Month: February 2011

After reading Gee (2003) and de Castell and Jenson (2003) this week, I see playing games in a different light. Now, I appreciate the problem solving skills, sense of community, and decision making opportunities that game worlds provide. Last year, I played online games with my students, thinking a “game” would motivate them. These games were primarily for math and grammar practice. I think the games did engage them at the beginning because it was something different but they were surface games that didn’t connect the players to something bigger or allow them to create their own meaning. My students love Club Penguin, Poptropica, and Webkinz. All three games seem to have a culture surrounding them where the games are “talked about, read about, ‘cheated’, fantasized about” as de Castell and Jenson (2003, p. 651) describe. That’s part of the reason why I wanted to see what the hype was all about.

Each game allows you to create an avatar that puts you in a gaming environment where you can choose your own adventure, play mini-games, and talk to other players.

What aspects of the design produce an engagement that feels like immersion?

I felt immersed in Clube Penguin because I was able to participate fully and navigate my penguin through a world composed of various buildings and outdoor activities. There was more exploration opportunity in Poptropica than in the other games. I felt that Poptropica had an addictive quality that would cause me to think about the game when I wasn’t playing (if I was younger). I was a little disappointed that Webkinz didn’t offer the same freedom as the other two. I was able to decorate my own room for my pet but I didn’t feel as connected to other players or able to explore a world around me. However, in order to keep my pet alive, I am suppose to feed it and exercise it everyday which would keep me coming back to the game.

How does design create links with specific narratives?

Poptropica was more game like because I felt like I had a quest even though I wasn’t always sure of what that was. I created my own narrative for Club Penguin as I moved from building to building to play mini-games. Both Poptropica and Club Penguin had other players who would give me information about what to do. I know some people who work for Club Penguin so I know that these are actual employees who are paid to play the game and act as tour guides. The mission in Webkinz is just to keep my pet alive. I was disappointed with Webkinz because it focused a lot on purchasing credits to decorate my room and buy things for my pet which, I thought, encourages materialism.

How does design create links with specific feelings?

Poptropica was the most exciting game because I was on an adventure collecting items and performing activities that would lead me to beat the level or island that I was on. It had a sense of mystery and challenge. Webkinz capitalized on my mothering instincts to keep my pet safe. Any emotion felt on Club Penguin was in response to conversation I had with the other players

How does design create links with specific knowledges, communities, and/or skills

Both Club Penguin and Poptropica provided online communities that enabled “solidarity beyond/outside the game (chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.” (De Castell & Jenson, p.655) I felt like I was producing my own meaning as I directed my avatar throughout these games. On Club Penguin, I felt like a bit of an outsider due to my correct spelling and punctuation use. Gee (2003) mentions this as he describes semiotic domains that have identifiable practices, patterns, and behaviours.

Webkinz could teach young children about how to look after another life form but I think there’s other online environments/activities that do a better job of this.

The mini-games embedded in all three games required a range of simple to complex problem solving skills.

How does design mediate interactivity in this game?

Each game encouraged communication amongst the players usually though a chat function. Club Penguin and Poptropica used other players as guides to help me through the game. Club Penguin was the only game that allowed me to type what I wanted instead of choosing from some standardized message. All three games allowed me to invite other players to compete in a mini game with me.

de Castell, Suzanne, & Jenson, Jennifer. (2003). Serious play. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(6), 649-665.

Gee, J. (2003). Semiotic domains: Is playing video games a “waste of time? Chapter in: What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave.

Web 2.0 applications like blogs, bookmark sites, games, wikis etc. allow a diverse group of participants to collaborate and support each other on different levels. These groups are reshaping the online community. Like a community of practice, it is the activity that brings the participants together who share a common understanding of their goal. Web 2.0’s primary principles of openness and inclusion (Alexander, 2006) appeals to members who innately have a desire to belong to a group. The knowledge that is gained from the Web 2.0 or a community of practice is the result of the collective and not an individual member. Both a community of practice and the Web 2.0 are continually adapting to the actions of its members.

