I’m spending much of this month working out the process for a game I want to include in my portfolio for grad school applications, and it’s causing me to do way too much thinking about this site and how I want to grow it over the next year.
Specifically, I got to thinking more about the specific structure of the tutorials and quests I want to develop for the site. You see, for the site to successfully accomplish my objective, it will have to be able to complete the whole teach-assess-reteach-reassess cycle on its own, without the benefit of human intuition. I’m not into artificial intelligence, but I think I don’t have to be to make it all work on a superficial level.
You see, I’ve been reconnecting with video games (oh, how I have desperately missed them!), and I’m learning something very important. Teach-assess-reteach-reassess isn’t something that takes place only in a classroom. In fact, it’s something of how nonformal and informal learning work. You pick up a skill in a game. You then apply said skill. After being killed repeatedly because you can’t get the hang out of said skill, you find the tutorial area of the game to practice the skill again, or you find a resource to explain the skill more clearly. Then you go back to the game and correctly use the skill.
It makes thinking about both my game and the site redesign a bit more easier to plan out.
Posted by Rebecca as Experiential Learning, Games at 7:54 AM EST
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I think this is something I probably keep revisiting, but I think it’s fairly interesting, especially in light of shifts slowly coming about in education.
When I was taking my oral comps for grad school, my chair asked me about my views on preserving data when the medium it has been captured on becomes obsolete.
I answered the question from a physical standpoint- you transfer the information onto a newer medium before the old one becomes obsolete. He thought that was a basically good, but incomplete response and kept asking me to consider the question from different points of view. It was hard to try to rethink preserving information in some form other than captured to a recent, relevant medium
The question was even more interesting because my background consisted of education and mythology. I loved sharing myths with people who visited the planetarium and then demonstrating how the myth were an oral tradition, capturing how a particular group of ancient people understood some astronomy concept or designated a constellation.
People have been looking to preserve information for all of time, prehistory and history both. What we’re currently seeing, though, is a desire, not so much to preserve, but to build up and fine-tune information as we work with it and become more familiar with its ins and outs.
In this time of collaborative learning, how do we approach the conservation of information that is constantly changing to reflect the newest knowledge?
Now there’s a question worth debating.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 7:45 AM EST
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As some of you are aware, I’ve been working on turning a plan for a math-based “choose your own adventure”-styled book into a computer game. It started out as a potential component of a portfolio to be included with my applications to grad schools.
It has become an interesting experiment, though. Working on this game is stretching me in ways I really can’t convey. Creating the underlying structure and the puzzles was the easy part. Right now, I’m working through the text, and that’s where the game has suddenly become interesting. I feel like I could teach writing classes based strictly on what I’m learning right now.
When you create a disjointed storyline, you do something very interesting. You have to create text that is capable of mixing and matching with any possible text that comes after it. It makes transitioning more interesting, more challenging. After working for the past year or so with writing students to help them create clear, clean transitions, I’ve already started working through in my head how I would teach someone else to accomplish the writing scheme I’m working with to get this game going.
The challenge is to keep each scene believable, and to make it feel like it genuinely belongs after the previous scene, regardless of which scene brought the player to the scene.
It’s also led me to start rethinking plans that I’ve had for writing my book through a series of tutorials on this site. At one point, I was only going to include articles. Then I was going to attempt a “Problem of the Day”. The current plans call for an article that leads to a set of practice problems that are navigated by entering the answer to a question and then either being sent on to the next problem or back to a reteaching tutorial.
I feel like I have so much trapped in my head at the moment, screaming to get out, but I’ve really become obsessed with creating math tutorials tyo help keep kids away from those dangerous cracks.
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods, Games at 8:28 AM EST
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I’ve probably shared this before, but when I was a nanny, I had a child in my care who hated reading. An avid reader myself, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around this concept and worked with the parents and his teachers to try to get him into reading. We did flash cards for outlaw words. We got him books on topics he liked (his bug book was particularly frightening).This child was also a huge Pokemon fan, one-third of the reason why I couldn’t escape being inundated by a show that completely annoyed me. Every afternoon, he, his younger brother and I would sit down for half an hour and watch Ash and Pikachu pointlessly battle creatures. One day, he excitedly sat down in front of the television. His parents had taped an episode for him, and he really liked the episode. As a result, I’ve seen “Island of the Giant Pokemon” more times than any self-respecting adult ever should.
