4.23
2	50	1	2
3	40	1	2.5
4	27	4	14.81
5	37	0	0
6	20	2	10
7	19	1	5.26
8	23	1	4.35
9	17	0	0
10	27	1	3.70
11	17	4	23.53

TOTAL	193	30	15.54

Isolates are participants who posted but received no replies. They will appear as isolated nodes without links in a network graph. The identification of isolates in a couse is important for teachers to triage their assistance to students. Table 3, column 4 shows the percentage of isolates per forum.

Chart 3: Isolates in CCK09

VNA open data file for all CCK09 forums released

2011-01-10T09:48:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/cj47z3gk9b5dl47/cck09_allforumvnagraph.zip (196.56 KB)

social network of CCK09 Moodle forums

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

cck09 vna graph with tie strength enabled

2011-01-09T13:51:00.000+08:00

I forgot to enable tie strengths in the preceding graph, here is the update.

vna file:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/nycltid939daqsf/cck09_INTROuniongraph_tiestrength.zip (4.49 KB)

VNA open data file for CCK09 introductions forum released

2011-01-09T13:40:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ifg16734lvdxq6h/cck09_INTROvnagraph.zip (134.88 KB)

social network of introductions forum of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 General Discussion forum released

2011-01-07T07:25:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/bdxarjj2mxdi0fm/cck09_GDvnagraph.zip (51.72 KB)

social network of the General Discussion forum of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 11 released

2011-01-06T17:43:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/771q4c75kd72p96/cck09_11vnagraph.zip (39.88 KB)

social network of Moodle forum 11 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 10 released

2011-01-05T08:05:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw

http://www.mediafire.com/file/9p7u6a4ofqpfc7p/cck09_10vnagraph.zip (90.61 KB)

social network of Moodle forum 10 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 9 released

2011-01-04T07:33:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw

http://www.mediafire.com/file/9d2ehwm91jqbbd1/cck09_9vnagraph.zip (66.73 KB)

social network of Moodle forum 9 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 8 release

2011-01-03T07:42:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/3ahvtv6nbpjbj8p/cck09_8vnagraph.zip (69.18 KB)

social network of Moodle forum 8 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 7 released

2011-01-01T08:38:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/498cbsue46hzqw0/cck09_7vnagraph.zip (51.01 KB)

social network of Moodle forum 7 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

Lost ties in CCK08 forum 1

2011-01-01T08:34:00.000+08:00

I've reassessed my findings in this post: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/07/validating-aneesha-bakharias-sna-moodle.html. In it I tried to estimate the reliability and validity of the Moodle forum SNA Tool.

In forum 1 of CCK08, 78 ties were identified by the tool. 4 ties were found in the body of the post that were not identified. Therefore of the total ties (82), 4.88% were lost.

But that is conveniently sampled. I really do not know how many ties on the average are lost for all the forums.

Limitations of the data sets for CCK09 forums in this blog

2010-12-31T08:02:00.001+08:00

I'm already halfway in completing the data processing of the LMS forum network of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (CCK09) course. I thought it wise to remind readers of the limitations of these data sets.

The CCK09 forum datasets presented in this blog only show a small part of the learning environment in CCK09. Other participants had opted to centralize their personal learning networks in other social networking sites like blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Second Life. I am not aware of the visualization/research on the learning network in those sites.

In addition there are limitations to the machine process of data gathering the ties (links, lines, or network data) in this visualization. I used the Moodle Forum SNA Tool rather than the newer version called SNAPP because the latter is slower due to graphing code transfered over the net. This application merely picks up tie data from "replies to" posts and not necessarily to actors. What I mean is that it fails to take into account replies to more than one person that is indicated in the body of the post. Clicking the "reply to" button in the Moodle forum, tags the post but there is no facitlity to explicitly state to whom you are replying to. If the Moodle forum would allow a dropdown list of posters (more than one of course) then a machine process may be able to pick up whom the poster intends to reply to.

Processing the body of the post will increase the complexity of data gathering. Even in current text analysis software that I've tested, human intervention in the form of scrubbing (editing the text for machine processing) is applied. There is a lot of variability in raw data. Posters usually use only the a part of the full name or even a nickname that is different from the username of the person they are talking to. I've also seen posters mistake the name of the one they're talking to, but the person being addressed simply ignored the mistake and replied appropriately. There is also the problem of language. People may use a different language, or they may not be as competent in the English language as native speakers.

Of course I could always fall back on human coding but I simply don't have the time, and I can't afford to hire people. So when you use these data sets always take into consideration the probability of lost ties.

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 6 released

2010-12-31T07:51:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/694u2u4my555t29/cck09_6vnagraph.zip (64.84 kb)

social network of moodle forum 5 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA data file for CCK09 forum 5 released

2010-12-30T07:29:00.001+08:00

The topic for this forum is Personal Learning Environments/Networks.

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/z3ejjc4wl92f4v3/cck09_5vnagraph.zip (131,25 kb)

social network of Moodle forum 5 of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 4 released

2010-12-29T07:47:00.000+08:00

The topic for forum four is Discussions on connective knowledge.

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/wm4szwcpe1n734d/cck09_4vnagraph.zip (63.18 kb)

social network of Moodle 4 forum of CCK09

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 3 released

2010-12-28T09:12:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/jhr5b5gn9daf7wv/cck09_3vnagraph.zip (104.96 kb)

Social network of CCK09 moodle forum 3

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 2 released

2010-12-27T09:09:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract the .vna file and open with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/itahzocy8a8011q/cck09_2vnagraph.zip (118.05 kb)

social network graph of CCK09 moodle forum 2

Compare with CCK08 graphs here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 1 released

2010-12-27T09:03:00.000+08:00

Download:
Extract and open the .vna file with NetDraw
http://www.mediafire.com/file/gmq4k876z8rpk24/cck09_1vnagraph.zip (77.1 kb)

The directed graph of the social network of Moodle forum 1 of CCK09 below has tie strengts, reflexive ties, and labels turned off.

CCK09 forum 1 social network

Compare with the first forum of CCK08 below, that discussed the question: What is Connectivism?

CCK08 forum 1 social network

CCK08 vna dataset is available here: http://paaralan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cck09-cck08-forum-social-networks-in.html

CCK09 forum one graph

2010-12-26T17:26:00.000+08:00

This is my test network graph for CCK09. It shows the first forum, with red nodes representing new participants and blue nodes are returning participants from CCK08.

Compare the above with Forum one graphs of CCK08 below.

I'll try to visualize the other forums later on.

MUD and MUSH integration wish

2010-11-22T14:18:00.002+08:00

James Wagner Au appears to have differentiated MUD and MUSH as follows: mud is primarily about battles and exploration while mush is about collaborative building and socialization. This is currently the same difference between MMORPG and collaborative virtual worlds.

I wish these were integrated in a way that I can use the same appearance of my avatar; and my inventory in one world and another. Probably this would require a viewer that could translate the avatar and inventory files (scripts, meshes, animation etc.) from one game to another.

I wonder if the Ryzom-core's client and WorldForge's ember can be integrated this way? Ryzom is an mmorpg while WorldForge is moving toward's virtual worlds. And they are both free software (gpl).

This way educators can have the best of both worlds. A strong narrative-systems sim world MMO and a collaborative-social virtual world.

Reference

Au, J.W.(2008). The making of Second Life. Notes from the new world. Harper Collins.

Defining Game

2010-11-13T14:24:00.000+08:00

Roel Cantada

The following post in an excerpt from my masters project proposal Exploratory Approaches to the Design and Development of a Game for a Distance Education Course in Philippine History (2010).

Katrin Becker asked a profound question about the definition of the term game: Is a game still a game when it is not being played, and can anything become a game if we play with it? (Becker, 2008) My answer to the first question is yes, but only in the sense that the playing of it could be imagined or abstracted as a general human activity. People do not have to actually play it right now, right here; as long as it is conceived of as an activity of people (players) who identify such activity as a game in their culture, then it is a game. My answer to the second question is no. The thing being played with is an artefact, a toy, not a game. In this sense a video game in the form of a CD-ROM on a store shelf is not a game but a game artefact or toy. If we rephrase the question into, “Can any human activity that we play around with be considered a game?”, then my answer is yes. We can actually turn the most mundane activity into a game. For example, luto-lutuan (play cooking) is a role playing game.

Let me discuss the meaning of game and related concepts in the Tagalog language to make my operational definition of game clear. The Tagalog word for game is larô, a noun that is synonymous with libangan or gawain bilang pag-aaliw (amusement, pastime or leisure activity); and paligsahan (competition) (Diksiyunaryo ng Wikang Filipino, 1989; Almario, 2001; the English translation is mine.). It could also mean a combination of the two -- i.e. a leisurely competition. This definition seems to resonate with Siitonen's distinction between casual playing and competitive playing (2007). Both meanings are in the English definition of the word game. But the word larô does not carry the meaning “animal hunted for food or sport” or “the game equipment needed to play a game” (Zheng, 2005). The last will fall under the word laruán, which means “anumang bagay na ginagamit sa paglalaro... (Almario, 2001). In English this refers to anything used to play a game. In this way the Tagalog larô is more discriminating than the word game. It is also more consistent as the Tagalog word for play is maglarô. So when I talk about a game, I am thinking about larô.

However, I think the dimension of leisure activity in the term ‘laro’ needs to be narrowed down. Walking in a park can be considered a leisure activity or pastime but it is not a game. A leisure activity that is a game would require something (laruán) or someone (larô) to play with. The toy could be something that is culturally reserved as a toy or something turned into a toy (pinaglaruan). What I mean by being culturally reserved is that a thing has no other function in society except to be played with like commercial dolls or action figures. In addition, games seem to be activities with specific rules. These rules may be written, unwritten, fixed, negotiated, or even emergent. Rules are negotiated and they are emergent when the rules change as the game is being played.

Two games for children will give us an example of games as leisure activity and games as competition. Bahay-bahayan (playing house) is a non-competitive game. Players usually use toys like cooking utensils and a doll representing a baby. It may also be played (and preferably) with others. No one wins in bahay-bahayan. One can think of it as a children’s simulation of family life. The simulation will depend on what family the child is aware of. If the child's model is an extended family, then the game could include a role for grandparents. The rules for playing house are unwritten, negotiated and emergent. In this way we can also look at bahay-bahayan as storytelling. The players create imaginary events about a fictional family. A series of kunwari (pretend) statements about the roles are negotiated as rules while the performances of the roles are done at the same time. For example, when someone says “Kunwari may sakit si baby (Let's pretend the baby is sick.)” and the other player responds “Kunwari ako ay doktor (Let's pretend I'm a doctor.)”, this means that the other player accepts the proposition of the first player, accedes to this rule by playing a role, and moves the story forward accordingly. The other players could have also said “Hindi...kunwari ... (No, let's pretend instead...)”, followed by an alternative proposition, which could be considered a new and contrary rule of role playing. It appears to me that in this type of game, fantasy is a stronger motivator than game mechanics.

A common example of a competitive game among children is Jack-and-Poy (rocks-papers-scissors). The rule is that rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock. No artefact is used. There are no real rocks, papers, or scissors. A fist represents a rock, two fingers extended for scissors, and an open hand for paper. Usually players will make a fist and move the fist up and down to rhyme “Jack and Poy, halehalehoy, sinong matalo mukhang unggoy” (Jack and Poy, halehalehoy, whoever loses looks like a monkey.) At the last syllable the hand is revealed. When the hands are the same, then it is a draw. In this game there is a win. There could even be scores, like best out of three, etc. Let me emphasize the fact that this is a game we play with others rather than with objects. Here the game mechanics dominate, as the rocks, paper and scissors could be replaced by lighting, rain, sun or something else.

In the educational game literature there is a debate as to whether games and simulations should be classified together or apart. Becker believes that games are simulations (Becker & Parker, 2009), to which I agree. I define a game as a leisure activity that may or may not involve competition, and is played with a toy or/and with others. Playing a video game involves the use of a digital toy. I would like to emphasize the video game as activity, not the artefact or equipment needed to play this activity. The term digital toy will include digital games (artefact), simulations, and virtual worlds (contrary to Klopfer, et. al., 2009) in computer, console, or mobile phones. Embedded in this definition is the interaction between an agent or player and the environment, in terms of learning between the learner and the learning environment which is covered by affordance theory.

References:

Almario, V.S. (Ed.). (2001). UP diksiyonaryong Filipino. Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino; Anvil.

Becker, K. (2008, January). The invention of good games: Understanding learning design in commercial video games. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved May 19, 2010, from http://www.minkhollow.ca/becker/papers/becker_thesis.pdf.

Becker, K. & Parker, J.R. (2009). A Simulation Primer. In Gibson, D., & Baek, Y., Digital simulations for improving education: Learning through artificial teaching environments (pp.1-24). Hershey & New York: Information Science Reference.

Diksiyunaryo ng wikang Filipino. (1989). Linangan ng Wika sa Pilipinas.

Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S., & Salen, K. (2009). Moving learning games forward. Obstacles, opportunities & openness. The Education Arcade, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf.

Siitonen, M. (2007). Social interaction in online multiplayer communities. Doctoral dissertation, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Retrieved May 10, 2010, from https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/13444/9789513929312.pdf?sequence=1; Available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-2931-2.

Zheng, H. (2005). WordNet dictionary for StarDict version 2.4.2 [Software]. Available at http://stardict.sourceforge.net/.

Lessons from Adventure Quest Worlds

2010-11-06T08:42:00.001+08:00

I don't really have first hand experience on MMOGs. My knowledge of it as a learning environment comes from reading the dissertations of Constance Steinkuehler (2005) and Marko Siitonen (2007). And reading "The Noob" online comics by Gianna Masetti.

Recently my 7 year old nephew taught me how to play an online MMOG called Adventure Quest Worlds (AQW). He wanted me to help him with bosses so he could unlock other areas to explore.

AQW is a 2D Flash MMOG. My initial impression of it is that it's a child's game because of the anime like graphics. I realized later on as I played the game that it did have some of the characteristics of MMORPGs and probably have learning potential.

Going back to our game play. I started with a healer character and simply followed my nephew around, taking instructions from him on what to click here and there. He certainly knew his way around. I also served as an oral reader for the big words in the quest's text.

Economy of Clicks

What I liked about AQW is its simplicity. It's easy to train characters, you go out and do your thing. There is no need to train in chopping wood, or doing crafts ... It's interface is pretty basic, an hp and xp bar. And a set of icons for special moves or powers. But more importantly is that there is what I call an economy of clicks in the interface. A few clicks of the mouse and you're character moves here and there. The distances of findable items in a room is very small. This efficiency of interaction is the same with LMS course pages, wherein the findable items are on a compressed list of text.

In 3D Virtual Worlds finding items require more clicks or involvement on the part of the player. You have to press your arrow keys for so long just to go from here to there. Virtual Worlds inherit the geographical characteristics of the real world. Very few items in RL is just a click away, except for the tv, boom box ....wait...where did I put that remote again?

Game Play

I noticed some differences in how I and my nephew play. He was basically an explorer and role player. He was currently into knights theme and he was role playing as a knight. I turned out to be a collector. While my nephew was interested in getting the right look on his character regardless of enhancements or item levels, I wanted better weapons and armor. He wanted form, I wanted functionality. He was interested in aesthetics, I was interested in increasing my hp,xp, and reputation level. In my case it means having to finish quest or grinding in bosses rooms to secure a prized drop. Which usually means killing the mob 20 times or so. We ended up playing in different areas of the MMOG and only occasionally summoning each other for help.

Another difference is that the child doesn't know strategy. He can't manage his mana, e.g. healing only when his hp reaches 75% to conserve mana. He doesn't know how to optimize the sequence of his special moves so that he will continue to strike while the other powers are charging. He would not withdraw from the boss room and rest outside while I keep the boss occupied. He would just stand his ground, hack...hack...until his character or the boss is defeated. There are bosses with pets (not always looking like an animal) that are needed to be defeated first before the boss will lose some of its hp. The pets regenerate so there is a need to assign some players to simply defeating the pets and not attacking the boss. Some players would have to take damage from the boss during this stage as well. But the child and including a lot of the players just attack the boss, ending in defeat for the entire crew. These weaknesses have the potential of being teacheable moments.

Teacheable Moments

Strategic thinking is one possible learning experience from AQW. I gradually gravitated towards PVP when my character is rank 10, level 25. It's interesting to observe and learn from the other players in the chat allowed areas (where the big kids probably are; my nephew was left in the canned-chat areas). They taught me how to sequence attacks (hit the restorers first). One group taught me how to steal a win when the opponents are ahead i.e. attack the other team when they're in the captains room and their hp is weakest. Of course this only works when the point difference is small. Another player taught me how to hide behind the captain or bosses to prevent the opponent from double clicking my character. Unfortunately I learned this only through observation as the setup of the PVP room doesn't allow for strategic conference. After spawning in the room you are already allowed to rush out and kill mobs. I don't know if holding the combatants in the safe zone for let's say a minute before allowing them to come out will encourage discussions on strategy. It's really difficult to chat and brawl at the same time. Most of the chats are single words, yes, nooo, kk, brb and the occasional wtf?

Winning in the PVP area is more of luck though. Since players are not allowed to select teams, the win will depend on when you're assigned to a more experienced team. Imho that's about 50%.

Socialization is not a big draw for AQW. The groups are temporary and you're not allowed to form clans or guilds (at least for free players, I don't know about member players).

Finally, I think AQW can be used to teach micro-economics :-). Players work to acquire gold, rank, reputation; and unlock items. The gold has value because it can be exchanged with digital items offered by the game, such as armor, helmet, potions etc. The rank raises hp and ability to enhace some digital items. Reputation unlock shops. The game makes some item more precious by making it cost more, or scarce (because you can't buy it, it has to be dropped by a powerful monster). AQW does not seem to allow exchange, selling, or giving inventory items to each other. But still this could be a hook (prior knowledge) that economics teachers can use.