My learning context primarily supports teacher-led instruction with pockets of student centred learning. Inclusion, participation, collaboration, and peer-to-peer sharing are valued. Sadly, I can’t say that “deep learning” is always taking place. I am on a journey of learning how to establish an environment that encourages consistent knowledge building. I am beginning to see how to overcome the obstacles in the system that have prevented deep learning from regularly taking place. Being in the MET program has given me the confidence and understanding to create a more authentic learning environment in my classroom.

One reason why it is important for me to be confident in using 21rst century teaching methods is so that I can defend my practices to parents and other teachers. Another obstacle is creating problems or projects that will motivate my students and meet learning objectives. Time and collaboration with other like minded teachers would help me reorganize my curriculum.

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? Educause Review, 41(2),  32-44

The web 2.0 construct provides us with an interesting way into the question at-hand – What kinds of tools offer the greatest opportunity for leveraging critical design elements towards the goal of designing environments that nurture collective intelligence? As Bryan Alexander points out, the term itself embodies a particular version of the history of the Web – one that makes a strong claim about a paradigmatic shift in how we interact in digital, networked spaces. Educators have taken notice of the social software design features that cluster in the web 2.0 construct, and it is these aspects that deserve our full attention.

A line of reasoning that is very much in synch with the web 2.0 construct, which is taken up substantively by the New London Group, is concerned with the gap between the design of learning spaces in schools versus workplaces. These authors argue that established trends in workplace and organizational learning (that can be attributed to the impacts of globalization, and networked mobilities) which educational designers need to pay attention to, include:  diversity as asset (rather than liability), proliferation of communication channels and related literacies, climate of rapid change and flexibility, teamwork and increased importance of collaborative work skills, multiskilled workers, constant on-the-job learning, hybrid forms of communication with a renewed attention to post-literate forms of “secondary orality” (Ong, 1971).

We are going to look, here, then, at how contemporary, networked media spaces are being designed, explicitly, to promote “collective intelligence” (Levy, 1997), which we will define here as tools that nurture: participation, serious play, a perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…), microcontent authoring and improvement by community members, social networking that is linked with content authoring, and content authoring that has mobility across sites and tools, by mean of tagging, and other forms of annotation.

Participation

Web 2.0 applications are sometimes described as “social software”, highlighting the key role of design features that allow users to add value to a site by means of their active participation, which could take the form of tagging, adding or editing content, commenting, ranking content, linking etc… This functionality has prompted media analysts to consider the ways in which participatory designs contribute to the democratization of knowledge production on the Web. Clay Shirky talks about the transformation of everyday participation in collaborative writing projects, like blogging, as a process of “mass amateurization” that significantly shifts the historically venerated location of experts and the power of established practices of publishing conglomerates

Serious play

In spaces where consumers are also creators, the bar for participation is lowered. Collaborative work environments foster active engagement, with a more egalitarian mode of interaction than is often the case in formal learning spaces. As Bryan Alexander argues, the unit of productive activity in web 2.0 environments is not “the page” or “the finished product”, but rather, “microcontent”, which refers to the typically restricted scope of content generated by participants. And so in Wikipedia, an author can change a single word in an existing article, or on a blog, can post a comment, rather than contributing an entire blog entry. This attribute of contemporary, networked, digital spaces enables meaningful participation to occur before an expert, or polished level of absolute competence is realized.

Perpetual state of tinkering (learning etc…)

In learning environments where content is constantly being altered, one finds a design for the representation of knowledge as “open source”. That is to say, as a shareable resource that is unfinished, and literally available for revision anytime and anywhere that participants can access the site. Brian Lamb’s discussion of wikis highlights the design features of wikis that encourage and support a relationship to knowledge as “persistently beta”.