At first, it really annoyed me. Then I noticed what he was doing. There is a scene in the episode where the Pokemon talk among themselves, planning to go find their humans. To anyone just listening to the episode (as I often do with the cartoons I willingly watch), the conversation was a combination of “pikachu”, “bulbasaur”, “charmander”, “ekans”, and “koffing”. However, someone was very kind. The scene is captioned so the conversation can be understood by those of us who don’t speak Pokemon.
My young charge would sit and read those captions, often pausing the scene so he had time to sound out words. And every time we watched the episode, he would entertain himself by reading the captions again. His baby brother found the whole thing very funny, but I was quite interested. The boy who hated reading was addicted to Pokemon.
It seems to me that I’ve read where other education professionals have noticed this activity with other children as well. I’m thinking that it is worth the effort to turn on captions for a low reader’s favorite shows.
Posted by Rebecca as Experiential Learning, Learning methods at 8:07 AM EST
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I spent some time last week reading this white paper on alternate reality games (PDF), and I suspect I’ll be reading it again before long. It explores several alternate reality games (ARGs) and their effects on the population around them.
It also discussed the development and components of an ARG, and that’s when I found it completely interesting. It has the capacity to be used as a safe training simulation if implemented correctly.
More importantly to me, it gave me some great ideas for the game I’m working on right now for my portfoilo, and it gave me some ideas for revamping this web site into a more interactive educational experience.
Definitely worth the read if you have any interest in games in education or social learning and networking.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:13 AM EST
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I rather like the idea of using an RSS feed to release bits of content in a digestible format. I had at one point considered making that part of the newsletter I still haven’t managed to start up, but the RSS method is a definite idea.
Posted by Rebecca as e-learning, Information Architecture at 8:19 AM EST
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I spent the weekend (Actually, I started during the snow days last week.) curled up with a e-book or two, and one of them was George Siemens’ Knowing Knowledge.
I really liked how the book itself was laid out and presented, because it visually brought home some of the main points of the book.
Most of the information was fairly familiar, but seeing it all compressed into one space helped drive a lot of it home.
My take-aways:
- Knowledge is organization, not structure.
- Somehow or other, this actually inspired a massive tagging project. I’ve never really been much of a tagger because I couldn’t wrap my mind around the whole taxonomy/folksonomy thing. Reading this one line immediately spurred me to reexamine my attitudes and practices regarding tagging.
- Repackaging is the personalization of the knowledge created by others.
- Remixing is hot right now. It has been for months now. I haven’t really explored it much for myself, but I know I need. When the need for remixing or mashing up is described this way, it really illustrates the connectivist role of remixing, and I think it even provides a strong argument for connectivism.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Experiential Learning, Learning methods, Information Architecture at 7:48 AM EST
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I came home from work last night in a nearly blind fury. One of my students tried to get out of doing his work by claiming it didn’t matter if he flunked the math section of the state’s new graduation exam. I didn’t let him off the hook, but after he left, I asked my director about it.
To my great horror, she told me that the governor decided to waive the math section of the test this year because over 60% of the students failed it. Even better, she’s considering waive it for the next three years.
I was furious. I was almost in tears by the time I got home. Rather than immediately start addressing the fact that students can’t pass a test with no fractions on it, students are being told it’s all right to not be good in math. Rather than stepping up math education in this standards-weak, integrated-math-program cursed state, children are being allowed to be left behind. We worry about the reading level of our children, but in the end, it’s the math, science, and technology levels that are going to cost us dearly. Yes, reading literacy is a big part of all of that, but so is math. We’re doing these kids a huge disservice!
And to think, we wonder why math education has become such a problem in this state. Or even in the country.
I suppose the upside is that I will never run out of work as a math tutor capable of teaching algebra, geometry and basic trig.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility at 8:30 AM EST
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