What I've learned from this experience is that I've confirmed some of what Steinkuehler is saying about MMOG as a learning environment. I also feel that adults (parents in particular) should play with their children and use that opportunity as learning moments. It's also a good way to connect and use the game as a conversation piece of sorts.

Links

Masetti, G. The Noob. Available at http://www.clichequest.com/index.php.

Siitonen, M. (2007). Social interaction in online multiplayer communities. Doctoral dissertation, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Available at https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/13444/9789513929312.pdf?sequence=1; Also at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-2931-2.

Steinkuehler, C.A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Available at http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html.

On Interactions with the Community

2010-10-20T07:03:00.001+08:00

Roel Cantada

Learner-Community Interactions

We could think of the community as a group of players, a group of students, or a school. Whereas the interactions between learner-learner are interactions between individuals, we are dealing here with an individual interacting with a group. That group has norms and values. Much had been said about the norms and values held by groups of players in the previous post (Steinkuehler, 2005; Siitonen, 2007) but there is still the matter of how these norms affect the use of games in teaching and learning.

Gamers' communities are seen as social networks (Steinkuehler, 2005; Siitonen, 2007) wherein reciprocal forms of teaching and learning occur in all directions throughout the social network (Steinkuehler). I think that the issue is not only how the individual as an agent will create ties with an existing network but also how the network (with pre-existing structure and rules of linking) will constrain or promote ties.

The ideal community is a community of practice. This community is not only a group of people sharing similar interests but a group that is actively participating to advance the knowledge and expertise about a topic. There is evidence that a community of gamers can socialize novice players but the culture of gamers appears to contrasts with school culture. School experience in the Philippines are organized into 45 minutes to 1 ½ hours subjects. Around six subjects a day. Each subject is usually taught by a single teacher. In my opinion such an organization of student experience is a hindrance to the openness, persistence, and length of time needed to play games and develop gamer culture that fosters collaborative learning. The idea that games need to be adapted to the school culture appears to limit how games can be used in teaching. On the other hand changing the school culture to afford the use of games e.g. providing flexible time and allowing open enrolment (class scale is not limited by teacher/student ratio) may be difficult to achieve in traditional face-to-face education. There may be hope for distance education where these barriers are being broken down but I think the traditional model of credit-hour class is still strong. Clearly there is a need for advocacy on the acceptance of games among stakeholders in education in the Philippines. This post will not deal with these socio-cultural and policy issues and leaves it to future researchers to study.

Teacher-Teacher Interactions

Teacher acceptance of the use of games in their classroom may be influenced by other teachers. In the case of the non-digital game in Hanghøj study one of the teachers who was reluctant to participate eventually did after hearing the experience (2008) of his colleagues in using the game. But this may also work in reverse; teachers who had failed in their use of games in the classroom may influence others not to adopt video games for teaching.

In Italy it has been reported that teachers had organized themselves into a community of practice in the use of video games in the classroom. The COP's formation had been briefly described this way:

First, a group of teachers who design educational games is set up, and brings in other people with more technical expertise; then a larger community of teachers tests these games in their own classrooms to identify their strengths and weaknesses and recommend or suggest improvements; and finally the improved games are made available online for a large group of teachers to use them in their everyday teaching. (Wastiau, Kearney, & Van den Berghe, 2009)

I believe that organizing such a community in the Philippines will not only improve pedagogy with educational games, but may also be used to produce games that are affordable and accessible to students. Opensource games projects may provide models of software production for such a COP. Hopefully other researchers will be able to explore this topic further.

Community-Game Content Interactions

The community being referred to in this section is the society in general. It appears that video games gets bad press in the media which reinforces the negative attitude of teachers and parents about video games. Of course this is not without reason as described in the post that mentioned video game overuse. This is especially acute when parents experience their children going to internet cafes and spending their allowances there instead of going to school. I wonder how parents would react when they are told that the video games will now be brought to school?

A concern among adults about video game content is the presence of sex, violence and bad language in commercial video games. The United States of America, Canada and Europe had responded to this by setting up rating systems similar to that used in film and television. The Pan European Game Information (PEGI) rating system use age categories and content categories. The age categories are 3, 7, 12, 16, and 18. While the content information includes violence, bad language, fear, sex, drugs, discrimination, gambling, and online (Felicia, 2009).

In the U.S.A. and Canada the self-regulatory agency Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) provides age and content ratings (ESRB-FAQ, n.d.a.). The age rating symbols include early childhood, everyone, everyone 10+, teen, mature, adults only, and rating pending. The content descriptors are more detailed than PEGI's and includes alcohol reference, blood, violence, comic mischief, crude humor, drug reference, language with moderate profanity, sexual content, simulated gambling, etc. (ESRB, n.d.b.).

Although providing tags or metadata on the affordable learning actions of video games will not substitute for the teacher play testing the game it may still be useful in game selection especially if there are many games on a particular topic. Teachers may create an online database of educational games and tag them for pedagogy, topic covered, length of game play, etc. The games may also be linked to researches on those particular games that will guide teachers on its effectiveness and problems that need to be resolved with out-of-game extensions. Exploring this possibility is outside the scope of my project.

Teacher-Community Interactions

To overcome the apprehension of the school community in the use of games in teaching and learning it is recommended to inform and even involve parents and the community in the evaluation of the implemented video games. The community should be regularly briefed about how the games are being used, the objectives, the outcomes and the evaluation (Wastiau, Kearney, & Van den Berghe, 2009).

Game researchers in the United States of America and Europe seem to be more concerned with educators interacting with the commercial/prorietary games developer community. Projects had been set up to encourage commercial game developers to invest in the development of educational games and to dialogue with researchers and educations stakeholders. It is said that commercial game companies avoid educational games because of the collapse of the first wave of the popularity of educational games in the market in 1990's (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005). I am not aware of a similar effort with opensource games developers.

Community-Community Interactions

I believe that a COP of teachers and learners advocating video games for learning and teaching will give the educational community a voice in the development of educational games. It will allow the educational community to dialogue (and be taken seriously) with game developer communities, parents, and the media about the realities of video game use for teaching and learning. Again this interaction and that preceding it are beyond the scope of my project. I can only hope that future researchers and practitioners will explore this topic further.

References

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2005). Beyond edutainment. Exploring the educational potential of computer games. Doctoral dissertation, IT-University of Copenhagen. Retrieved March 8, 2010, from http://www.egenfeldt.eu/egenfeldt.pdf.

Entertainment Software Rating Board. (n.d.b). Game ratings & descriptor guide. Retrieved July 7, 2010, from http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp.

Felicia, P. (2009). Digital games in schools: A handbook for teachers. Belgium: European Schoolnet. Retrieved July 1, 2010, from http://games.eun.org/upload/GIS_HANDBOOK_EN.PDF.

Hanghøj, T. (2008). Playful knowledge: An explorative study of educational gaming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Denmark. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from http://www.sdu.dk/~/media/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.ashx.

Siitonen, M. (2007). Social interaction in online multiplayer communities. Doctoral dissertation, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Retrieved May 10, 2010, from https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/13444/9789513929312.pdf?sequence=1; Available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-2931-2.

Steinkuehler, C.A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html.

Wastiau, P., Kearney, C., & Van den Berghe, W. (2009, May). How are digital games used in schools? Complete results of the study. Belgium: European Schoolnet, EUN Partnership AISBL. Retrieved July 1, 2010, from http://games.eun.org/upload/gis-full_report_en.pdf.

On Game Content-Subject Matter Content Interactions

2010-10-18T11:04:00.000+08:00

Roel Cantada

The following discussion focuses on history as subject matter content.

The content-content interaction of distance education proposed by Garrison and Anderson referred to computer programs interacting with one another to create a synthesized adaptive learning content (Anderson, 2003, pp. 139-140; 2008, pp. 59-60). An example would be the use of a blog list in another blog. The programs involved are a RSS (Rich Site Summary) harvester and a feeder. I think of them as small client and server scripts. The blog where the RSS feeds are collected are able to pull or receive new information from feeder blogs whenever there is a new post. The feeder blogs push or send RSS scripts to the destination blogs. The destination blogs or harvester gets updated automatically.

This subsection will discuss automated interactions between programs in a video game but I would like to go beyond that and discuss the relationship between the substantive content of the video game and curricula. I think the design of the computer programs that will interact in an educational video game will be based primarily on this relationship.

Substantive content interaction

One of the content options on the video game side of this interaction is either to learn by playing games or to learn by making games. Yasmin Kafai labelled these approaches instructionist and constructionist respectively. Kafai questions what she calls the hidden premise of instructional games, “that we need games to sweeten the learning of difficult ideas (2001).” Educational games had been criticized as what I would call sugar-coated ampalaya (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005, p. 38). But I don't think the desire to make learning fun is hidden or bad. Playing games for fun is compatible or complementary with making games for learning; there is no need to pit one against the other. Another point is that students will appropriate the games for their own goals and create metagames not intended by the designers (Squire, 2004). So playing complex games does not preclude making games.

Learning by making games may be integrated my project in the same way that role playing or diorama making is assigned in face-to-face history classrooms. Such projects are particularly suitable to MUVEs where learners may create and modify digital objects in a virtual world. Perhaps here, playing and producing may require learning only the game software without going into computer programming or learning software for manipulating the game platform. But creating a game in a virtual world without any knowledge of programming would mean that there will be very little automation. The players would have to supplement the game rules and events with manually constructed rules and direct action, just as in non-digital games in real life.

Another issue with game content that is relevant to this project is whether to emphasize story telling or game mechanics. The narrative approach would usually result in a more constrained game play such that the player is forced to follow the path of the story. In strategy games there is no narrative to follow but what is emphasized are the rules of interaction. Like in chess it's a matter of winning by capturing the enemies' king. In strategy games like chess the king is a token and not a character. Chess players do not give unique names to king, they are simply tokens with specific allowable moves. In this case one square at a time, in all directions. In MMOGs and MUVEs a player is given a unique identity but the path of the game is open ended. In MMOGs a player may want to level up and do quests but there is no predetermined story. Of course the player may not want to do quests and simply explore or socialize. In MUVEs the players is pretty much left to do what he/she wants to do.

In relation to history teaching players may create stories in these environments that may be useful to exploring counterfactual history. But history teaching is first and foremost about telling what happened as narrated by historians using historical evidences. In other words there would be a need for the teacher to constrain the path of game play towards a predetermined narrative (predetermined by historical texts). In order to do this the video game must allow for chaining of events i.e. any player moves in a time slice will have an effect on subsequent moves in the next time slice. History content is chronologically sequenced. Strategy games do have this temporal sequencing but the emphasis is on rules or laws of the game. Chess is not about what individual pawns did or did not do, but about the patterns of game play as constrained by the rules of the game. The strategy game genre appears to me more suited to social sciences where laws and generalizations are emphasized rather than unique events. It may be suitable for teaching some types of history as espoused by Fernand Braudel. He classified history into three types based on time. The first is the history of events which is journalistic in nature, dealing with day to day or year to year events. The second is the history of conjunctures, which are conditions that cycle around every decade or so like the economy. And finally the longue durée--conditions that persist for hundreds if not thousands of years like religion and culture. The last changes very slowly (Braudel, 1982). Strategy games may be useful for teaching the history of conjunctures’ and longue durée but they would be very weak in teaching the history of events.

I think the most promising video game genre for teaching the history of events is the adventure game. Adventure games integrate game mechanics and story. The player is asked to perform actions that move the story forward. In turn a predetermined story limits the freedom of the player in the game in favour of completing the game (Fernandez Vara, 2009).

Of course history is not just about facts. Both Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2005) and Squire (2004) discussed the need to look at the game as a simulation of a historical model. Not only should students learn to play a game, or to accept games as learning tools or as a learning environment, but they must also change their view of history in order to get the most out of games. A systemic view is necessary to appreciate games as historical simulation. That is, changes in one aspect of society will result (usually emergent or unexpected) in other aspects of society. The premise of a simulation is that initial conditions will have an effect on the system. In history, the learner should consider that decisions by people in the past will have an effect on the present. And that these decisions were not destined to occur. Historical agents had options just like game players. And their choices led to consequences just like players in a video game.

In relation, a systemic view of history allows for counterfactual history (Squire, 2004). Counterfactual history is an alternative history that may be used to experiment on histories that challenge traditional power structures and overturn historical outcomes. Counterfactual history had been dismissed by some historians as trivial entertainment (Carr as cited in Ferguson, 1997). But the study of counterfactual history is a great way to drive home the point that historical figures did not know their future, just like us today. They considered options just like we do about the school we are going to study in, our career choices, our political choices. Sometimes there are records of these choices like plans A and B of military generals. This allows us to look at alternative histories that were actually considered by the contemporary characters of that time (Ferguson, 1997). This also allows us to eliminate fantastic and mythical explanation of what happened by considering if an antecedent event did not occur would the consequent event occur? The more important lesson for students is that if history is not destiny then we can change our own future history.

Aside from history, it is also recommended to teach students to think about the epistemological and historiographical issues of historical works. Peter Lee listed the following concepts as important to the study of history: time, change, empathy, cause, evidence, accounts (2005). He called them second order concepts (the historical facts are first order concepts). It is taught in face to face teaching by looking at historical sources (that may appear to be contradictory), and asking the sources questions that these sources were not meant to answer. The comparison and contrasts of these sources in terms of the second order concepts will reveal varying assumptions about history—by historians and by the students themselves. In learning theory terms this is teaching metacognition.

The challenge for the teacher is to correct misconceptions about the past like the belief in the “deficit past” i.e., that people in the past could not do what we can and were not as clever as us today (Ashby, Lee, & Shemilt, 2005). And then to guide them towards ever more sophisticated assumptions about how we know about the past. A progression of assumptions could range from viewing this knowledge about the past as “an information problem” to a “problem about working things out using evidence” (Ashby, Lee, & Shemilt, 2005, p. 123).

How can we use games to teach these second-order skills? Squire suggests that the adoption and defence by students of different interpretations of game events may be connected to different positions on history. And the exploration of games with contrasting underlying assumptions may be an effective way to introduce students to historiographical issues (2004).

Let me now turn to the question of how we can integrate learning content with a game. Habgood (2007) suggested ways to intrinsically integrate content with video games in the previous post. Riding on the flow experience without interrupting it seems to mean that the learning content must be needed to win the game. It has been observed that students will ignore information (including the manual) that is not needed in their immediate game play. But this only applies in a game genre with a win situation. In games that encourage exploration like MUVEs, collateral learning (Becker, 2008) seems acceptable. In addition it there will be a need to interrupt game play for reflection. Finding the balance between sustaining motivation and reflection would be a challenge. Gamers do not like (an understatement) being interrupted.

In terms of role-playing games it appears to me from reading the literature that there may be some tension between playing some other role and still needing to keep the role of a student. There might be value in the student keeping the role of a student in the game rather than trying to be something else. This way there would be consistency between real life and the game. What I mean is that instead of playing Andres Bonifacio in a history game, his/her avatar could still be a student playing Andres Bonifacio. The value of such a design needs to be studied further.

Software interaction

I would now like to turn to the technical integration of subject matter content with video game content. This is where the interactions of intelligent programs come in. The most common approach is not to interact with an external program but to use pop-ups. Pop-ups are dialogue boxes with the text of the learning content that pops-up during the game to teach the student something. Imagine you are playing a Katipunero in the 19th century. You are fighting Spaniards. It’s a shooter and your busy blasting the enemy, then a pop-up appears telling you about the battle of San Juan. The game is interrupted, and the usual response of students is to ignore the text, close the dialogue box, and blast away. And if there are too many pop-ups you get a very angry player, not at the digital enemy but the lame game. It's not a recommended design (Egenfeldt-Nielsen).

An approach may be to put the text in digital letters of dead soldiers (see Grossman, 2003, p. 11). If real historical letters are used then the students can use them as primary source materials. This approach is cheaper (in terms of computer power and internet bandwidth) than making Non-Player Characters (NPC), Mobile Objects (Computer characters that gives experience points when killed), or Bots (Artificial Intelligent characters) that provide interactive content. But if the processing power is available then it would be interesting to see Jose Rizal being interviewed by students while being led to his execution at Bagumbayan. The technical requirements of doing this in an MMOG is beyond the capability of my project but it may be possible to demonstrate it in a MUVE. The approach will require external software independent of the game, with a database of sentences that the digital character is to say if queried by players. One can see that those sentences may be text from historical documents thus there would be an interaction between the Bot software and the game software (Rock, 2010).

Another possible interaction is between an LMS like Moodle and a MUVE like Open Simulator. The MUVE can create digital objects that represent activities in the LMS. The interaction of players in the MUVE is tracked by the LMS. Tracking of student activity is one of the strengths of a LMS that is absent in games. This integration is now available in the software called SLOODLE. SLOODLE will allow the 3D clients for Open Simulator to view Moodle in a 3D virtual world, replacing text-based webpages. It will also allow teachers to use Moodle as a back-end database for virtual world courses (Livingstone, 2009).

Video games can also be embedded in an LMS as a SCORM package of Java or Flash games. The e-Adventure platform developed in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid can produce such games (Torrente, Lavín-Mera, Moreno-Ger, & Fernández-Manjón, 2009). In adventure games the factual and counterfactual histories can be turning points in the games that may be explored as if in a branching interactive story.

Finally, I feel we should not restrict ourselves to a single game genre. Perhaps there is a way to chain two or more games together to deliver the appropriate content to learners.

References

Anderson, T. (2003). Modes of interaction in distance education: recent developments and research questions. In M.G. Moore, & W.G. Anderson (Eds.). Handbook of distance education (pp. 129-144). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Anderson, T. (2008). The theory and practice of online learning, (2nd. ed). AU.