Microcontent authoring and improvement by community members

Think about the organization of content in a knowledge management system for course design, like Vista. Now think about how content comes into existence in a wiki, like Wikipedia, or indeed, the wiki we are using in this course. Vista is designed to limit the flow of content by means of a silo architecture, where you can move around from place to place, but rather like a traditional museum, you can’t touch anything, or put something of your own on display. Apart from the Forum and the Assessment tools, interactivity in Vista is reduced to button clicking. Whereas in a wiki, with its endlessly editable pages, openness is part of the design for learning, and indeed, for participation itself.

Social networking that is linked with content authoring

Social software applications tend to merge and blur binary distinctions between public and private, owned and shared, open and closed. With participation linked to the creation of content, content becomes linked to aggregates of participants. On a blog, for example, the content includes textual and or graphical material that is topical, as well as links to other sources/sites, and links to other blogs. The linking feature mediates the construction of communities of practice. Sites with mapping capabilities, likeCommunity Walk support collaborative projects by combining Google Map data with a flexible editing tool that allows users to add rich multimedia content directly to specific map locations, including text, images, URL’s etc…

arab and Duffy introduce us to the historical shift in discourses about the design of learning environments from a focus on representational, objective theories of individual learning “by acquisition,” to “situative,” socio-cultural theories that emphasize the relationship between participation in a “community of practice” (CoP), and the provision of opportunities to learn by appropriation.

The impact of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Situated Learning on the ways that educational researchers and community-based practitioners construe the complex relationship between learning and setting has been extraordinary. As Barab and Duffy point out, there is a potentially confusing, apparent similarity between (a) educational theorists who talk about situated learning, and who design learning environments that are intended to help students “do school” more successfully, and (b) educational theorists whose interest is in characterizing how it is that learning occurs as a byproduct of interaction in communities of practice where participation is predicated on opportunities to learn.

A brief elucidation of the main characteristics of the CoP perspective will highlight what is unique about this perspective on learning. Lave and Wenger did not study, or even prioritize, the analysis of school learning, in the development of their theoretical account of CoPs. Rather, Lave (an anthropologist) and Wenger (a teacher) studied relatively bounded communities where people including naval quartermasters, AA members, midwives learned as part and parcel of joint action undertaken within social structures of participation.

For socio-cultural constructivists like Lave and Wenger, then, learning is not most significantly understood in terms of representational states in individual “minds”, but rather, as dialectical social and cultural practices that reflect the sedimented institutional history of particular settings, and involves the “historical production, transformation, and change of persons.” Understood as such, learning is an explicitly collaborative activity that is fundamentally orchestrated for the purpose of engineering social reproduction, as well as innovation.

A CoP orientation to learning is typically attuned to issues of power that shape social interactions in pedagogical settings, and to particular patterns of inclusion and exclusion. As Vygotsky (1997) pointed out,

“Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly and unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adapted particular social patterns, political lines, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests.”

Closely related to the attention to issues of power and social inequities in CoPs, the focus on identity as a significant element in learning represents an important advance in constructivist theories. Thinking about the role of identity as scripted and produced in the course of learning, and as intimately bound up with opportunities for participation, requires us to think about the public character of learning, and the ways in which learning selves are public selves that are tied to particular conditions within which recognition is negotiated. This observation alone clearly tags a CoP analysis of learning environments as one within which any unreservedly optimistic notions about relations between environments, and opportunities for participation and citizenship, would of necessity be tempered by critical perspectives.

For cognitive constructivists, like Bereiter and Scardamalia, “the mind” is most usefully described in terms of knowledge states. Whereas for socio-cultural constructivists, “the mind” is explicated in terms of mediated action, practices, artifacts, social and contextual relations between participants in an activity system.

The most significant historical originary figure in socio-cultural psychology is Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), whose contribution to developmental psychology rivals in importance that of Piaget. Vygotsky created a Marxist psychology that emphasizes the social and cultural genesis of all learning, as well as the explicitly meliorative ideological project that education represents. Three key ideas undergird Vygotsky’s developmental psychology: mediation, internalization, and the zone of proximal development.

For Vygotsky, learning is mediated by cultural tools, including concrete artifacts, as well as symbol systems, like language. Learning, in this view, is social, before it is individualized, and inter-mental, before it reappears as intra-mental activity. As Vygotsky put it,

We can formulate the genetic law of cultural development in the following way… Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an inter-psychological category and then within the individual child as an intra-psychological category… but it goes without saying that internalisation transforms the process itself and changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships. (Vygotsky, 1978)

The “zone of proximal development” is the single most widely-circulating construct from Vygotsky’s psychology in North American English-speaking educational settings. As Vygotsky put it, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is:

“The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers “(Vygotsky, 1978).

The main contribution that the ZPD construct makes to a psychology of learning is to highlight that our performance of any particular skill varies in its actual competence level as a function of the interactive setting, and is highly variable. On this view, then, capacity to benefit from interaction with others, and/or with rich artifacts, doesn’t just add to one’s competencies, but produces shifts in competence. And so what is critical, from an educational perspective, then, is not what the child can do alone, or without access to their computer, but what particular combination of social actors and artifacts produces, collectively, the most significant advance in culturally valued knowledge. One might conclude from this, with Courtney Cazden (1981), that performance precedes competence, and in fact, that one may never “see” competence directly, and that we only ever see performance in educational settings. Think about the significance of this theory for understanding the importance of interaction to learning, of educational technologies to learning, and of setting to assessment.

Bereiter and Scardamalia’s emphasis on knowledge-building, and their insistence on its pedagogical priority, and its importance in the design of computer-supported intentional learning environments represents the hallmark of their unique and significant contribution to educational research. The authors make a clear and compelling distinction between learning and knowledge-building, that is worth thinking about at some length.

Whereas a great deal of school-based activity is oriented towards enhancing “learning,” this accomplishment, while significant, does not promote the production of clear and articulable advances in knowledge, nor does it enact a communal orientation towards the latter as a normative goal. And so it is quite possible to learn to read, but not to engage in reading activities as a means of knowledge transformation. It’s quite possible to learn all the elements in the Periodic Table, and have no interest in why the Table was created in the first instance, or what is its significance in scientific reasoning and research as, itself, a conceptual artifact.

Scardamalia and Bereiter, like Papert, are concerned about the flurry of activities in school that purport to make innovative uses of new media. An analysis of the focus of students’ work in these projects reveals (a) a “recreation of the familiar” (think, students making digital videos that simply reproduce knowledge already assembled elsewhere) and (b) superficial engagements with knowledge (knowledge-telling versus knowledge-transforming).

CSILE (computer supported intentional learning environment) was the authors’ first computer-based learning environment, CSILE, was extensively field-tested and the focus of a great deal of research in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Bereiter and Scardamalia released a commercially available product, Knowledge Forum.

CSILE is a networked computer-based environment that reorients learner activity towards achieving “cognitive objectives” and scaffolds collaborative work so as to support the “restructuring of schools as knowledge-building communities.” Carefully read the description of the cognitive and related social structures of schools that the authors provide (p. 268) and think about how it is that designs for educational activity orient participants towards particular kinds of cognitive objectives.

Scardamalia and Bereiter argue that new knowledge media support initiatives to restructure schools as knowledge-building communities. CSILE was designed in order to leverage particular affordances of networked media. At the heart of CSILE is its communal database. Participants contribute conceptual artifacts to this database that can be linked with the ongoing work of other community members. Cognitive scaffolding is provided by means of the flagging of notes with categories that index the contents in reference to the kind of thinking, or the metacognitive activity, that it represents, such as “My theory…”, or “What I need to know…”.