Ashby, R., Lee, P.J., & Shemilt, D. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Teaching and planning. In M.S. Donovan, & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), How students learn. History, mathematics, and science in the classroom. A Targeted Report for Teachers, Center for Studies on Behavior and Development, National Research Council (pp. 79-178). Washington, D.C.: The National Academies. Retrieved August 11, 2009, from http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10126.html.

Braudel, F. (1982). On history. (S. Matthews, Trans.). University of Chicago. (Original work published 1969).

Becker, K. (2009). Games studies theses. Serious Game Pathfinder. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://www.minkhollow.ca/becker/doku.php?id=pf:theses.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2005). Beyond edutainment. Exploring the educational potential of computer games. Doctoral dissertation, IT-University of Copenhagen. Retrieved March 8, 2010, from http://www.egenfeldt.eu/egenfeldt.pdf.

Ferguson, N. (Ed.). (1997). Virtual history: Alternatives and counterfactuals. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Fernandez Vara, C. (2009). The tribulations of adventure games: Integrating story into simulation through performance. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/1853/31756/1/fernandezvara_clara_200912_phd.pdf.

Grossman, A. (Ed.). (2003). Postmortems from Game developers. San Francisco, CA: CMP.

Habgood, M.P.J. (2007, July). The effective integration of digital games and learning content. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nottingham, UK. Retrieved June 6, 2010, from http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/385/1/Habgood_2007_Final.pdf.

Lee, P.J. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Understanding history. In M.S. Donovan, & J.D. Bransford (Eds.), How students learn. History, mathematics, and science in the classroom. A Targeted Report for Teachers, Center for Studies on Behavior and Development, National Research Council (pp. 31-77). Washington, D.C.: The National Academies. Retrieved August 11, 2009, from http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10126.html.

Livingstone, D. (2009). November. Online learning in virtual environments with SLOODLE, final project report. July 5, 2010, from http://www.sloodle.org/downloads/SLOODLE_Eduserv_report_final.pdf.

Kafai, Y.B. (2001, October 27). The educational potential of electronic games: From games-to-teach to games-to-learn. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://www.savie.ca/SAGE/Articles/1182_1232-KAFAi-2001.pdf.

Rock. (2010, January 21). Radegast and the A.L.I.C.E. bot. Retrieved April 23, 2010, from http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2010/01/radegast-and-alice-bot.html.

Squire, K.D. (2004). Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved January 22, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html.

Torrente, J., Lavín-Mera, P., Moreno-Ger, P., & Fernández-Manjón, B. (2009). Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches In Online Learning Environments. Re-published in Transactions on Edutainment II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5660, pp 1-18. Retrieved February 2, 2010, from http://www.e-ucm.es/drafts/e-UCM_draft_148.pdf.

On Learner-Game Content-Learner (Peer) Interactions

2010-10-17T08:53:00.001+08:00

Roel Cantada

Just like the preceding forms of interactions, peer interactions among learners in distance education are mediated by communication technology. Nevertheless, I would like to discuss the finding s of two studies that observed learner-learner interactions in a face-to-face classroom before moving on to those that were mediated by online games. One is by Kurt Squire and the other by Thorkild Hanghøj.

In Squire's study, affinity groups emerged from the game play (2004). Even though they were playing single-player games, students inside a computer laboratory would interact with one another, even leaving their computer games (during long pauses in the game) and observing the others. They examined each other’s games, advised one another, and shared solutions to certain problems. These affinity groups were the ones that created metagames among themselves. In one class of students “taken as shared meanings arose ... as students played their games and asked one another for advice, examined the consequences of decisions, and predicted how events from one game might relate to the unfolding of others (Squire, 2004).” None of these activities were designed in the game; they developed naturally among the learners. But as was previously presented in Squire's curricular outline for using the game Civilization III, the emergence of affinity groups took time or they grew out from existing friendships.

In Hanghøj's (2008) non-digital debate game we get to see how students interact with one another in a game about interaction. Unlike in Squire's case, the interaction here is designed in the game rather than outside the game. We also see the interactions directly without the mediation of technology unlike the next examples. Hanghøj found out that the students needed three competencies to successfully play the debate game. These are social, communicative, and scenario competencies (Hanghøj, 2008). These competencies were in the context of playing the role of a professional politician. I found most insightful is the varied ways by which the students played out their communicative competency. Hanghøj classified it as parodic, personalised, professionalised and/or reproductive. This finding may be useful in teaching history especially when students are asked to role play historical characters online.

What strike me about the design of these games is that we can afford learner-learner interaction in a game by incorporating it in the rules as a learning goal or task; or by making the game too complex or too difficult for an individual to successfully complete. Simply allowing students to group themselves but giving them a task that can be accomplished individually will neither encourage peer interaction nor greater learning gain for group learning (Boland, 2009). In fact in the latter case the demands of group interaction may just be an added burden. The learning goal and task should demand group work to be accomplished. In Hanghøj case a student can't debate with himself/herself, and in Squire's case the game was so complex that sharing solutions increase the likelihood of successful game play. This theme will manifest itself again when we look at MMOGs like Lineage in Constance Steinkuehler's study and Anarchy Online in Marko Siitonen's research.

There are times when we may wish to replicate these results in distance education. But can students in distance education walk around and observe each other's game play like in face-to-face classrooms? My answer is a qualified yes. Certain genres of games allow us to observe each other's game play via avatars. In MMOGs and MUVEs, avatars are digital representation of the learner. Depending on the extent by which an avatar can be customized it can represent ones gender, ethnicity, and clothing style (Dickey, 1999). It can even represent a user as a fantasy character in the virtual world.

An avatar differentiates the collaborative experience of learners in a text based forum or chat, from a graphical virtual world because the learners presence in the world is communicated to other players simply by placing the avatar in the virtual world (Taylor, 2002). In a forum or chat one has to act consciously by posting messages so that others will know that you are present in the forum. In the virtual world it's the reverse, people may actually think you are present in the virtual world and ignoring them if you do not type afk (away from keyboard) in the in-game chat box. According to Kong Siu Lung, “co-presence is the sense of being there in other places and being together with other people (Biocca et. al., as cited in Kong, 2008). It is the fundamental prerequisite of collaborative learning and it is claimed to be one of the crucial social components of computer-mediated communication (Spears & Lea, as cited in Kong, 2008).” And that “...co-presence is an essential design of multiplayer computer games which facilitates social behavior online (Vogiazou & Eisenstadt, as cited in Kong, 2008, p.8).”

Current MMOGs and MUVEs also allow avatars to move, display gestures, and even show facial expressions. The translation of real life non-verbal behaviour to the virtual environment, usually through an avatar is called embodiment (Dickey, 1999). Rune Klevjer claims that the “... relationship between the player and the avatar is a prosthetic relationship; through a process of learning and habituation, the avatar becomes an extension of the player’s own body (2006). He further said, “The avatar is the embodied manifestation of the player’ engagement with the gameworld; it is the player incarnated (Klevjer, 2006).” In 3d virtual worlds avatars not only serve as a visual representation of the user but also as a camera (Dickey, 1999; Klevjer, 2006). MMOGs and MUVEs usually allow a first person and third person camera view. In the first person view, the camera is in the avatar and the player sees what the avatar sees but cannot see the avatar. In the third person view the camera is outside the avatar and the player sees the world as well as the avatar. When the avatar's head is turned left, right, up or down, the camera follows thus enhancing the feeling of embodiment.

Another affordable action of avatars commonly discussed in the literature is identity experimentation. Identity in virtual worlds is established by unique usernames and personalization of avatars. The avatar allows a player to distinguish himself/herself from other players and to establish a reputation in the virtual world. Identity is essential for establishing trust and accountability (Dickey, 1999), that in turn is important to establishing long term social relationships online. Other players know you through your avatar. Since players may also be allowed to have more than one avatar and to change their avatars, they can experiment with other identities. This is very useful for role playing in history as players can take on different genders, age, race, form etc. and see how people or things were treated by others in different times and different cultures.

The other affordable actions allowed by avatars included richer communication, affiliation, and socialization (Taylor, 2002). In communicating with others the player is no longer confined to emoticons and may include a limited set of body and facial expression. Players can also signify their affiliation by giving their avatars the same look as the group they belong to. Within the virtual world you can hold almost any social activity that involve gathering somewhere like dances, conferences, and even virtual classrooms. An avatar affords the player to act on a game world. It is a virtual body that inhabits an environment and allows us the metaphor of place-of being somewhere in the game.

A feature of MMOGs and MUVEs that encourage social networking (and a virtual economy) is the persistence of the game. Participants of MMOG cannot restart the game or practice “save-and-load” strategy, and restore the game play progress back to their desired state, therefore when they disconnect from the game and return later on the results of the social activities and game play will remain. It creates an in-game history and in-game biography for an avatar. The game ends only when it is abandoned by the company that created it.

MMOG and MUVE's virtual world had been praised for affording the establishment of communities of learners and communities of practice. The difference between the two learning communities is that the community of practice is more dedicated to some professional activity. This had been lauded as a natural environment for learning, that is, people come there to learn voluntarily. They organize themselves and sustain their communities by learning from one another (Steinkuehler, 2005). Would it not be great to see self-driven, self-organizing students who can sustain their own learning in a collaborative learning community? Perhaps by briefly looking at the dynamics of community building and disbandment in online multiplayer games we could learn how to design games that will afford this form of collaborative learning.

How gamers form communities

As previously mentioned MMOGs were studied by Steinkuehler and Siitonen. Siitonen in particular observed two types of communities of gamers, the casual gamers and the competitive gamers (2007). The casual gamers emphasize getting along and having fun rather than winning and efficiency. In certain MMOG these communities are called guilds or clans.

These communities could start from players who do not know each other or from players with real life relations such as relatives, friends or work mates (Siitonen, 2007). Those who found the community form the initial core group of the social network. Then they recruit other members based on the emergent values and norms of the communities. Casual gamers for example would recruit members who are fun to be with and easy to work with, while competitive players may value game skills over interpersonal skills. The new members and occasional players compose the periphery of the network, and moving to the core requires commitment and participation. Each community has leaders. The leaders manage the activity of the community, like quests, meetings, and other projects. Some leaders are autocratic, while others are more democratic. This brief description would already have suggested to the reader that online multiplayer communities are just like real life communities or groups.

In MMOGs players take on roles to do quests collaboratively. The quests are usually very difficult such that an individual cannot complete it by himself/herself. Sometimes there are too many monsters to kill in a dungeon. The roles may then be divided into those who fight and those who heal the fighters so they could fight longer. Of course we know from Bartle (1996) that there are players who prefer to just socialize with other players rather than kill monsters. We may need to provide a safe venue for socializers in same way that course designers usually put a General Discussion forum in an LMS.

Online gamers' communities according to Siitonen last only for months. They are then disbanded and the players move on to other communities or even to other newer online games. Sometimes the community is disbanded because of conflict among members. Misunderstanding could arise, or there are conflicts in the interpretation of the norms and values of the community. Sometimes the community just withers away as members lose interest; or their real life situation changes that affect their time to play (Siitonen, 2007). Again let me reiterate that the lesson here is that social networks or social relationships may be developed in a game even when players or learners are geographically separated.

What do gamers learn in a community?

Of course in terms of content one learns in-game content rather than school subject matter content. But as Becker (2008) had shown with single player games, the content is irrelevant to the fact that games have the appropriate pedagogy to teach novices. Learning is through full participation in genuine game play with more knowledgeable or more skilled others (Steinkuehler, 2005). The manuals are supplementary materials to learning. Contrast this with the traditional face-to-face classroom were the textbook or manual takes precedence in learning. The virtual world looks more like a richer learning environment than common impoverished classrooms in the Philippines not only because of the digital objects in the virtual world but also because of the many potential mentors that you can meet (just like in the real world outside the school). In the school students are limited to one teacher every 45 minutes or 1 ½ hour.

Note that nothing stops learners in a virtual world to organize a more intentional and formal class as shown by Magine's class in Michele Dickey's study (1999). Magine is a player who organized a class on building digital objects. Her class is part of the player organized Active Worlds University that offered virtual classes on technical stuff about digital objects in the MUVE Active Worlds.

Steinkuehler also emphasized the literacy learned in online multiplayer games (2005). Because players usually have to communicate through chat, reading and writing is an everyday activity. Not only have students had to learn to interpret a lot of symbols in the game. And they would even analyze games mathematically as well as write essays in blogs or websites about the game play. They would also discuss and even analyze strategies in forums. In this web environment they would manipulate not only text but multimedia like screenshots or video recording of their games. Steinkuehler's study seems to suggest that gamers may produce more written material than a student in class. Players do not waste their time playing online games because it’s not all about pushing buttons. What advocates of using games in school are saying is that if only we could motivate students in school to organize themselves as learning communities like these gamers perhaps they will learn more and retain more of what they have learned.

Dangers in MMOGs and MUVEs

However, just like in the real world, when minors enter an open game world there are dangers. The persistence of games that affords social networking also affords overuse which may result in physical or mental health risks discussed above. At least with single player stand-alone video games there is a natural ending. And usually when a player finishes a video game, he/she loses interest in replaying that video game again. There may be a need to design pauses or breaks in MUVEs and MMOG used for teaching and learning not only to avoid overuse but promote reflection as well.

There are other perils aside from overuse. Commercial MUVE and MMOG internet services like Second Life and World of Warcraft have policies regarding misbehaviour in their games. Second Life does not allow users who are under 18 years old. In the teen version of Second Life only 13-17 years old are allowed to participate (Linden Research, 2010). Second Life and Teen Second Life have community standards, formal rules of behaviour. The goal of the Second Life community standards is stated as “...treat each other with respect and without harassment, adhere to local standards as indicated by simulator ratings, and refrain from any hate activity which slurs a real-world individual or real-world community (Linden Research, n.d.)”. Teen Second Life's community standard goal is to “...enjoy a safe, fun Second Life experience and always treat each other with respect. (Linden Lab, n.d.)”. In particular Teen Second Life has rules about respect for others, anonymity, password protection, privacy, vulgar language, expletives, nudity, sexual content, strong violence, harassment, assault, disturbing of the peace, etc (Linden Research, n.d.). This list reads like a student manual in school. The list is self-explanatory except assault. How do you assault someone virtually? MUVEs like Second Life have simulated physics which allow players in to push, shove and even shoot others. This behaviour is restricted in combat zones or PVP (player versus player) zones.

There are players who misbehave intentionally and are known as griefers. According to Wikipedia a griefer is a player in a multiplayer video game that purposely irritates and harasses other players (Griefer, 2010). It is the equivalent of an internet troll in chats, forums, and blogs (Troll in Wikipedia, 2010). Internet games may even be used for cyber-bullying where the intention is to divulge embarrassing or hurtful information about people (Cyber-Bullying in Wikipedia, 2010). Hekki Jungman studied criminal and offensive behaviour in multi-user virtual worlds and found that common offenses and crimes is connected to money e.g. getting one’s account password to steal the virtual assets, and sell them for real-world money (2009).

Second Life had dealt with minor offenses by suspending accounts and banishing people to a virtual detention centre called the corn field. When a player is sent to this virtual place he cannot teleport (travel to another place just by clicking a link or entering an URL address) elsewhere. He cannot communicate with anyone, and cannot create objects. All he will see is the corn field and a tractor. In other words the misbehaving player is punished with boredom (Walsh, 2006). But more serious offenses are punished differently. In World of Warcraft, a player who breaks the game play policy is punished in this order: warning, suspension, final warning, and account closure (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010). It would be wise to study the rules of existing MUVEs and MMOGs as part of the design of an educational game project.

References

Bartle, R. (1996, April). Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDS. Retrieved February 13, 2010, from http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.

Blizzard Entertainment. (2010). World of Warcraft account penalties policy. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20226.

Boland, I.T. (2009, March). Efficacy of the 3D Multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) Second Life for learning in cognitive constructivist and social constructivist activities. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minnesota, USA. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from http://www.elearningfuture.com/efficacy-of-the-3d-multi-user-virtual-environment-muve-second-life-for-learning-in-cognitive-constructivist-and-social-constructivist-activities/.

Cyber-bullying. (2010, July 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:47, July 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cyber-bullying&oldid=371451552.

Dickey, M.D.(1999). 3D virtual worlds and learning: An analysis of the impact of design affordances and limitations in Active Worlds, Blaxxun Interactive, and Online! Traveller; and a study of the implementation of Active Worlds for formal and informal education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University. Retrieved May 29, 2010, from http://mchel.com/Papers/Dickey-Dissertation.pdf

Griefer. (2010, June 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:46, July 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Griefer&oldid=370651956.

Hanghøj, T. (2008). Playful knowledge: An explorative study of educational gaming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Denmark. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from http://www.sdu.dk/~/media/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.ashx.

Jungman, H. (2009, August). Criminal and offensive behavior involving multiuser virtual worlds. Thesis, Haaga-Helia, University of Applied Sciences, Finland.

Kong, S.L. (2008). Intention to learn in MMOG : examining the roles of peer intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Unpublished master's thesis, City University of Hong Kong. Retrieved June 19, 2010, from http://lbms03.cityu.edu.hk/theses/ftt/mphil-is-b23406902f.pdf.

Klevjer, Rune. (2006, July). What is the avatar? Fiction and embodiment in avatar-based singleplayer computer games. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen, Norway. Retrieved June 6, 2010, from http://www.yellowdocuments.com/2943117-what-is-the-avatar-fiction-and.

Linden Lab. (n.d.). Teen Second Life community standards. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://teen.secondlife.com/footer/cs.

Linden Research, Inc. (2010, March 31). Second Life terms of service. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php.

Linden Research, Inc. (n.d.). Second Life community standards. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php.

Siitonen, M. (2007). Social interaction in online multiplayer communities. Doctoral dissertation, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Retrieved May 10, 2010, from https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/13444/9789513929312.pdf?sequence=1; Available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-2931-2.

Squire, K.D. (2004). Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved January 22, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html.

Steinkuehler, C.A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html.