Lax, Taylor, Wilson-Pauwels, and Scardamalia (2004) discuss the design of Knowledge Forum <http://www.knowledgeforum.com/> , which is Scardamalia and Bereiter’s successor knowledge-building environment to CSILE. Knowledge Forum is widely used in educational (and other) settings internationally. The article we have read for this module outlines significant links between the design of Knowledge Forum, a pedagogical intervention premised on an educational model of knowledge-building, and the use of this technology-supported learning environment by a medical legal visualization class. This article productively outlines concrete relationships between pedagogical notions about how to support knowledge-building, and specific design characteristics that are built-in to Knowledge Forum. It is interesting and stimulating to think about what it is that makes Knowledge Forum explicitly educational in its design, in comparison with other networked technologies that are commonly used to support learning, such as the Web. One of these critical design features is the explicit separation of a representation of knowledge and an epistemic relationship to that knowledge that focuses on the extent to which it consists in a contribution to new knowledge – to innovation in that knowledge community. It is, indeed, rare, for the design of learning environments in schools to include affordances that highlight and scaffold what Scardamalia and her colleagues refer to as “epistemic agency”.

Scardamalia and Bereiter ask educators to look to existing communities of inquiry (e.g., scientific communities) in order to discern what are the relevant structures and practices that are characteristic of organizations that produce and sustain knowledge advances. There are commonalities between the approach to designing productive educational activity, and related uses of technology, suggested by Scardamalia and Bereiter, and “inquiry learning” or “project-based learning.” However the authors argue that the focus on “knowledge-building” is distinctive. The discussion of the relationship between knowledge-building and the important role of publication in scholarly journals that represents a cornerstone of scientific communities helps us to see what might be distinctive about their argument.

Papert’s programming language, LOGO, was developed as a means of providing children with “objects to think with.” Whereas Piaget’s constructivism tended to downplay the formative importance of cultural building blocks on learning, Papert’s “constructionism” places a high value on the pedagogical role of media. This is the substance of Papert’s major contribution to our thinking about how to support children’s learning.

Papert’s use of “constructionism” signals a significant shift from constructivism to include an emphasis on the social and interactive context, or the situatedness, of building valued artifacts within a bounded setting, or a “microworld”. As Papert wrote,

Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word—shares constructivism’s
connotation of learning as “building knowledge structures” irrespective of the
circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially
felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a
public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.
(Papert 1991, p. 1)

Papert emphasizes the multiple ways in which the representation of knowledge in a computer program like LOGO, and its explicit manipulability, render concrete, and therefore accessible, the formal and abstract characteristics of mathematical knowledge, specifically, as well as metacognitive knowledge, more generally.

In the excerpt from Mindstorms that we have read, it is clear that Papert is making an impassioned and cogent argument for an approach to designing educational technologies that is qualitatively distinct from the conventional applications of that historical period – computer-based programmed instruction with a clear and linear lock-step curriculum. In Papert’s microworlds, learners are making things using tools that make abstractions concrete and manipulable. He emphasizes several aspects of the design of microworlds, including:

• Activity that focuses on concrete instantiations of abstract concepts
• Intelligent manipulation of objects
• Talking about thinking in the process of solving problems
• Reflections on thinking in the process of solving problems
• Failure as a normal and intelligent part of problem-solving, that leads to refinement of ideas
• Opportunities to represent ideas in a public forum where they can be explicitly testedPapert’s discussion about how educational institutions take up particular technologies is both insightful, and prophetic.

Papert’s discussion of how computers are typically used in supporting novice writers aptly identifies the problem at-hand, which is that educational uses of media tend to reproduce non-educational relations to tasks that are rich in potential for learning and intellectual growth. And so, for example, immature writers may use computers for writing, but “the computer is seen as a teaching instrument” where teaching writing is reduced to producing superficially correct text.

One of the central theories that underpins contemporary models of education, and related curriculum designs, is “constructivism,” which, to oversimplify, typically refers to the notion that knowledge is not a given, that is “out there”, but represented in the mind, and it is created actively by the knower. Jonassen (1991) talks about constructivism as follows:

Constructivism, founded on Kantian beliefs, claims that reality is constructed by the knower based upon mental activity. Humans are perceivers and interpreters who construct their own reality through engaging in those mental activities…thinking is grounded in perception of physical and social experiences, which can only be comprehended by the mind. What the mind produces are mental models that explain to the knower what he or she has perceived…. We all conceive of the external reality somewhat differently, based on our unique set of experiences with the world and our beliefs about them. (p. 10)

Constructivism is a very important, and multi-faceted set of theories concerning how new knowledge is created, and the status of any understanding of a rationally determined, objective world of knowledge. Constructivism is probably the most prevalent philosophical orientation amongst Western, 21C educators, even if frequently our teaching practices and learning environments are more closely based on behaviorist learning principles, than constructivist ones.