Taylor, T.L. (2002). Living digitally: Embodiment in virtual worlds. In R. Schroeder (Ed.), The social life of avatars: Presence and interaction in shared virtual environments (pp. 40-62). London: Springer-Verlag. Retrieved May 25, 2010, from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12.4645&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

Troll (Internet). (2010, June 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:47, July 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Troll_(Internet)&oldid=369932989.

Walsh, T. (2006, January 3). Hidden virtual-world prison revealed. In Clickable Culture. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/.

On Teacher-Game Content-Learner Interactions

2010-10-16T09:01:00.000+08:00

by
Roel Cantada

I am going to discuss learner-teacher interactions and teacher-game the interaction in this post. In distance education the interactions between learners and teachers are mediated by communication technology. In this case the technology is video game content. Some online video games have embedded chat and message communication facilities, but others rely on external web applications. Even though I am talking about distance education the reader should bear in mind that some of the studies (Squire & Egenfeldt-Nielsen in particular) referred to in this post were conducted in a face-to-face classroom environment wherein the teacher can directly talk to the student without the need for mediation by technology.

Teachers' attitude towards the use of games in education varies (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005; Hangøj, 2008; Jamison, 2008). John Jamison classified the attitudes towards learning Second Life among higher education educators as positive, neutral, and negative (2008). He reported that all groups experienced the same set of frustrations about learning the game but responded differently. The positive group treated the frustrations as motivational experiences, to which they responded by increasing flow experience. While the negative group were dissatisfied and wanted clear instructions from the researcher. When they were unable to acquire the instructions during the orientation some of them gave up. The difference between the positive and negative group is that the positive group had personal intrinsic reasons for participating in the orientation while the neutral and negative group had professional extrinsic reasons only (Jamison, 2008).

The danger here is that teachers with negative experience with games tended to transfer their personal interpretation of that experience to others, including their students (Jamison, 2008, pp. 57-58). They generalized their point of view to all and in a way projected their weaknesses to their students. They think that if they can't learn to play a game, their students would not be able to as well. Of course this is not always the case. Reverse socialization had been observed with new technology, in fact my seven year old nephew taught me how to play MMORPG. In addition they think failure is bad. They are shocked to find that in a game as a learning environment “failure” is the norm. But of course teachers must learn to manage failure and frustration among students (Squire, 2004). Kurt Squire puts it quite perspicuously,

“...that managing students’ questions and failures may be particularly important early in the unit, as students orient to the game and adjust to the feelings of frustration and the failures common to game play.

Ultimately, how to support students in learning games and managing success and failure may be less an issue of particular instructional resources and more one of learning culture. It is worth reiterating the contradiction between predominant approaches to curriculum and instruction where information is broken down to easily processed chunks of information and “failure” is to be avoided, and game-based learning environments, where problem spaces are complex, information must be gathered from disparate sources, and failure is the norm. Learning in game-based learning units means resetting expectations so that problem spaces are way too large to be fully understood, information must be gleaned from multiple sources (particularly other games), and failure is accepted, even valued. Learning, as it predominantly occurs in game playing communities is driven by goals (which are often going unmet due to failure) and is iterative, multi-modal, and ongoing." (Squire, 2004)

I believe that the reason why we created artificial learning environments like schools is to minimize the dangerous consequences of failure but not to eradicate failure. Students have a right to fail. In a sense that their failure is a consequence of their action that resulted from experimenting with solutions to problems rather than the judgement of a teacher (as in a grade).

Jamison's study is an orientation on Second Life for educators. It is worth noting here that he recommended the following for a successful orientation into the virtual world environment:

Participants should have the option of being a part of an orientation process that includes formal social activities, or leaves all participants to seek out their own interactions.
Participants should have the option of participating in structured activities early in the orientation that more directly introduce them to the specific concepts of the 3-D virtual space, and to the role of the avatar in that space.
Participants in an effective orientation program should have the opportunity to select from a wide range of structured learning materials addressing the wide range of skills and behaviours required to function fully in the virtual environment.
Participants should be asked to identify their motivation for participating in the orientation process, and this stated reason should be a factor in guiding the participant through the orientation.
Provide a live mentor. (Jamison, 2008, pp. 85-87 )

In the previous post I mentioned that M.P.J. Habgood said that “...educational computer games have been traditionally used by classroom teachers as a ‘hands-free’ mode of teaching: an individual reward for completing work, or simply just a way of keeping a class occupied while attending to other priorities (2007, p.246).”

If teachers use games in teaching then the hands-free mode criticized by Habgood above should be avoided. The different results can be seen from the findings of Kurt Squire (2004) and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2005). Squire actively interacted with the students while they were playing. He gave prompts, technical advice, and just-in-time lectures. In my opinion Egenfeldt-Nielsen followed the hands-free mode. Most of the time he simply observed how the teachers and students used the game in a formal classroom. Of course he was playing the role of researcher. But the problem with his situation is that the participant teachers were not experts in the game he used.

Squire had some success with some students. Students who played the game recursively were able to connect world history with their experiences in playing the game. One student even went so far as to consider the game as a simulation of world history. On the other hand, the teachers in Egenfeldt-Nielsen's study did not have the time to integrate the video game to their teaching. They failed to connect the student's game experience with learning history during their discussions. As a result their students failed to connect playing the game and learning history as well. Egenfeldt-Nielsen lists three lost learning opportunities in his study: First, students had no appreciation of the historical information embedded in the game because the teachers failed to point out the value of these facts to them. Second, there were rare times when the students appreciated historical facts in the game but the teachers were unable to exploit that teacheable moment, they instead went on with their lesson without relating it to the game. And third, when the some students did ask questions to explore the emergent nature of history in the game, the teachers failed to extend these moments to enrichment activities or assignments that would have tied the game content with the learning content (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005). Egenfeldt-Nielsen emphasized the need for teachers to be explicit in linking game content with learning content. Probably because the students are yet to be socialized in using games for learning. If teachers dismiss the game experience of students in order to cover their course content, then the students will dismiss the game as irrelevant to their learning.

Thorkild Hanghøj came up with an incisive classification of how teacher's pedagogical beliefs manifest in the way they value or make the game content relevant for the students. He found that:

"By comparing how the teachers taught with and reflected on the same game, three pedagogical approaches concerning the game emerged. More specifically, the teachers interpreted the game scenario as a scripted, a performative and an explorative form of teaching. The difference between the three approaches was particularly clear in the way that the teachers authorised the game results in the end-of-game discussion. Thus, one teacher promoted particular interpretations of the game which were only partially related to the students’ game experience. Two teachers chose to let the assertions and results of the game determine possibilities for interpretation, while two other teachers explored and validated multiple different interpretations of the game session.
These three pedagogical approaches also indicated three different epistemological views on the subject-related knowledge of the game scenario. The scripted approach mostly focused on the “facts” of the game and validated game-based knowledge as being either “true” or “false”. The performative approach viewed game knowledge as an entertaining contrast to the more “serious” knowledge of upper secondary education. Finally, the inquiry-based approach validated the students’ game-based knowledge as a construction and reconstruction of hypotheses." (Hanghøj, 2008, pp. 321-322)

Teachers can serve as a bridge or a barrier to the successful use of games in teaching and learning.
Egenfeldt-Nielsen's study suggests that there is a need for changing current teacher's practices in teaching. But teachers are resistant to this change. The successful use of games may have to wait for teachers to change their teaching practices (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005). Or an active program to retrain and reorient teachers to use games in teaching and learning would have to be developed.

What is the role of teachers in successfully using games in teaching and learning?

I doubt it if teachers should be expected to create their own games, or even to modify games. The skills needed for such activities may be beyond the knowledge and time of many teachers. The ideal is that there would be a course team of designers, developers, programmers, and artists who will design and develop games for specific courses. Another possibility is relying on a community of open source games developers, and a few in-house people who have the technical expertise to modify these games. This second approach is what I am exploring in my project.

But it does not matter if the game is created, modified, or acquired as a commercial off the shelf game, the first task of the teacher is to play the game. He/she needs to evaluate the game in terms of the learning goals of his/her course.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen said if the teachers only learn the game at the same time as the student, the use of games in education will probably fail. Teachers will not have enough time to integrate the game with their content and vice versa. As a result they will not be able to help students with their game play problems (2005). Clearly, the teachers should be knowledgeable in the game before the start of the course. Van Eck (2009) suggests the use of walkthroughs and cheats to speed up evaluation. There is no need for the teacher to be an expert gamer, or to be better than their students at game play. What he/she needs to be is a pedagogical scene setter (Wastiau, Kearney, & Van den Berghe, 2009). Someone who can prepare the learning environment that uses games, and ensures students learn the subject matter content from playing games.

Some of the things teachers must do during the implementation of the educational gaming is to exploit teacheable moments including errors and biases in the game (Squire, 2004). This will allow students to understand the systemic nature of games and compare these errors and biases with real life phenomena. The literature also recommends extending or supplementing the game with assignments and projects (Squire, 2004; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005; Watson, 2007). It has been observed in online gaming communities which are considered learning communities (Steinkuehler, 2005) that gamers go beyond the game and create websites, forums, and even face-to-face meetings to share knowledge about the game among them. The creation of learning communities is one of the objectives of distance education, and it would be better if it is voluntary.

Teachers should also be prepared with back-up lessons and activities in case of technical difficulties, specially in the Philippines where random brownouts are common. If the game is delivered online, it is very frustrating for distance education students to experience server downtimes and not be redirected to a forum or website where they could receive further instruction onn what to do next.

Debrief students. It is important for reflection and analysis of the students' game experiences (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005; Wagner, 2008; Watson, 2007). Some of the possible guide questions for debriefing include:

How did you feel while playing the game? (decompressing – feelings)
What happened during the game? (describing – facts )
How does this activity compare to other phenomena? (drawing comparisons – enhancing transfer)
What might you plan to do differently in future activity? (deriving lessons – application). (Heinich et al., as cited in Squire, 2004).

Given the ambivalent attitude of students towards the validity of learning with games, students appear to dislike being graded on game play. William Watson said “that the students strongly resisted the notion of being graded on their performance in a game. However, the students did not have an issue with being graded on an assignment related to the game, such as their reflection assignment. It seems likely that learner attitude towards the use of an educational game could be turned negative if the learners feel pressure to perform in the game. The focus on extrinsic reward, such as grades, could increase immediate engagement with the game but might damage long-term engagement with the topic, which is the driving goal behind the GATE theory. It is therefore recommended that educational games developed with the GATE theory should encourage a play experience which is intrinsically rewarding (Watson, 2007, p. 152)”. In the case of some students in Squire's study, grades do not motivate students, and they refuse to do anything they do not want to do (2004). On the other hand in Egenfeldt-Nielsen's study, a student commented that “she learned history in order to get good grades, so she could get into university.” This tells us again that the teacher should be sensitive to what motivates their actual students.

The methods of implementing a game in the William Watson's GATE instructional design theory provide further guidance for teachers’ use of games (See Watson, 2007). In the next post I will discuss the findings of educational game literature regarding social play among learners.

References

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2005). Beyond edutainment. Exploring the educational potential of computer games. Doctoral dissertation, IT-University of Copenhagen. Retrieved March 8, 2010, from http://www.egenfeldt.eu/egenfeldt.pdf.

Habgood, M.P.J. (2007, July). The effective integration of digital games and learning content. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nottingham, UK. Retrieved June 6, 2010, from http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/385/1/Habgood_2007_Final.pdf.

Hanghøj, T. (2008). Playful knowledge: An explorative study of educational gaming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Denmark. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from http://www.sdu.dk/~/media/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.ashx.

Jamison, J.B. (2008, May). Educators in a strange land: The experience of traditional educators when immersed into the virtual environment of Second Life. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minnesota, USA. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from http://gradworks.umi.com/3307549.pdf.

Squire, K.D. (2004). Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved January 22, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html.

Steinkuehler, C.A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html.

Van Eck, R. (2009). A guide to integrating COTS games into your classroom. In R.E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (pp. 179-199). Hershey: Information Science Reference.

Wagner, M.D. (2008, May). Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games as constructivist learning environments in K-12 education: A Delphi study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation proposal, Walden University, Minnesota, USA. Retrieved May 8, 2010, from http://edtechlife.com/files/dissertation/Wagner_Mark_Dissertation.pdf.

Wastiau, P., Kearney, C., & Van den Berghe, W. (2009, May). How are digital games used in schools? Complete results of the study. Belgium: European Schoolnet, EUN Partnership AISBL. Retrieved July 1, 2010, from http://games.eun.org/upload/gis-full_report_en.pdf.

Watson, W.R. (2007, August). Formative research on an instructional design theory for educational video games. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved May, 25, 2010, from http://www.indiana.edu/~syschang/decatur/documents2/formative_resrch_isd-theory_edvideogames.pdf.

On Learner-Game Content Interactions

2010-10-15T08:35:00.114+08:00

On Learner-Game Content Interactions

Roel Cantada

Different types of learners interact differently with games in general, and with different genres of games.
Different games afford learners different learning action due to differences in features and constraints.

To state it another way, not all learners like playing games either for learning or entertainment. Not all learners like the same type of games. A single game cannot possibly afford all the learning action that will satisfy all learning objectives of a course (meaning predetermined by other than the learner) or the learner. There may be a need to combine different genres of games.

These variations are what I have learned from the educational games literature. The first focuses on the learner, the second on the afforded learning actions of the game. The latter insight is grounded on Affordance Theory.

Not All Learners Like to Play Games

Kurt Squire declares “games are not good for all learners” (2004, p. 411). Squire's dissertation provides a rich description of how students interact with a video game that teaches history. Some of the students actually dropped out of his class because they did not find the game engaging or they found it too hard. Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen had a similar experience. A group of students gave-up on his course within the first two weeks of the experiment. All these students had little experience with computer games and found the activity irrelevant to their studies (2005, p. 180).

Do learners learn from games?

The answer to this question is mixed and needs to be qualified by “what” they learn from games. If what they have to learn is how to play the game successfully then I think the literature is in agreement that games with the right design can teach a learner to successfully complete a game. In fact it was this perspective that Katrin Becker (2008) used in order to claim that good games embody good pedagogy. She said, “I'm pretending that what needs to be learned in the game is something that we care about and I'm going to identify how that game supports the player/learner so they can learn what they need to.”

Learners learn a lot from games. The question is whether what they are learning is valuable or not. Corollary to this question is “valuable to whom?” James Paul Gee (2003) called this “the problem of content”. He illustrated this view with a six year old child who can play a rather complex game for hours. The child's grandfather remarked, “While it may be good for his hand-eye coordination, it’s a waste of time, because there isn’t any content he’s learning. (Gee, 2003, p. 20)” Recently, I heard a similar remark on national television from the head of the Philippine Department of Education who was complaining about internet cafes offering games to students, she said that students were wasting their time playing games instead of studying (DepEd , 2010). In the Philippines, local governments are forbidding computer games in internet cafes that are within a couple of meters (it varies from ordinance to ordinace; from 50 to 500 meters) from of a school.

I admit that games can teach something good and something bad, but so do printed material, videos, music and everything else we use in school. The problem of content is rooted in the belief that the only valuable thing to study is what is listed in the nationally mandated curriculum for primary and secondary education, or the facts in the established academic disciplines for higher education (Gee, 2003). Another cause is the belief that learning is an acquisition of facts, embedded in what has been criticized as rote memorization. This is particularly acute in teaching history wherein students are socialized to expect memorization of dates, names, and places as the primary activity in a history course. Squire (2004) and Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2005) observes this with their participant students who tend to devalue the history they learn from games as being not factual. Squire also noted that the game Civilization III teach many concepts (233 concepts) but fails to provide deep understanding of those concepts (2003). This may be a problem of breadth over depth. Egenfeldt-Nielsen on the other hand reported that “...the learning outcome of students do not differ in relation to whether computer games are used or not. However, it seems that retention is better when using computer games and students are more intrinsically motivated despite criticism of the actual historical content of the course. (2005, p. 239)” In another subject matter, Richard Blunt (2006) found that the academic achievement of students who use games in class was higher than those who did not use games. He operationalized academic achievement as test scores in the course. Unfortunately, Blunt's study is ex-post facto and we don't know how the games were actually used by the students.

Becker (2008) seems to shed light on the problem of content when she used the idea of Collateral learning (things that are unintentionally learned) and Things we MUST learn in a game in her Magic Bullet design model of educational games. In relation we may be informed by the findings of Thorkild Hanghøj (2008). Some of his participants separated hard outcome, or pure subject matter content from soft outcome, which in Hanghøj “debate game's” case are discussing and arguing. One student even said that the end result would be “a very, very stupid class of social studies students who don’t know much about social studies but are enormously good at arguing (2008, p.281)”. On the other hand experts in Wagner’s Delphi panel (2008) appear to be promoting soft-skills as part of the school curriculum. They believe that “MMORPGs might be able to help students develop various 21st Century skills, as defined by NCREL and the Metiri Group”. These skills include (Burkhardt, et.al. 2003):

Digital-Age Literacy
Inventive Thinking
Effective Communication
High Productivity

The third item in the above list would be considered soft-skills (Soft skills, 2010). The experts are encouraging schools to adopt a new set of skills in the curriculum rather than using games to teach existing subject-matter content. This “change the school” or “change the game” issue is prevalent in the literature. The issue of how in-game and subject matter content may be interacted will be discussed in its own post later.

How long does it take for learners to learn from games?

Squire (2004) offers us a glimpse of the length of time before students get something relevant from games in his suggested curricular outline for Civilization III. The schedule is as follows:

Days
Game Play

1-3
Facilitate appropriation of game

4-7
Master game basics; go over common “failure points;”

8-11
Fostering purposeful game play & communities of inquiry

12-15
Recursive play and examining Civilization (game) as a simulation

16-18
Finish games

The schedule suggests that it will take seven (7) days before students can play a purposeful game, which I interpret as playing to learn history. One thing video games have in common with web applications and even a Learning Management System is that the learner has to master the game interface and rules before they are able to learn from it. Since games are more complex than Learning Management Systems, it may even take longer for learners to learn to play a game before being able to learn. The reader should also note that the length of game play varies among video games. Some games can be played within minutes; others as in the case of MUVEs and MMOGs never end until the company that maintains them decides to end the game or go bankrupt. The latter are called persistent games (Blunt, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2005; Qian, 2009). I will discuss the problem of lock-step scheduling and the time needed for playing in the post on community-game content interaction.

Types of Players

Richard Bartle (1996) created a taxonomy of player types based on their styles of playing. He mapped four types of players on two axes of a graph. The axes of the graph represent the source of players' interest in a MUD (See Bartle, 1996 for the graph). The x-axis maps whether the players are interested in other players or the world. While the y-axis maps whether they are acting on or interacting with the players or the world. The four types are the following (Bartle, 1996):

Achievers – interested in doing things to the game (acting on the world)
Explorers – interested in having the game surprise them (interacting with the world)
Socializers – interested in interacting with other players
Killers – interested in doing things to other people (acting on other players). This term is associated with games that allow players to fight each other.

The types above can be mapped to Michele Dickey's ways by which learners learn from video games (1999). The first two learn from the world, the last two learn from other people.

Another classification of players is that of Marko Siitonen (2007) who differentiates between casual players and competitive players. Siitonen's category has more to do with the norms of gamers' community. It can roughly be mapped to Bartle, as socializers and explorers may be considered casual players, while killers and achievers are competitive players. We can use these types when designing and implementing games for learners, by reminding ourselves that not all learners appreciate competition.

Steinkuehler (2005), using Bartle's taxonomy as a starting point, created different dimensions for axes of the graph which she elicited from MMOG players. She came up with a more complex graph, one example having 13 axes (Steinkuehler, 2005, p. 66). I am not going into detail of Steinkuehler's graph; suffice it to say that she advocates the development of taxonomies of playing styles based on a study of the community of players rather than forcing Bartle's model on the data. One thing that I have noticed though is that her reproduction of Bartle's graph has the label interveners instead of killers (Steinkuehler, 2005, p. 59). Steinkuehler points out the difference between players who do good things to other people, (like helping other players in quests and giving them game items) and those that are player killers.

I more inclined to adopt Squire's interpretation of Bartle's taxonomy. Squire (2004) focused on the fact that the types of players are differentiated by their goals. He thinks that “motivation is better conceptualized as a series of goals”. Furthermore he observed how students changed their goals (and therefore their playing style) as they play the game. He came to the conclusion that “students who appropriated the game as a tool for learning history, repurposed the tool and changed the goal of the game”.

It appears to me that Squire focuses on the intentionality of the learner in game play when he speaks of motivation. The literature appears to have consensus on the commonly known capability of games to motivate players. I will now turn to this aspect of the interaction between learners and game content.

Motivation

The dictionary definition of motivation is “the act or process of motivating; the condition of being motivated; or a motivating force, stimulus, or influence (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2010).” It is synonymous with drive and incentive. The literature on motivation does not seem to be arguing over what behaviour is motivated behaviour. The argument which is relevant to game design is whether the cause of that motivated behaviour resides in the agent (drive) or the environment (incentive) (Motivation in Wikipedia, 2010). The terms used for this division is intrinsic and extrinsic motivation respectively. Intrinsic motivation in relation to learning is motivation that is in the act of learning itself, without any need for external rewards. Its opposite is extrinsic motivation, where learning is done because of the expectation of external rewards (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Those who focus on motives that reside in the agent (intrinsic motivation) may be further divided between mind and body. Those who attribute motivation to drives like hunger and sex focus on the body, and those who attribute motivation to for example curiosity, honour, (Reiss, 2005) goals, and dislike of cognitive disequilibrium (Müller, Carpendale, & Smith, 2009, p.126) focus on the mind. The last—cognitive disequilibrium is a Piagetian concept that refers to discontinuities prompted by a disparity between what is believed to be true and what is actually true (Van Eck, 2006). Richard Van Eck citing Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith said that “game playing is a voluntary exercise of controlling a system (i.e., the game) intended for a state of disequilibrium. In other words, game players continuously try out new methodologies and strategies during the game-playing process based on the system’s feedback until they achieve the game objectives or the equilibrium state (Van Eck, 2009, p. 1144)”.

Let me give a brief example of the motivation of players. I have a six year old nephew just like the child in Gee's (2003) example mentioned above, who plays Lego StarWars (Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, 2010). He can play for hours and knows all the options, buttons, and menus needed to play the game. No one taught him how to play this video game. And this six year old child can't even read his score beyond three figures. I am amazed at the dexterity he displays with the controls but disappointed that the game is not teaching him how to read. But then again this game is not designed to teach six year olds how to read. One time I was baby-sitting my nephew while he was playing a difficult level where you shoot a couple of red circles that is supposed to be part of a ship and every time he failed (which brings him back to his last position) he would jump up, cry and say over and over in Tagalog, “Why doesn't it work?”. After that tantrum he would sit back again with tears in his eyes and try again. He repeated this probably more than ten times. I remember when I was trying to teach this child how to read and he'd give up after the first mistake, but with games he appears to be displaying what Seymour Papert dubbed hard fun (Papert, 2002). Students find games fun because it’s hard. They are engaged and motivated by it even though it challenges them to the brink of frustration (Wagner, 2008).

But not all games are motivating to all learners. A designer of educational games is interested in what makes video games fun, motivating, and engaging. He/she is interested in harnessing this power of games for teaching and learning. The designer needs to identify specific features of a game that will elicit particular motivations. Difficulty is not the only feature of a game that makes it fun.

Among the theories of motivation two stands out in the literature, Thomas Malone and Mark Lepper's Taxonomy of Motivations (1987) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory (1990).

Malone and Lepper constructed a taxonomy of intrinsic motivations that they hope “can be used in designing intrinsically interesting learning environments, not just in explaining why or predicting that some environments will be more interesting than others (1987, p. 224)”. Malone and Lepper's taxonomy or an earlier version had been cited by five (Becker; Egenfeldt-Nielsen; Squire; Vandeventer; Watson) of the dissertations on educational games that I have read. On the other hand flow theory had been cited by seven dissertations (Becker; Egenfeldt-Nielsen; Jamison; Squire; Steinkuehler; Wagner; Watson).

Below are the first two levels of Malone and Lepper's taxonomy (1987, pp. 248-249):

1.Individual Motivations
   a) Challenge
   b) Curiosity
   c) Control
   d) Fantasy
2.Interpersonal Motivations
   a) Cooperation
   b) Competition
   c) Recognition (See Malone and Lepper, 1987 for their Heuristics for Designing Intrinsically Motivating Instructional Environments checklist.)

Flow's characteristics or what Csikszentmihalyi dubbed as the elements of enjoyment are the following:

The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals
The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken provides immediate feedback.
One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 49)

Csikszentmihalyi further states that “the combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it (1990).” Video games had been observed to induce this flow experience, and even lead to addiction.

Interpretation of flow theory emphasizes the need for matching available skills and the task challenges (De Freitas, 2009 p.56-57). Malone and Lepper had subsumed this theory under their category of challenge. They said “activities that are trivially easy or impossibly difficult will be of little intrinsic interest. Activities that provide some intermediate level of difficulty and challenge will stimulate the greatest intrinsic motivation (Malone & Lepper, 1987).”

Matthew Peter Jacob Habgood in his study "The effective integration of digital games and learning content (2007)" studied the effect of integrating learning content in a game to intrinsic motivation among primary school children aged 7-9 years old. The single-player game used was Zombie Division. It was used to teach division in mathematics. Habgood questions the value of fantasy in Malone and Lepper's taxonomy and prefers game mechanics to explain intrinsic motivation. He also used flow theory in his study. His guidelines for creating intrinsic integration and extrinsic learning content are worth mentioning.

Habgood's theoretical guidelines for creating intrinsic integration in video games are the following:

Deliver learning material through the parts of the game that are the most fun to play, riding on the back of the flow experience produced by the game, and not interrupting or diminishing its impact.
Embody the learning material within the structure of the gaming world and the player’s interactions with it, providing an external representation of the learning content explored through the game’s core mechanics. (Habgood, 2007, p. 43)

While his guidelines for creating extrinsic learning content in video games are:

Keep the learning material separate from the parts of the game that are the most fun to play, avoiding the distraction of the flow experience produced by the game.
Separate the learning material from the structure of the gaming world, providing a direct mapping of the learning content that must be completed in order to proceed with the game play. (Habgood, 2007, pp. 43-44)

Using learning content as the independent variable Habgood studied its effect on motivation, deep learning, reflection and transfer. He said that there are two ways to measure motivation. One is through self-reporting and the other is time-on-task. But he also considered there is more to intrinsic motivation than increasing time-on-task (see also Gentile, 2009; Charlton & Danforth, in press; albeit in relation to pathological behaviour). He found that intrinsically integrating learning content in a game is motivationally and educationally more effective than the extrinsic equivalent. He also suggests the possibility of using video games for assessment aside from teaching/learning.

I am sceptical about the generalization of Habgood's study to college students in a distance education environment. I disagree with his devaluation of fantasy. He believes that as long as the game mechanics are the same the fantasy elements can be arbitrary and would not have much effect on the learning process. Thus he said he would have gotten the same effect had he substituted futuristic weapons for archaic weapons in his game. I don't think this would apply if he was teaching history. I can just imagine the confusion that will be brought about by teaching World War II using futuristic weapons like laser swords. Nonetheless, Habgood's study of motivation is a good starting point and his tabular breakdown of the design features of his game, as well as his well documented steps will be a good reference point for my project.

Issues about motivation

Intrinsic motivation had been emphasized by the educational games literature over extrinsic motivation. But Steven Reiss is critical of the concept of intrinsic motivation. One of his arguments is that the dyad intrinsic-extrinsic does not capture the multifaceted nature of motivation (Reiss, 2005). He also argues against the emphasis on enjoyment or pleasure (Reiss, 2004). He said that enjoyment is an effect rather than a cause. He proposes 16 basic desires or motives to explain motivated behaviour. The 16 desires are the following:

Power – desire to influence
Curiosity – desire to be autonomous
Status – desire for social standing
Social contact – desire for peer companionship
Vengeance – desire to get even
Honour -desire to obey a traditional moral code
Idealism – desire to improve society
Physical exercise – desire to exercise muscles
Romance – desire for sex
Family – desire to raise own children
Order – desire to organize
Eating - desire to eat
Acceptance – desire for approval
Tranquillity – desire to avoid anxiety, fear
Saving – desire to collect, value of frugality (Reiss, 2004)

I have yet to see a research on video games that apply Reiss' theory, but it seems to elaborate Malone and Lepper's fantasy category. For example the popularity of the game Tamagochi, where the player takes care of a virtual pet may be explained by a desire to raise your own children. And there is an endless collecting in many adventure games. I keep wondering why players would endure repetitive task to collect virtual items that only differ in colour or shape.
I feel though that Reiss had severed the individual from his environment. His theory focuses on the agent rather than the agent's interaction with the environment.

Another issue with the power of video games to motivate people that parents are concerned with is the so-called “video game addiction”. Scary stories like the death of a South Korean for excessively playing an online game (S Korean dies after games session, 2005) are picked up internationally despite being isolated cases, and without full investigation of other circumstances affecting the deceased.

After reading the relevant literature I found the term “internet addiction” is misleading. Internet addiction is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) (AMA Council on Science and Public Health, 2007). In the literature it is not associated with substance abuse addiction, but rather with impulse-control disorders particularly pathological gambling (Charlton & Danforth, in press; Gentile, 2009).

The inclusion of the term was proposed to be included in the next version of the DSM, but was rejected by the American Medical Association (AMA Council on Science and Public Health, 2007).
A report by the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health used the term “video game overuse” instead. The report did recognize potential detrimental health effects of videogame overuse like light-induced epileptic seizures and short-term increase in aggressive behaviour. But it called for further research.

A problem with accurately diagnosing “video game overuse” is a question of what symptoms to be included. The use of pathological gambling diagnosis has been shown by John Charlton and Ian Danforth (in press) to misdiagnose highly engaged video game players as being addicted. They identified six criteria associated with pathological gambling. The criteria are defined as follows: “salience – domination of a person's life by the activity; euphoria – a buzz or a high is derived from the activity; tolerance – the activity has to be undertaken to a progressively greater extent to achieve the same buzz; withdrawal symptoms – cessation of the activity leads to the occurrence of unpleasant emotions or physical effects; conflict – the activity leads to conflict with others or self-conflict; relapse and reinstatement – resumption of the activity with the same vigour subsequent to attempts to abstain (Charlton & Danforth, in press).” They found that the criteria cognitive salience, tolerance and euphoria are poor indicators of overuse. Overuse may be diagnosed with the criteria conflict, withdrawal symptoms, relapse and reinstatement, and behavioural salience. In other words pathological game use is not all about excessive play or high engagement (Gentile, 2009).

This discussion is important in that it should remind educators who use video games to do two things. Filter out learners who will potentially overuse games in a course that uses educational games by being explicit with warnings and using diagnostic tests. And/or provide counselling support and debriefing during and after the use of games in teaching and learning.

Neuroscience research appears to me to have had found physiological evidence for intrinsic motivation while playing video games and learning. Koepp et.al. (1998) found out that specific parts of the human brain releases dopamine while playing video games. They suggest that dopaminergic neurotransmission may be involved in learning, reinforcement of behaviour, attention, and sensorimotor integration. Dopamine is a chemical that naturally occur in the human body and has been associated with feelings of pleasure (Dopamine in Wikipedia, 2010). Dopamine increase is also known to be involved in substance abuse addiction but the processes are different from the natural release while playing video games and learning.

Simply put, the idea is that an increase in dopamine in the brain motivates learners, unchanged dopamine release does not. In a study of monkeys, Jeffrey Hollerman and Wolfram Schultz found that dopamine increases in the brain when there is an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning (1998; see also Schultz, 2000). My reading of their report is that the neurons that are responsible for releasing the dopamine are keeping track of this prediction error. They said that these neurons are “activated by rewards, and because they are activated more strongly by unpredicted than by predicted rewards they may play a role in learning. (Hollerman & Schultz, 1998)” Furthermore they suggest that “many behaviours are affected by rewards, undergoing long-term changes when rewards are different than predicted but remaining unchanged when rewards occur exactly as predicted . (Hollerman & Schultz, 1998)”

The findings above seems to contradict Reiss' argument against hedonistic (pleasure seeking) interpretations of motivation. On the other hand it supports the ideas of Malone and Lepper (1987) about challenge and curiosity. They said that the certainty of achieving or not achieving a goal is not a challenge. In addition they stated that some models of motivation specify that motivation will be maximal when uncertainty is maximal i.e., when the probability of success is exactly one half (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell as cited in Malone & Lepper, 1987). They listed four techniques to make computer games unpredictable:

Variable difficulty levels
Multiple levels of goals
Hidden information
Randomness (Malone & Lepper, 1987, p. 232)

Nevertheless, I feel that dopamine increases cannot explain everything about motivation. After all a study found that different dopamine releasing neurons react differently to the same stimuli among monkeys (Matsumoto, 2009). In relation, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) does not only emphasize enjoyment but also discuss the outcome of flow, that is, complexity. He said:

Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies (Csikszentmihalyi, p. 41).

Neuroscience has a lot to offer in support of and against educational theories. But we should be careful in using its findings as we may be reading more than what neuroscientists are willing to say (Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008). I guess the best approach is to think of the neuroscience findings as metaphors in educational research, pending unequivocal assertions about neurons and learning from neuroscience. Neural networks is one of the metaphors in the learning theory supported in this blog--Connectivism.

Another issue regarding motivation to be considered is that raised by Michael Young (2001). He questions the existence of motivation as a variable. He suggests that motivation may be an epiphenomenon. An epiphenomenon is “the result of presuming such a variable exists and asking people to rate how much of it they have (Young, 2001).” It is a secondary phenomenon that is a by-product of another phenomenon (Zheng, 2005). Young reinterpreted motivation “as an on-going momentary personal assessment of the match between the adopted goals for this occasion and the affordances of the environment.” To him then the primary phenomena that explain motivated behaviour or action are goals and affordances. We keep coming back to affordance theory which I discussed in another post in this blog.

What is important with Young's interpretation of motivation is his belief that learners can change their goals during the learning process. They could adopt new goals, generate new goals, or modify existing ones. Malone and Lepper (1987) recognize the dynamism of goal setting with the idea of “emergent goals” under their category “challenge”. They defined “emergent goals” (also Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.56) are goals that people can easily generate for themselves. They warn though that people may generate goals that are too difficult for their level of ability. This could lead to frustration and giving up.

The task then of instructional designers according to Young is to develop “contexts that induce students to adopt goals that will be afforded by the learning contexts they design”. But at the same time “instructional designers should not be surprised when the actions students take in a designed learning context appear unanticipated from the perspectives of the original designers” (Young, 2001). This takes us full circle to Squire's observation of students changing their goals as they play (2004). In fact players may create a whole new game from an existing game that was never the intention of the designers. This is called meta-gaming (Squire, 2004; Steinkuehler, 2005, p.114; Wagner, 2008).

According to Wagner, a metagame is a “broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game that transcends a prescribed rules set, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game (2008, p. 9).”

Transferability to Distance Education

The focus of this subsection is the interactions between learners and games. The literature shows that learners learn from games. They are motivated by games to learn. But not all learners will be motivated to learn from games. Among those who will learn from games there are different types of players with different learning goals and motivation. There may be problems with what learners are willing to learn from games, but there may also be a solution through integration of learning content in games. Using games in education will result in longer time schedules due to the overhead of learning to play the game, so there is a need to determine the cost and benefit of additional time and effort invested in the game as oppose to what will be learned. Problems of overuse need to be addressed through counselling support and debriefing.