The knowledge building construct is different from the current way we teach and assess in schools because it focuses on the advancement of knowledge built by the collective, not regurgitation of information by the individual. It is different from knowledge construction because the teacher acts as a participant, not an expert who guides or scaffolds the learning for the student. Knowledge building values “a desire to advance understanding rather than to display individual brilliance” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994, p. 8).
A design challenge for knowledge building would be to adapt the process for all ages and groups with high needs. Any program like Knowledge Forum would need to be accessible to these diverse groups but still seen as acceptable for everyone else. In terms of using knowledge building in the classroom, I think curriculum would need to be redesigned because the benefits of knowledge building wouldn’t be as effective if students only got to experience it in one classroom. Assessment would also have to change in order to adequately reflect the unique type of learning that knowledge building allows.

Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994) say that the challenge for educational technology is to use it in a way that it remains student focused. In order to overcome this challenge, they suggest educators need to “ensure that contacts with outside sources grow out of the local knowledge-building discourse and that the obtained information is brought back into that discourse in ways consistent with the goals and plans of the local group.” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994, p. 9) However, I think another challenge would be guiding students to these outside sources who may or may not be available. I would also be concerned that this is a public forum and not all users may post respectful comments.

Another design challenge was that Knowledge Forum started fresh every year so the learners were reinventing knowledge instead of advancing it. However, the “BMC class of 2003 expressed the need to access to the 2002 database to build on previous ideas, to rise above what had been done before with the explicit goal of creating new ways of visually communicating complex medical information” (Lax et al., 2004, p. 6). The class of 2003 used various media to present their findings in innovative formats.

I’ve participated in Bible studies where the members build knowledge share multiple perspectives about a faith based topic. However, Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994) say “In knowledge-building contexts, the focus is on problems rather than on categories of knowledge or on topics.” In the groups I mentioned, we didn’t usually focus on problems but themes. The projects I’ve participated in for the MET program build knowledge, distributed across a diverse group of learners, and is problem based. These projects also include expert feedback (from professors, in this case) which Lax et al. (2004) describe as being a component of Knowledge Forum.

In my educational setting discourse is teacher directed much like the “three-step unit” observed by Scardamalia & Bereiter (1994, p. 7). In order to shift to knowledge building discourse, students would have to be trained not to seek answers me. Parents would have to be briefed on why I wasn’t answering their children’s questions so that they understand I am in fact, doing my job. Students would need access to classroom conversations to allow them to mindfully reflect, participate after school, and give feedback to others. This would allow those who are more timid to share in a non threatening environment. Subject matter would need to be carefully selected in order to motivate students to participate. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994) say “What students find to be significant discourse – the kind they will get truly involved in, struggling for a turn to speak, actually listening to and responding to what others say – will often deal with issues closer to their personal lives than the issues arising from scholarly inquiry” (p. 7).

Specific affordances necessary to support knowledge building would be a central discussion board or forum where students can easily read and post about a certain topic without having to comment on multiple web pages. Participants would need to access a variety of resources to support their knowledge and a database to keep the information. The problem objective would need to be well defined so that everyone was clear on the collective goal.

Environments that ressemble knowledge building which I’ve personally participated in are online help forums, wikis, and google docs.

Lax, L., Taylor, I., Wilson-Pauwels, L., & Scardamalia, M. (2004). Dynamic curriculum design in Biomedical Communications: Integrating a knowledge building approach and a Knowledge Forum learning environment in a medical legal visualization course. The Journal of Biocommunication, 30(1), 1-10.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 265-283.