Despite the fact that these studies were conducted on face-to-face learning, I think their findings are general enough to apply to distance education. I have also learned useful concepts, techniques, and instruments that can be used in modelling students for my project. Modelling students is necessary because design and development is very long and in formal schooling we are unable to assess students before the start of classes. So a designer can only anticipate learner-player characteristics in designing games. I have also affirmed the necessity of using more than a single genre of games in teaching in order to be able to provide a rich assortment of features to address the variation in student types and motivation.

Before proceeding let me point out that the adoption and use of video games in education has barriers (Klopfer, Osterweil, & Salen, 2009; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005, p.181), the same goes for distance education that uses other web tools. Noriko Hara and Rob Kling identified sources of students' distress with a web-based distance education course (2000). Two sources of frustration that stood out are technological problems that are exacerbated by the lack of technical support; and lack of prompt feedback and ambiguous instructions from the teacher. The first may be worst for games as games typically require more powerful computers to work properly. The provision of demonstration games for preview and testing of equipment and internet connection should be implemented before enrolling students in a distance education course that use games as primary approach to teaching. The second lies with the teacher and will be discussed in the next post. Unfortunately, as Habgood have said about how teachers use games in the classroom, “...educational computer games have been traditionally used by classroom teachers as a ‘hands-free’ mode of teaching: an individual reward for completing work, or simply just a way of keeping a class occupied while attending to other priorities (2007, p.246).” In the next post I will be discussing the role of teachers in the use of educational games in the classroom.

References

AMA Council on Science and Public Health. (2007, June). Emotional and behavioral effects of video game and Internet overuse. Retrieved June 23, 2010, from http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/443/csaph12a07-fulltext.pdf.

Bartle, R. (1996, April). Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDS. Retrieved February 13, 2010, from http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.

Becker, K. (2008, January). The invention of good games: Understanding learning design in commercial video games. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Retrieved May 19, 2010, from http://www.minkhollow.ca/becker/papers/becker_thesis.pdf.

Blunt, R.D. (2006, August). A causal-comparative exploration of the relationship between game-based learning and academic achievement: Teaching management with video games. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Walden University, Minnesota, USA . Retrieved, March 23, 2010, from http://www.rickblunt.com/phd/blunt_richard_dissertation_final.pdf.

Burkhardt, G., et.al. (2003). enGauge 21st century skills: Literacy in the digital age. Illinois, & California, USA: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory and the Metiri Group. Retrieved May 9, 2010, from http://pict.sdsu.edu/engauge21st.pdf.

Charlton, J.P., & Danforth, I.D.W. (in press). Distinguishing addiction and high engagement in the context of online game playing. Computers in Human Behavior.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperCollins.

De Freitas, S. (2009). Massively multiplayer online role-play games for learning. In R.E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (pp. 51-66). Hershey: Information Science Reference.

DepEd to watch Internet shops for class-cutting pupils. (2010, June 12). GMA News.tv. Retrieved June 18, 2010,from http://www.gmanews.tv/story/193294/deped-to-watch-internet-shops-for-class-cutting-pupils.

Dickey, M.D.(1999). 3D virtual worlds and learning: An analysis of the impact of design affordances and limitations in Active Worlds, Blaxxun Interactive, and Online! Traveller; and a study of the implementation of Active Worlds for formal and informal education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University. Retrieved May 29, 2010, from http://mchel.com/Papers/Dickey-Dissertation.pdf.

Dopamine. (2010, June 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:28, June 20, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dopamine&oldid=368243944.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2005). Beyond edutainment. Exploring the educational potential of computer games. Doctoral dissertation, IT-University of Copenhagen. Retrieved March 8, 2010, from http://www.egenfeldt.eu/egenfeldt.pdf.

Gee, J.P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. USA: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gentile, D. A. (2009) Pathological video game use among youth 8 to 18: A national study. Psychological Science, 20(5), 594-602. Retrieved June 23, 2010, from http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/dgentile/SRCD%20Video%20Game%20Addiction.pdf.

Habgood, M.P.J. (2007, July). The effective integration of digital games and learning content. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nottingham, UK. Retrieved June 6, 2010, from http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/385/1/Habgood_2007_Final.pdf.

Hanghøj, T. (2008). Playful knowledge: An explorative study of educational gaming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Denmark. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from http://www.sdu.dk/~/media/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.ashx.

Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2000). Students' distress with a web-based distance education course: An ethnographic study of participants' experiences. Indiana University. Retrieved March 2, 2010, from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/1092/wp00-01B.html.

Hollerman, J.R., & Schultz, W. (1998, August). Dopamine neurons report an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning. Nature Neuroscience, 1(4), 304-309. Retrieved, June 21, 2010, from http://www.cs.rochester.edu/users/faculty/dana/nn0898_304.pdf.

Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S., & Salen, K. (2009). Moving learning games forward. Obstacles, opportunities & openness. The Education Arcade, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf.

Koepp, M.J., et.al. (1998, May). Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature, 393, 266-268. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from http://www.nrc-iol.org/cores/mialab/fijc/Files/2002/120402_Koepp_Nature_1998.pdf.

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Malone, T. W., & Lepper, M. R. (1987). Making learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivations for learning. In R. E. Snow & M. J. Farr (Eds.), Aptitude, learning and instruction III: Cognitive and affective process analysis (pp. 223-253). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2009, June). Two types of dopamine neuron distinctly convey positive and negative motivational signals. Nature, 459, 837-841. Retrieved June 23, 2010, from http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/braingroup/papers/matsumoto_hikosaka_2009.pdf.

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Müller, U., Carpendale, J.I.M., & Smith, L. (2009). The Cambridge companion to Piaget. Cambridge University.

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Reiss, S. (2004). Multifaceted nature of intrinsic motivation: The theory of 16 basic desires. Review of General Psychology, 8(3), 179-193. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from http://nisonger.osu.edu/papers/Multifaceted%20nature%20of%20intrinsic%20motivation.pdf.

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Wagner, M.D. (2008, May). Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games as constructivist learning environments in K-12 education: A Delphi study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation proposal, Walden University, Minnesota, USA. Retrieved May 8, 2010, from http://edtechlife.com/files/dissertation/Wagner_Mark_Dissertation.pdf.

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Steinkuehler, C.A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html.

Vandeventer, S.S. (1997, December). Expert behavior among outstanding videogame-playing children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida. Retrieved April 5, 2010, from http://www.coedu.usf.edu/itphdsem/odissvan.pdf.

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On the Forms of Interaction in Distance Education and Educational Games

2010-10-14T08:35:00.000+08:00

Roel Cantada

The following discussion is part of a draft proposal for a Master's project that I am currently doing at UPOU. I had to drop this from the final proposal because it bloated the paper. I am posting it here so I would remember what I've learned from reading literature on educational games. I am currently developing assets for the project game and I might lose track of the theory underlying my project.

The analytical tool that I will use in this post is the “forms of interaction in Distance Education (DE)” initially developed by Michael G. Moore (1989), then extended by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson (Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Anderson 2003, 2008), and further extended by Jon Dron (2008). The ten forms or types of interactions are the following:

learner-content
learner-teacher
learner-learner
teacher-content
content-content
learner-group
teacher-teacher
group-content
teacher-group
group-group

I selected this analytical framework because these forms of interactions are what are called relations (also called ties, links, lines, or connections) in network terms. They are not properties of single entities (also called actors, nodes, or vectors in network analysis) but at least two entities. With these dyads I can build a network of interactions in distance education. In reality the human-to-human interation is mediated by digital content and the result is a triad rather than a dyad. In applying these forms of interaction to the use of games in distance education I am going to make some modification to the terms that will result in the following list:

learner-game content
learner-teacher
learner-learner
teacher-game content
game content-subject matter content
learner-community
teacher-teacher
community-game content
teacher-community
community-community

I have adopted the term community instead of group because it is more common in the educational games literature. The term “content” in the literature usually refer to domain knowledge or subject matter content like Philippine History. In this post subject matter content has been differentiated with in-game content or how to play the game.

This multi-part post will focus on the first five interactions which deal with the interactions of the triad: learner-game-teacher. The remaining five appears to me to involve faculty development and educational policy considerations in the local and national scale. I will be not deal with them as deeply as the first five as they involve intervention outside the realm of a game designer.

References:

Anderson, T. (2003). Modes of interaction in distance education: recent developments and research questions. In M.G. Moore, & W.G. Anderson (Eds.). Handbook of distance education (pp. 129-144). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Anderson, T. (2008). The theory and practice of online learning, (2nd. ed). AU.

Dron, J. (2007). Control and constraint in e-learning: Choosing when to choose. USA & UK: Idea Group.

Garrison, D. R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Moore, M.G. (1989). Three types of interaction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 3(2). Retrieved May 18, 2010, from http://www.ajde.com/Contents/vol3_2.htm#editorial.

Affordance and educational games

2010-09-08T14:16:00.001+08:00

What is an affordance?

James Jerome Gibson an American psychologist, proposed the theory of affordance. He coined the term affordance in this way, "The verb "to afford" is found in the dictionary, but the noun "affordance" is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (Gibson, 1986, p. 127)." Furthermore, he stated that "The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (1986. p. 127). Affordance is identified with the school of psychology that grew from Gibson's work called ecological psychology (Young, 2001). Ecological psychology emphasizes the importance of the environment or ecological niche in cognition, hence it considers cognition as situated. That is, the "what and how" people think depends on the situation they found themselves in.

Michael Young (2001) stated that “affordances can be thought of as possibilities for action. Affordances are detected by a goal-driven agent as they move about in an “information field” that results from the working of their senses in concert with their body movements.”

Another coherent interpretation of Gibson's conception of affordances states that, "Affordances, or clues in the environment that indicate possibilities for action, are perceived in a direct, immediate way with no sensory processing. Examples include: buttons for pushing, knobs for turning, handles for pulling, levers for sliding, etc. (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2010)". Speaking of knobs and buttons here is an example.

In the figure above the affordances are push-able, flip-able, and rotate-able. The objects in the environment are buttons, switches and knobs. The action of pushing are for buttons rather than knobs, the constraint on buttons allows it only to be pushed, rotating it will not turn on the light bulb. The light from the bulb is considered feedback which tells us whether our action is successful or not. In the case of the switch and the knob, it tells us which way is on and off. Up or down for the switch, clockwise and counter clockwise for the knob.

Interestingly, this electrical system will supposedly teach us about itself even if we had no prior experience with push buttons, switches and knobs. Handling these objects (since they are constrained to work only one way) will allow us to discover how they work. Even trial and error will be reduced as supposedly, flip switches looks like they should be flipped rather than turned. In a way this is a very simple example of experiential learning.

This example satisfies what Michael Young (2001) identified as the three basic principles that are fundamental to an ecological psychology perspective on learning and thinking. They are the following:

Learners are self-directed by personal goals and intentions (intentionality)
Learning improves with practice
Learning improves with feedback

The goal is to turn on/off the light bulb. Practice involves manipulating a switch, and feedback comes in the form of light or absence of light. Young also said that ecological psychology may appear to resemble behaviourism but this is not so (2001). For instance in the example, the light bulb may be said to condition the individual to move the switch in one direction. Young said that “a fundamental distinction rests in ecological psychology's presumption of intentionality driving behaviour on the part of the learner. While behaviourism in its purest form would have the environment selecting the behaviours of the learner (operant conditioning), an ecological psychology description of behaviour begins with the definition of a “goal space” … that consists of a theoretical set of paths that define a trajectory from the current state of the learner to some future goal state selected by the learner.” I will not go any deeper into ecological psychology but I think it is appropriate to understand the concept of affordance within its theoretical framework, and to settle any confusion with behaviourism. Sometimes when concepts are borrowed by another discipline, the concept is orphaned and loses its meaning because the connection with other concepts in the original discipline is severed. Thus it loses its meaning. Let us now return to affordance.

The example given above shows the presence of manmade objects in the environment. For the design of educational toys the concept of affordance is important not only to the analysis of existing toys but the creation and modification of toys. Gibson recognizes that man can change his environment. He states that man changed his environment “to change what it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him. (1986, pp. 129-130)”. It is exactly our goal in using affordance in the design of educational toys. To make more available what benefits learning and less what obstructs learning.

Relational nature of affordance: Is affordance a property of the environment or is it a relation between the environment and an agent?

Wikipedia, though not a scholarly source, has an insightful definition of affordance that may help clarify its relational nature. It states that, "An affordance is an action that an individual can potentially perform in his or her environment. (Affordance, 2010)"

An issue discussed by psychologists is whether affordances are properties of the environment that are relative to the animal (Chemero, 2003; Scarantino, 2002); or relations between the environment and the animal? Anthony Chemero (2003) brilliantly clarified the relational nature of affordance. Chemero stated that affordances are relations between the abilities of organisms and features of the environment. He presents the structure of affordances in the formula:

Affords-ϕ (feature, ability)

The symbol ϕ - means phi and in Chemero's discussion appears to represent the actions that results in the interaction of an animal with a particular ability with an object in the environment with a particular feature. In my view, this is surprisingly similar to the Wikipedia definition. An example would be:

Affords-sitting (flat surface, butt and bendable legs)

The ability is not detailed enough, but sufficient for explaining the concept. A flat surface affords an animal with a butt and can bend it legs far enough so that the butt touches a surface to sit. The affordance applies to both man and dogs.

How is this issue related to this games in education? I will not delve into the theoretical argument of Chemero but focus on its use in educational game development. If affordances are properties of the environment relative to an animal then we can state that we can design affordances in a toy, because they would be properties of the toy relative to a learner. But if affordances are relations then we can no longer say that we can design affordances in a toy directly. We can only say that we design features of a toy that may afford learning in individuals with particular abilities. At the same time I believe that we can also say that we can teach individuals to develop particular abilities to exploit the features in an educational toy that affords learning.

For me at least, thinking of affordance as relations will allow me to represent it as links in a network, and the features of the environment would be partition of nodes. Affordances could then be thought of as connections and would be useful in the application of the learning theory Connectivism.

Is affordance applicable only to a real life environment and not to a digital environment?

Donald Norman is probably one of the best known design theorists that had adopted the theory of affordance in product design. Norman does not think screen-based products have affordances. He defined affordance as "the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used (1988, p.9)”. This is the environment sided definition of affordance rather than the relational definition. And when he spoke of things he was referring to physical products.

He said, “Now consider only the touch sensitive screen that enables the system to support the affordance of touching. In this circumstance, designers sometimes will say that when they put an icon, cursor, or other target on the screen, they have added an "affordance" to the system. This is a misuse of the concept. The affordance exists independently of what is visible on the screen. Those displays are not affordances: they are visual feedback that advertises the affordances: they are the perceived affordances (Norman, 1999).” And even more clearly in the following: “Far too often I hear graphical designers claim that they have added an affordance to the screen design when they have done nothing of the sort. Usually they mean that some graphical depiction suggests to the user that a certain action is possible. This is not affordance, neither real nor perceived. Honest, it isn't. It is a symbolic communication, one that works only if it follows a convention understood by the user (Norman, 1999)”.

Norman emphasizes the role of cultural conventions in digital environments instead of affordances. In relation, he defined cultural constraints as “constraints that rely upon accepted cultural conventions, even if they do not affect the physical or semantic operation of the device.” Symbols and constraints he categorically stated are not affordances. According to him, “they are examples of the use of a shared and visible conceptual model, appropriate feedback, and shared, cultural conventions (Norman, 1999).”

“Affordances reflect the possible relationships among actors and objects: they are properties of the world... Conventions, on the other hand, are arbitrary, artificial and learned (Norman, 1999).” I disagree with Norman and I would argue against it by differentiating perception and cogitation of the agent instead of differentiating the environment between real and virtual.

Is affordance perceived or does it include features in the environment that require information processing such as symbols or conventions?

Remember the definition presented above that "Affordances, or clues in the environment that indicate possibilities for action, are perceived in a direct, immediate way with no sensory processing. (Learning Theories Knowledgebase, 2010)". That part which I highlighted states a view of affordance founded on perception.

My reading of Donald Norman (1988; 1999) is consistent with this definition. I think that his denial of on-screen items as affordances is that there should be no sensory processing of the features of the product, it should be directly perceived. On-screen items need sensory processing; they are symbols that need to be interpreted in terms of culture, which in turn is prior knowledge. Throughout his book, the “The Design of Everyday Things, 1988”, Norman emphasized the need for things being intuitive to use. One of his examples is that a door must not make you think too much about how to open it during an emergency such as a fire. If it is to be pushed then it should have a visible plate, if it is to be pulled then a handle. Needing to process information like written instructions on an emergency exit door may spell the difference between life and death.

This sounds reasonable enough. But the problem with an affordance that should be perceived; that should not make you think hard is its contradiction with learning. The literature on educational games appears to me to present the reverse, that is, games afford thinking hard, i.e. learning. And learning requires sensory processing or processing of symbols and information.

Although I may be guilty of taking this out of context, J.J. Gibson, seems to take this position as he propose “that the psychology of perceptual learning should be about learning to perceive more of the differentiating qualities of stimuli in the environment rather than acquiring associated responses that cause greater differentiation by enrichment of stimuli as a result of past experience. (Greeno, 1994)”

To make things clearer, let me put up the artificial division between perception and cogitation. Let's say perception be direct acquisition of information from the environment, while cogitation would be the sensory processing of information in relation to prior knowledge such as conventions. Here's an example.

Red color

The word Red

The sound Red (Click to play)

The red colour can be perceived by anyone with normal eyesight, even a baby who does not know how to speak. The printed word red is perceived as a pattern of black and white pixels on a screen within a box that is 12 pixels high (i.e. 12 points font). These pixels would be meaningless to a baby who does not know how to read, it would also be meaningless to an adult who do not know how to read English or the Latin alphabet. Therefore the printed word in a monitor requires additional sensory processing, by interpreting the meaning of the patterns of pixels based on prior knowledge of the alphabet and the English language. The alphabet is made up of symbols that are conventions, i.e. agreed upon by a culture.

The sound of speaking red is a pattern of vibration in the air that stimulates a pattern of vibration in organs in the ear that converts it to signals to the brain. Similarly with the example of images above, even a baby can perceive the sound but may not understand its meaning. In fact we teach babies to associate this sound with the colour by pointing to the colour whenever we say “red.” The meaning of the sound is also mediated by culture and would require extra information processing.

If affordances are perceived and never cogitated then should game based learning abandon the concept? I would not be too hasty, as the concept provides valuable insight on new learning theories like distributed learning and situated learning. What is important about this concept is what J.J. Gibson and E.J. Gibson said that “perceptual learning ... consists of responding to variables of physical stimulation not previously responded to. The notable point about this theory is that learning is always supposed to be a matter of improvement -- of getting closer touch with the environment (as cited in Greeno, 1994).” The idea here is that knowledge does not only exist in the world but also in the environment. And that in order to learn one does not need to be separated from the environment; one does not need to withdraw inside the mind to learn. That separation from the environment would lead to loss of knowledge. The unity and inseparability of man and environment is important.

A solution I propose is to remove the artificial separation between perception and cogitation. In terms of neural networks perception would be concerned with the communication between the sense organs and the neurons directly attached to them, while cogitation would be concerned with the communication between neurons and other neurons in the brain. But all these neurons are connected. When the neurons attached to the eye or the ear fires, other neurons one step removed may also fire. And when neurons separate from the sense organs fire, they may fire neurons attached to our muscles to move them towards acquiring new sensations. When we think, “I want to read something”, we direct our body to get a book and our eye muscles to look at the printed text. When we are awake we continue to get information from our environment, our entire body is continually twitching to balance ourselves in relation to gravity. This is a sense we call proprioception. We don't stop hearing things even if we ignore certain sounds and so on. Perception and cogitation would be a seamless process.

It would therefore make no difference to the individual whether the environment is real or digital. They will both fire the neurons attached to the sense organs and the neurons one step away from these organs. The differentiation is not with the environment but with the ability of the perceiver. In the relational definition of affordance as long as an affordable action is allowed by the environment (real or virtual) in relation to the abilities of the agent then there is affordance.

Recently Norman coined a more inclusive term that includes on-screen items deliberately created by the designer. He replaced the term affordance with “social signifier” (2008). He defined a “signifier" as “some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully. Signifiers signify critical information, even if the signifier itself is an accidental by-product of the world (Norman, 2008).” This may prove to be a more relevant idea but since it's still too recent I will leave it to future work to deliberate.

Pedagogical affordances

This section continues the issue of perception or cogitation of affordances. Zheng mentions "instructional affordances (2006, p. 14)". Squire equated "pedagogical potentials" of using games with affordances (2004). Foster and Mishra used the term "pedagogical affordances (2009, p.33)" in the following context, "Research in game-based learning should connect claims to genres, rather than discuss games as if all games afford the same learning and skills development to disciplinary knowledge/subject matter knowledge (Foster & Mishra, 2009, p. 45).

These terms are used without in depth discussion. I think they diverge from the perceptual meaning of affordances. Digital toys affording learning is far more complex than flat surfaces affording sitting. The latter is the example given by Gibson (1986).

The concepts of digital toys and learning may require sensory processing and falls in the realm of cogitation not perception. For example Zheng said the affordances of chat channel (in a MUVE) “provided non-native English speakers (NNES) opportunities to perceive the language use and act immediately or later on (2006). The chat facility of the MUVE may afford online exchange of written messages synchronously but the recognition of a chat box is culturally defined. Usually it can be mistaken for any input text box. Assuming then that this is as close to perception as we can get, e.g. text box affords typing in text for people who has the ability to read and type. And that it is recognized as a chat application in a game. There is still no link to learning here. We need to go closer to the idea of cogitation, wherein the chat box is known to be useful for learning, rather than perceived to be useful for learning. In order to know it is useful for learning, one has to have prior knowledge of its use in learning. Or one can be told by someone else who had that experience like the teacher. There is mediation, and this is the only way that we can claim that in-game chat affords collaborative learning. The chat facility by itself cannot tell us that, in the same way that a door tells us that we can open it by simply looking at it. As has been discussed in the previous section, actions made possible by affordances seems automatic; a product of evolution rather than learning. Design of affordances emphasizes immediate understanding based on perceived properties of the object. Learning objects on the other hand appears to emphasize prolonged and sustained processing and linking of patterns in the human mind. It looks as if affordance theory and learning are incompatible.

Pedagogical affordance may be illustrated through online assessment. One of the most common online tests is the multiple-choice test. For example is the following item:

The independence of the Philippines was declared by Emilio Aguinaldo on:

a. July 4, 1946
b. October 14, 1943
c. June 12, 1898
d. August 22, 1896

This test item affords an examinee to display his/her knowledge of a fact in Philippine history, in a cognitivist's sense. It's an exercise on memory retrieval of a date. The probable answers are constrained by the choices and clues in the stem. But the action of selecting the right answer depends on the ability of the examinee. If he/she read the history of the Philippines or is a Filipino who had experienced the Independence Day celebrations this would be very easy. But then it also depends on whether he/she can read at all, or if he/she can read English. It may also depend on the absence of any brain abnormality that prevents him/her from retrieving information from long term memory (again in a cognitivist's sense). It also depends on whether the keyboard, the network connection, and the software work.

Anyone who can't read English, is not a Filipino, had not read the history of the Philippines, can't remember dates, and has malfunction computer hardware and/or software cannot answer this question by himself/herself. The only affordance in this situation is the press-ability of the keyboard. Everything else is culturally determined and taking Norman's original perspective on the matter will not be affordances. Therefore there is a need to look at affordances in a different perspective. A perspective that will allow the use of the concepts “pedagogical affordances” and virtual environments.

My interpretation of affordance: affordable actions

I prefer to tentatively use the term affordable actions instead of affordances. This follows the characteristic linguistic construct used by Gibson to refer to affordances, namely (verb phrase)-able (Scarantino, 2002, p. 4) e.g. climb-on-able, fall-off-able, and sit-on-able (Gibson, 1986, p. 128). The reason I'm introducing another term is that I do not want to muddle the concept affordances any further especially due to the fact that I am outside the circle of ecological psychologist debating its meaning. Affordable here means--that can be afforded, or something made available or allowed; and not in the limited sense of finances. I know that this may be confusing but I could not think of a better term.

Affordable actions are relations (see Chemero, 2003) between patterns in the environment and patterns in the behaviour of agents.

The following assumptions are held with respect to this definition.

I assume that the patterns in the environment include digital or on-screen environments aside from real life environments.
I assume that the patterns in the behaviour of agents are directly related to their neuronal network patterns, and indirectly related to their conceptual network patterns.
Finally I assume that abilities or patterns in behaviour include those manifested as embodied behaviour of avatars.

The definition could then be applied to the design of educational video games such that we can say affordable learning actions are relations between features of the digital toy and abilities of the learners.

Typing as an example

Donald Norman mentioned this research example of the knowledge of typist: “One of my graduate students found that when professional typists were given caps for typewriter keys, they could not arrange them in the proper configuration. American students dial telephones properly, and all those typists could type rapidly and accurately. Why the apparent discrepancy between the precision of behaviour and the imprecision of knowledge? Because not all of the knowledge required for precise behaviour has to be in the head. It can be distributed--partly in the head, partly in the world and partly in the constraints of the world (Norman, 1988, p.54).”

I would agree with Norman on the idea that knowledge can reside in the world but I think the typist knowledge problem only makes sense in terms of knowledge being patterns. I also think there is a flaw in the research method. What is remembered are proprioceptive rather than visual patterns. The visual information is left in the environment for people who had yet to strengthen the proprioceptive connections in the neuronal network. This is a case of apples and oranges; the researcher is testing for one pattern rather than another.

I feel that a network-based interpretation of learning using the concept of affordable actions can explain the problem of the researcher much better than above. But let’s use a keyboard rather than typewriter keys, and imagine that we can pull out keys from it. By pulling out the keys we can rearrange them.

In the case of the keyboard the physical arrangement of the keys, their order, layout and distances composes a pattern. The keys' mappings with the software are a pattern. These patterns can be considered knowledge in the world.

The human typist knows what a keyboard is. The human who can touch type has the knowledge i.e. patterns of touch and patters of proprioception. The typist can remember the feel of the bumps in F and J, and this tells him/her to place his/her index fingers in the proper locations on the keyboard. Aside from this the touch typists can remember the distances of stretching and bending that the fingers must perform in order to reach particular keys. This is proprioception, “the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. (Proprioception in Wikipedia, 2010)"

The pattern of stretching and bending fingers produce pixels on the monitor is remembered by the body. The connection between the fingers on the appropriate keyboard is remembered. But the touch typists cannot remember the sequence of letters if given keys pulled out of the keyboard. Why? Because touch typists by training are not allowed to look at the keyboard, that is done by novices not experts. They had been trained to weaken the connection between the eye (and therefore the neurons that are associated to images) and the keyboard. The eye is used to see the images on the monitor as feedback for the proprioceptive senses instead. Their ability to remember visual patterns on the keyboard are deliberately weakened.

Did the researcher ask the typist to close their eyes and try to imagine what letter appears in an imaginary paper when they bend a particular finger in such a way? Perhaps if he did, the typists would have better success but still not fast enough.

This is very interesting when we consider that the proprioceptive pattern in the brain, and the patterns of pixels associated with each finger bending/stretching is specifically tied to a particular pattern on the keyboard. If you change a QWERTY to a DVORAK keyboard the patterns in the brain fails. Each bending/stretching of the finger produces a wrong image on the monitor as compared with what is remembered. This time the typist needs to look and relearn the new keyboard.

If you change the distances of the keys such that the fingers have to stretch beyond what is remembered then there is bound to be failure of expertise i.e. more errors in typing and a need to look again at the keyboard. In fact transfer of knowledge from typewriter keyboard to computer keyboard is not perfect. I trained in touch typing on a typewriter, and I tend to hit the spacebar twice after a period. This is deemed erroneous by word processors.

Instead of keeping a conceptual model of the keyboard in the brain my contention is that the typists only keeps in the brain the patterns of the finger muscles bending and stretching, tactile sense of two bumps on keys, and the feedback from the monitor in the form of light patterns due to pixel patterns. This illustrates the relation between knowledge (patterns) in the world and knowledge (patterns) in our heads. Therefore the specific type of keyboard affords the action of touch typing by people with specific abilities. This goes hand in hand, without the other there is no affordable action of touch typing.

Let me close with a final quote from Donald Norman, “As we have seen, knowledge in the world, external knowledge can be very valuable. But it, too, has drawbacks. For one it is available only if you are there, in the appropriate situation. When you are somewhere else, or if the world has changed meanwhile, the knowledge is gone. The critical memory aids provided by the external information are absent, and so the task or item may not be remembered. A folk saying captures this situation well: "Out of sight, out of mind." (Norman, 1988, p. 72).

References:

Affordance. (2010, February 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 06:57, March 6, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Affordance&oldid=346115474.

Chemero, A. (2003). An outline of a theory of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181-195.

Foster, A. N., & Mishra, P. (2009). Games, claims, genres, and learning. In R.E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (pp. 33-50). Hershey: Information Science Reference.

Gibson, J.J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. USA: Taylor & Francis.

Greeno, J.G. (1994). Gibson's affordances. Psychological Review, 101(2), 336-342.

Norman, D.A. (1988). The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday.

Norman, D.A. (1999). Affordance, conventions, and design [Electronic version]. Interactions, pp. 38-43. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html.

Norman, D.A. (2008). Signifiers, not affordances. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://jnd.org/dn.mss/signifiers_not_affordances.html.

Proprioception. (2010, April 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:49, May 10, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proprioception&oldid=354807482.

Scarantino, A. M. (2002) Affordances explained. In [2002] Philosophy of Science Assoc. 18th Biennial Mtg - PSA 2002: Contributed Papers (Milwaukee, WI; 2002): PSA 2002 Contributed Papers. Retrieved March 18, 2010, from http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001104/02/Affordances_Explained_Final_Version_May_2003.doc.

Squire, K.D. (2004). Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Retrieved January 22, from http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html.

Young, M. (2001). An ecological psychology of instructional design: Learning and thinking by perceiving-acting systems. In D.H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (pp. 169-177). The Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://www.aect.org/edtech/ed1/07.pdf.

Learning Theories Knowledgebase (2010, February). Affordance Theory (Gibson) at Learning-Theories.com. Retrieved February 1st, 2010 from http://www.learning-theories.com/affordance-theory-gibson.html.

Zheng, D. (2006). Affordances of 3D virtual environments for English language learning: An ecological psychological analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut. Retrieved April 27, 2010, from https://www.msu.edu/~zhengdo/files/DZhengTOC.pdf.

Real world Philippine terrain in OpenSim

2010-07-17T14:57:00.001+08:00

Here is a video of my test of a 64 region Philippine terrain in OpenSim. The terrain data is from GIS data. Rezzing is slow because it was ran on a single core desktop PC. I'll post the method l used to convert GIS data to OpenSim terrain.

This is a part of my master's project for distance education.

On George Siemens' book, Knowing Knowledge (2006)

2010-07-12T10:24:00.004+08:00

I've finally finished reading George Siemens' Knowing Knowledge (2006). I can't count the number of times I tried to read this book since I joined the CCK08 course, only to stop after the first few pages. Two things bug me about the book, the crazy typography and the graphics that reminds me of 1950's magazine graphics. My initial impression was that this book was about training in corporations. I was wrong.

This is my reading of Siemens work. In it he provided an analysis of the nature of knowledge in the light of the digital age. He then presents connectivism as learning theory that responds to the issues raised by that analysis. And in the final chapters he proposed approaches to implementing connectivism in organizations. This summary does not do justice to the work, you'll have to read it yourself :-).

It affirmed a lot of what I understood about connectivism and added a few more pragmatic stuff. Although I would have wanted an elaboration of the second domain of the AESI implementation i.e. Network and Ecology. Perhaps a case study of the implementation would have been instructive, especially in distance education. The tools of analysis in domain 1 would also need a manual of sorts. I also wonder how much had changed in Siemens' views since 2006?

All in all it is insightful. It's one of those books that feels like opening windows in a stuffy classroom in order to let the cool breeze and some sunshine in. I highly recommend this book to every educator.

P.S. I wished I could give a better review but I'm still reflecting on a lot of what was said in the book. A free copy of the book is available at http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf. George Siemens released it for free under a Creative Commons license. Unfortunately http://www.knowingknowledge.com/ appears to have been abandoned. I don't know what flavor of the CC license it is released in. You can also buy a copy of the book at http://www.amazon.ca/Knowing-Knowledge-George-Siemens/dp/1430302305.

A very brief visit to the Chibo Community Connectivism Reading Room

2010-05-10T09:34:00.000+08:00

I'm working on a project for my masters degree in distance education, and I'm exploring the use of OpenSim as a central node in a history course. I never participated in the Connectivism Cohort in Second Life facilitated by Fleep Tuque so I thought I'd visit the Connectivism Reading Room to get some ideas.

Here I am in this very brief visit. It was quite homey (read cozy) despite the fact that no one was there.

Connectivism and axon guidance

2010-04-23T09:24:00.002+08:00

After watching this video on neurite outgrowth from garlandscience, I cannot help but think that graphs are too clean and neutral as a visualizing tool for connectivist learning.

What I came to learn about growth cones and axon guidance is that first, axons has a synaptic target. It means that they select what they connect to. They don't just randomly connect to whatever neuron is nearby.

But then how do they establish a target in the first place? The axon guidance article in Wikipedia states that they "'sniff out' the extracellular environment for signals that instruct the axon which direction to grow" and that there are specific molecules in the extracellular environment that repel or attract the axon growth.

This doesn't answer my question. It just says that the axon moves left or right etc. given some mollecules in the environment. But the articles are silent in how the environment in the brain is regulated, that is, what increases a particular repulsive molecule in a certain area and an attractive molecule in another. The lab experiments seem to be injecting these molecules in vitro rather than observing their production in their natural setting.

In connectivist learning, the role of a curator or someone who can guide another person towards a node/actor/vector is important. It filters the environment, thereby playing the role of the unknown agent that produces repulsive and attractive cues. A person may recommend a website as a resource for a particular research or dissuade others from reading another website.

An interesting idea to me is the fact that human beings can set targets or goals, and can change those as they sniff the environment. Can neurons do the same, can they set themselves to targetting a another neuron that has a specific amount of molecules or other attributes? The neurons that have outgrowths that connect to cells in the eyes, nose, ears etc. seems to have predetermined targets. How do we separate this kind of connection with connection due to learning in the brain in relation to an analogy for the social and conceptual mode in connectivism?

OpenSim as a Time Machine

2010-02-22T10:52:00.000+08:00

my avatar stading before a brave new virtual world

I've managed to run a local OpenSim server and client in Ubuntu AMD64 Karmic. OpenSim is a 3d application server that can be used to create a virtual environment just like Second Life. The client applications I was able to run include the Open Metaverse (OMV) viewer and the Hippo OpenSim viewer. The OMV viewer works better for me because it has a native amd64 package.

OMV can be installed in Ubuntu by adding the following to the repositories list then using synaptic to install omvviewer-x-xx.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

I'm planning to develop islands of periods in Philippine History which students can explore. Thus they can travel in time as represented by virtual spaces. If Freeciv can be used to study the world scale concepts of history, OpenSim can be used to look at history from an individual's perspective. Freeciv may be for teaching the longue durée while OpenSim for l'histoire événementielle.

Game based learning

2010-02-20T19:59:00.005+08:00

I've been reading Kurt Squire's (2004) dissertation Replaying history: Learning World History through Playing Civilization III and he has convinced me of the value of using games in teaching history. His work should be required reading for history teachers today.

Before reading Squire's work almost all game-based learning (GBL) literature I've read applies to science and mathematics teaching. His research imho points history teachers in the right direction. I found the case reports engaging, and the treatment of learning with game play clear. In other articles on GBL the learning is lost in the discussion of game design and technology.

The only thing wanting for me in his study is that it only deals with face-to-face education and not distance teaching.

I also went back to playing Freeciv, an opensource game compatible with Civilization 1 and 2. I've spent hours of game play in order to understand Squire's dissertation and I can personally confirm how engaging and useful it is for teaching conceptual history. In face-to-face teaching I use to breakdown the analysis of events in terms of the four aspects: social, political, economic, and cultural. But students do not seem to get their interrelation no matter how much emphasis I give it in my discussion and requirements. I think playing Freeciv will remediate this misunderstanding in students.

AI vs. AI naval battle in Freeciv

In general I think this is a landmark work in history teaching, and it also opened an entirely new field of pedagogy for me. I've never realized how advance and numerous GBL literature is now.

More on this later on as I am ravenously digesting GBL books and articles.

In loco parentis & distance education

2010-01-02T09:31:00.000+08:00

There was a time when education was believed to have its roots from the family. The relationship between the institution, its teachers and the students were like parent and child. That is the principle of "in loco parentis" or "in place of a parent". The values of educational institutions were familial.

Today, in higher education in particular, there had been a shift towards rooting those values and that relationship in business. Wherein the student is no longer treated as a child but a customer. Parents do not sell learning services to their children; they do not think of making profit from their children. But businesses do to their customers.

It is in this context that I wish educational institutions will return to the concept of "in loco parentis". But not with regards to its narrow emphasis on policing student's mores. I would rather emphasize the values of parents in relation to how, why, and what they want their children to learn. "In loco parentis" applies to the academic activities as well. And those values can be summed up in terms of giving the best education to their children regardless of cost and sacrifices.

Of course parents cannot teach everything their children want to learn. It is the reason "apprenticeship" had been the second best option but not better than parental guidance. But I believe that in earlier times, the relation between master and apprentice was like parent and child. This appears to be implied even with for instance the relation between Joshua and Moses. When masters (craftsmen, artists, philosophers, prophets etc.) were accessible in villages, candidate apprentices can just walk in and learn what they wish to learn. With industrialization, the masters had disappeared inside the secured walls of factories and research laboratories. The knowledge had been dispersed among so many people involved in the production process that eventually the masters had been diminished if not disappeared all together.

In the suburban community where I live, when one goes out you would not find any artists, craftsmen, or philosophers. You'll find retail stores and malls. Generations after generations had lost an opportunity to learn. And so we go to schools that cannot teach us the knowledge that are locked away in the factories, ateliers, and research laboratories. Schools cannot attain the totality of learning that a culture with learned parents and learned masters can provide, such that one achieve his/her highest potentiality.

Now with technology, I am hoping masters would again be accessible to would be apprentices. But can this be achieved with distance education? Is it really possible to connect to essential expert actors in a social network threaded by the Internet? Are the masters even out there?

Two decades of distance education research

2009-12-31T22:35:00.000+08:00

Zawacki-Richter, Baecker and Vogt recently published a review of distance education research from 2000 to 2008 in IRRODL. Comparing their findings with Berge and Mrozowski's review of 1990-1999 research (2001) struck me that not much has changed in the state of research in distance education.

What worries me more is that the least studied area is cost and benefit. Are distance education institutions going the way of correspondence schools as presented by David Noble in Digital Diploma Mills, Rehearsal for the Revolution? How can we refute or support his arguments if there is not enough research?

References:

Berge, Z.L., & Mrozowski, S. (2001). Review of research in distance education, 1990-99. The American Journal of Distance Education 15(3), pp. 5-9. Full text available in Practitioner Research and Evaluation Skills Training (PREST) A1 module reading resources, http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/A1%20resources.pdf.

Noble, D.F. (1999). Digital diploma mills, part IV. Rehearsal for the Revolution. Retrieved December 31, 2009, from http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl/ddm4.html.

Zawacki-Richter, O., Baecker, E., &; Vogt, S. (2009). Review of distance education research (2000 to 2008): Analysis of research areas, methods, and authorship patterns. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 10(6). Retrieved December 31, 2009, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/741/1433

On PLE and walled gardens

2009-12-21T07:17:00.000+08:00

Just like many of the terms in distance education (DE), I've come across the term Personal Learning Environment (PLE) a year or two ago. But I did not get it. I thought it was some kind of software that would glue together free services like Google tools and social software. My DE thinking was still dominated by the Learning Management System.

It was only this year after retaking Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (CCK09) that I think I get it. My understanding is not merely one that is logical but actually explains a subjective experience I had with one of the online courses I was taking in my Masters of Distance Education. The previous semester after I attended Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (CCK08) I had a course on Multimedia Educational Materials for DE. Both online courses encouraged the creation of the student's PLE. That was the first time I've attended such courses; online courses not centered in an LMS. I found them to be exhilarating, overwhelming and at times exasperating. The following semester, the courses I've attended returned to the LMS, the walled garden learning environment. I could not explain it, but I felt uncomfortable with a learning environment that I had been attending for the past three years. It appeared bland compared to the PLE. I didn't even use the word PLE, and I could not explain why I was feeling bored and limited with the LMS centered course.

It's like the feeling you get when you have an older and slower computer. As long as you have not used the newer and faster computers you don't really notice the speed difference. But when you touch the newer computer, you find it difficult to work with the older computer. You can't ignore the speed difference, and it irritates you. You just can't go back to the old computer, similarly it was difficult going back to the LMS centered course. Could it just have been the novelty. But the fact is I continued creating my blog and other bits outside the course, even if they were not going to be evaluated. I probably did half of my thinking aloud outside the course, in the parts of my PLE beyond the teachers' bounded learning environment.

I was recently reading Theo Hug and Norm Friesen's Outline of a Microlearning Agenda (2009), and they spoke of "technologically emancipated" education (Fiedler and Kieslinger as cited in Hug & Friesen). That's what I feel at this moment about PLEs, they are technologically emancipating. But at the same time I can't help but think that from the learner's perspective there could be "technologically emaciating" education as well.

Reference

Hug, T., & Friesen, N. (2009, September). Outline of a Microlearning Agenda. In eLearning Papers, 16. Retrieved December 13, 2009, from http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media20252.pdf.

Trying to create a PLE in Tagalog

2009-12-21T07:11:00.001+08:00

I've been a bit quiet lately in this blog and I also failed to finish CCK09... again. I only participated up to the 3rd forum in CCK08 and in CCK09, I only managed up to the 5th forum (I think). It's because my mind wandered towards how to experience and communicate Connectivism in Tagalog.

I'm bilingual. I speak Tagalog and English. Tagalog is my first language, my language at home and in my community. English is a language I use at work, at school, in business and in communicating online with an international English speaking community. I cannot learn anything if it is only in one of these two languages. For me to learn something there should be parallel subnetworks of new knowledge in my brain, otherwise I will forget it. I have to translate in order to learn.

So what I've been doing lately is developing my Tagalog PLE at http://ugnay.blogspot.com. The Tagalog word "ugnay" means connection. Hopefully I would be able to share what I've learned about distance education, and connectivism with Tagalog speakers.

Training contributors to free software projects

2009-11-04T10:41:00.002+08:00

With the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala a few days ago, I think a lot of great software are being abandoned because there are not enough developers in the upstream or not enough packagers. This is the case with CinePaint which is an HDR image editor and an industry standard in film editing. eXe, a scorm authoring software appear to be heading in the same direction. If only newbies, mostly occasional bug hunters could be trained to become developers or packagers.

Moodle may be on the right track with courses such as Introduction to Moodle Programming. I wonder if other projects are looking at the possibility of offering free training for eager users to be contributor-developers in free software.

Dana Boyd's advice on choosing the right grad school

2009-10-30T17:09:00.002+08:00

I like what Dana Boyd said about choosing a graduate school. She said NOT to choose the best but the place that will "allow you to explore the questions you're interested in in a way that works best for you." I also think she correctly pointed out the importance of an advisor in a graduate students success. For the full artilcle read: http://www.danah.org/GradSchoolAdvice.html

Funny but true PHD comics (also applies to Masters)

2009-10-30T17:05:00.002+08:00

He-he-he. To lighten the depression from post-graduate burn out. PhD Comics.

Doing online research with tomfox for tomboy notes

2009-10-30T09:40:00.002+08:00

I always find it a drag to have to type in references for a web page while doing research over the Internet. Here's a tool that will make web page citation easier. Harry Coal's Tomfox for Firefox. After installing the extension simply highlight a text (an interesting quote, author's name, title, citation, etc.); right click, and select "Create Tomboy Note". It will create a note in tomboy notes in a notebook called Snippets. It will also add the url of the web page.

Doug Englebart's eerie demo of the mouse in 1968

2009-10-24T09:49:00.002+08:00

While watching Doug Englebart's demonstration of the mouse in 1968 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFRSBzn3vgw I can't help get a feeling of chill, the same one when I saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon.

It also corrected my belief about "new" technology that I take for granted now, like the mouse. I was not even born when the mouse and graphical text editing was already fully functional! It took 20+ years before that technology reached our home here in the Philippines. It's a bit humbling.

CCK09: Wiki syllabi, PLE and Connectivism

2009-10-10T20:07:00.003+08:00

George Magoulas and Sherry Chen defined learner control as "an alternative procedure for accommodating instruction to the learners' individual differences. Learners are allowed to take varying levels of initiative and direct their own learning experience. Learner control can be considered as the degree to which individuals control the path, pace, and/or content, approach of instruction. (2006, p. 358)"

Greater learner control appears to be one of the boon of Personal Learning Environments. While I was studying sequencing and learner control in course pages/syllabi I have noticed that CCK08/CCK09 is unique in that it used a wiki for its syllabus. Technologically wikis afford learner control as we can see from Wikipedia. The use of a wiki syllabus by CCK08/CCK09 appears to be an invitation to learners to participate in planning the path, pace and content of the course. But looking at the syllabus it will be seen that it does not display the collaborative pattern of a Wikipedia page. It appears to me to be the most stable node of the CCK08/CCK09 course network.

Its content and sequencing had been scaffolded in the topic/unit level. Only the content in the topic/unit grow within the syllabus. The timing/pacing is also predetermined and the course does not divert from it. The weekly timing is also propagated in the Moodle forums. E.g. some participants may be dying to hear about how connectivism can be used in teaching, but they have to wait for a few more weeks. In this sense CCK08/CCK09 is not so different from other courses that are guided by different learning theories. Sequence, content, and timing are predetermined by the instructor.

Assuming that the wiki syllabus is open to the participants, why do we not see a lot of learner contributions in it? Would novices (who are the majority of students) even dare to touch the wiki? Would K-12 and under students also avoid editing a syllabus even if it is an open wiki?

The other question is that: what if the syllabus was even more unstable, like an etherpad page? How would it affect the course itself? Would participants end in an edit war of the syllabus without anything being discussed at all? If a lot of people take part in making the rules of the course in terms of the syllabus, when would it achieved enough quiescence so as to start the course. Or will there be endless branching, aborting, and restarting of topics?

Finally, how much learner control in a course does connectivism allow? Does it allow for changes in the syllabus? Up to what and when?

It would really be very interesting to study the effects of an emergent curriculum that is subject to full learner control; on learner performance.

Reference

Magoulas, G.D., & Chen, S.Y. (2006). Advances in web-based education: Personalized learning environments. Hershey: Information Science.

CCK09: There's too much salt in my conceptual network

2009-09-30T04:00:00.002+08:00

I think there are two self-organizing learning networks. One is the neural network and the other is the bit network. The human and the computer. The beauty of connectivism is its explanation of how these two networks connect such that two humans can share neural networks.

Unfortunately humans do not directly connect neurons, nor do we connect neurons to bits. Our communication with other humans and with computers is mediated by language. And imho language is an arbitrary system of symbols i.e. words, gestures, voice, and images.

It is (unfortunate that) these symbols which make up our conceptual network. Even if one where to deny a symbolic system in connectivism, he/she would still be forced to use language to deny that. I think it would be more practical to admit the limitations of our languages and try to approximate the "if" neurons of one person can directly communicate with the neurons of another.

What had bothered me about the current state of connectivist explanation of concepts is the selection of what nodes should represent. In the neural level it is explicit. In the social level it is natural to identify an actor as the node. The human is after all a world in himself/herself. But in the conceptual level, made up of words, it is not so clear. I think a lot of what is represented as nodes should be represented as ego networks or component networks.

This could be illustrated in Chemistry. If we consider salt for instance. Salt is not represented as a node but a network of basically Sodium and Chlorine, connected by bonds (please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not a chemist). I think we misrepresent a lot of concepts like salt as nodes in our conceptual layers, and have not gotten around to identifying the basic elements of a learning conceptual network that are simple enough to have no meaning when standing by themselves. Resulting in a salty network.

Stopmotion animation with a webcam in UbuntuStudio

2009-09-06T21:16:00.003+08:00

This educational tool is probably for under K-6 education. I still can't think of an example for secondary and higher ed students.

The Stopmotion software for stop motion animation is included in the distribution of UbuntuStudio. The demo here was done with UbuntuStudio 8.04 based on Intrepid.

I used an A4Tech web cam which is v4l2. Stopmotion has a problem with these kind of web cameras so you'll need to follow Aearenda's solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=931208 . I do hope they've already solved this in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.

Create an mplayer video import device in Stopmotion

Start Stopmotion and in the menu find settings->configure stopmotion or ctrl-P.

Click add button.

Resize the dialog box to see the start deamon & stop deamon text boxes.

Click video import tab.

In the start deamon text box enter the following (change the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder with your preference):

~/RENDER/stopmotion/startmplayer $VIDEODEVICE $IMAGEFILE 2 0.25s .tempjpgs &

In the stop deamon text box enter this code:

killall startmplayer && killall mplayer

Download my startmplayer file from: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zm2ytmnqa2j/startmplayer.zip.

Extract this startmplayer file in the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder, you can change this folder.

Then follow this demo:

Finished product (a bit crude):

Symbolic versus Connectionist Simulation

2009-09-05T10:49:00.002+08:00

While happily trying to learn Soar due to my quest for my own simulated student, I came across Allen Newell's statement that:

"The final risk [to unified theories of cognition] is the rising tide of connectionism, which is showing signs of sweeping over all cognitive science of the moment. The excitement is palpable--we are all hot on the trail of whether neuroscience and th cognitive world can finally be brought together. That is indeed an exciting prospect. But my message relates to symbolic architectures and all the other good things that connectionism sees as the conceptual frame to overthrow. So the final risk is that my timing is terrible. John Anderson had it right when he wrote his book on the architecture of human cognition for publication in 1983. It is too late now. (1994)"

My heart sank when I realized I wasn't paying attention to the issue of symbolic cognitive science and connectionist cognitive science. The fact is that connectivism appear to be siding with connectionist. And here I am fiddling with a symbolic cognitive architecture, Soar. I had to look for a connectivist i.e. neural network simulation tool, and found emergent. The question is whether emergent can be used to build a simulated student. It looks so daunting, and appears to be rooted in computational simulations.

Reference:

Newell, A. (1994). Unified theories of cognition. USA: Harvard University.

Paul Rosenbloom explains SOAR

2009-08-28T19:08:00.002+08:00

If you can ignore the trial version text overlayed in this video, it is a good intro to SOAR.

And another video where John Laird talks about Soar's extensions e.g. declarative memory, emotions, and reinforcement learning.

Open Educational Tools

First International Conference on Open and Distance e-Learning

Suzanne Darrow's Connectivism Learning Theory: Instructional Tools for College Courses

Project Report: Exploratory Approaches to the Design and Development of a Game for a Distance Education Course in Philippine History

Appending SNAPP graphml files in Gephi

Workflow of the merger and anonymization of the CCK09 forum datasets

Building the orientation area of my Philippine History game project

Ego networks as a measure of performance in a forum

Gephi has improved a lot

Would an online forum network survive the absence of a facilitator?

Comparison of CCK09 and CCK08 stats

Basic statistics on CCK09

VNA open data file for all CCK09 forums released

cck09 vna graph with tie strength enabled

VNA open data file for CCK09 introductions forum released

VNA open data file for CCK09 General Discussion forum released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 11 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 10 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 9 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 8 release

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 7 released

Lost ties in CCK08 forum 1

Limitations of the data sets for CCK09 forums in this blog

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 6 released

VNA data file for CCK09 forum 5 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 4 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 3 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 2 released

VNA open data file for CCK09 forum 1 released

CCK09 forum one graph

MUD and MUSH integration wish

﻿Defining Game

Lessons from Adventure Quest Worlds

On Interactions with the Community

On Game Content-Subject Matter Content Interactions

On Learner-Game Content-Learner (Peer) Interactions

On Teacher-Game Content-Learner Interactions

On Learner-Game Content Interactions

On the Forms of Interaction in Distance Education and Educational Games

Affordance and educational games

Real world Philippine terrain in OpenSim

On George Siemens' book, Knowing Knowledge (2006)

A very brief visit to the Chibo Community Connectivism Reading Room

Connectivism and axon guidance

OpenSim as a Time Machine

Game based learning

In loco parentis & distance education

Two decades of distance education research

On PLE and walled gardens

Trying to create a PLE in Tagalog

Training contributors to free software projects

Dana Boyd's advice on choosing the right grad school

Funny but true PHD comics (also applies to Masters)

Doing online research with tomfox for tomboy notes

Doug Englebart's eerie demo of the mouse in 1968

CCK09: Wiki syllabi, PLE and Connectivism

CCK09: There's too much salt in my conceptual network

Stopmotion animation with a webcam in UbuntuStudio

Symbolic versus Connectionist Simulation

Paul Rosenbloom explains SOAR

Defining Game