e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Anybody Out There Attend AERA?

I've always wanted to attend the American Education Research Association's annual meeting but have always either missed it timing wise or just been a little over-awed - have you seen the program? I mean these people are doing sessions until like 8:00 at night!

Part of me will always be an academic at heart though and that part lusts after attending some of these sessions. Look at this little selection I got when I searched the online program for 'games' (I hope these links work):

A Constructionist Approach to Learning Through Designing Games: What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy and Learning
What Do We Know About the Effectiveness of Instructional Strategies in Computer Games?
A Frankenstein Approach to Open Source: The Construction of a 3D Game Engine as Meaningful Educational Process
Cognitive Transfer and the Game of Chess: Representation and Expertise

Now I did read Tony O'Driscoll's very fine rant earlier this month, so I am bit hesitant to put out there that I would really like to attend this academic event - only because Tony goes on at some length about the perils of an Ivory Tower approach which some might conflate with an academic approach - I don't think they are the same thing and I suspect that Tony might agree that there is a difference. To me, I think that I'm more comfortable talking about the 'bunker mentality' of some folks in our industry versus the ivory tower.

Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone who has actually attended AERA...and then I might ask, if the silence is deafening - is it me (i.e. nobody reads this blog) or is it our industry focus - that would lead to a dearth of attendees?

Memory, Reconsolidation and Big Questions...

I am a big fan of big questions. I think that sessions like the Game Design Challenge and its "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" cousin - "The Great ILS Challenge"(scroll down, its #800), force us to ask questions about what we can do. I love the Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month (BQOTM) and think that it has really spurred some insightful discussions that might not have occurred otherwise. I do have to say though that the BQOTM has a big brother out there and it asks REALLY big questions.

The Edge describes it's purpose as "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The main way that Edge gets at these questions is ironically enough, through asking their annual question. You can see the past questions here, and if you doubt the bigness of their questions, past ones have included; What is your dangerous idea?, What's you law?, What's your question? and What now?

So that is a long way to get to this - as I was reading this year's entries, I came across this gem from Joseph Ledoux, neuroscientist and author of The Synaptic Self:

"Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader,  did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what  Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning."

Well that got me thinking.

Two Very Different Views of Publishing (here's a hint...I think one is WAY wrong!)

"I shall be telling this with a sigh   
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—; I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
Robert Frost

The world can be a murky place but sometimes you get two examples side-by-side and their contrast makes a set of differences crystal clear. A post on Danah Boyd's blog Zephoria, pointed out the fact that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning from MIT Press was now up an online.

Part of that series is a book entitled "The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning" edited by the wonderful Katie Salen. The is an edited work and the essays are all by well-known, highly respected authors/researchers/designers. You can order the paper back for $16US  or the hard back for $32US....or...(wait for it)...you can download the whole thing for FREE!!

Later I was perusing my feeds and I noticed that the journal of Dialectical Anthropology had two recent articles in it that I thought would be worth checking out: Creative Social Research: Rethinking Theories and Methods and the Calling of an Ontological Epistemology of Participation and Virtual Speakers, Virtual Audiences: Agency, Audience and Constraint in an Online Chat Community. The punchline that you may have already guessed? Yeah...access to the articles costs...$30US for EACH!! Let me see....a whole book for free or two articles for $60US? Hmmm.....that's tough. Remember that old bit about "If a tree falls and no one is there, does it make a sound?" How about "If you write an article and only the people who review it for publication read it, does it make any difference?"

Honestly, we know that the recording industry and the movie industry (as they specifically relate to the digital world) are evil, close-minded dinosaurs that are stuck in Donner Pass mentality of attempting to eat their own customers as they quickly twirl into irrelevance but come on....shouldn't we expect a bit more from academia?

Back in 1999, Robert Darnton, professor emeritus of history at Princeton and past president of the American Historical Association, wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books entitled "The New Age of the Book." Darnton is also a proponent of e-publishing especially as it relates to acedmia; in that article he asserted that "the best case to be made for e-books concerns scholarly publishing, not in all fields, but in large stretches of the humanities and social sciences where conventional monographs—that is, learned treatises on particular subjects—have become prohibitively expensive to produce. The difficulty is so severe, in fact, that it is transforming the academic landscape." That transformation is not in a positive either in case you were wondering.

Darnton goes on to say;

"Commercial publishers have raised the price of periodicals, especially in the natural sciences, to such a height that they have created havoc in the budgets of research libraries. In order to maintain their collections of periodicals, libraries have cut back drastically in the purchases of monographs. Faced with the decline in orders from libraries, university presses have virtually ceased publishing in the fields for which there is the least demand. And scholars in those fields no longer have an adequate outlet for their research. The crisis concerns the workings of the marketplace, not the value of the scholarship; and it is greatest among those with the greatest need to overcome it—the next generation of academics whose careers depend upon their ability to break into print."

So in an age when we have the Public Library of Science Journals and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and when we have academic journals working with publishers who are pricing their product out of the reach of almost everyone and not to mention the Creative Commons; why then do academics still work with these dinosaur publishers and limit the accessibility of their work to all but a handful? Wake up people! You own the content. Publishing has never been easier. You can still maintain all the rigor of peer-review but take back the content from these people who seek nothing but to profit from your own work.

Take the other path....please
 

Dissertation: The Effective Integration of Digital Games and Learning Content by M.P.J. Habgood

(link)

Just getting into this but it looks promising.

"This thesis provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of game designs that follow a more integrated approach, broadly known as intrinsic integration (Kafai, 2001). This is also often called intrinsic or endogenous fantasy, as it was fantasy elements that were considered key to creating this integration in the early research (Malone, 1981; Malone & Lepper, 1987). However, this thesis proposes an alternative viewpoint that identifies gameplay mechanisms or game mechanics as more critical to effective integration than fantasy. Both formative and
summative evaluations are described which develop and test this new theory
using a prototype mathematics game called Zombie Division. "

Your LMS Is a Control Freak

Tony Karrer points to and expands on a post at Dicole on Horizontal Technologies for Learning. The line I love from the original post is this, "The concept of Learning Management System (LMS) was wrongly named. Better fit for a name would be Teaching Management System or Institution Control System."

Amen. No doubt. In fact I think I blogged something along those lines back in April. My argument extended further though...I think that we should recognized that ISD is a control mechanism...that's not always a bad thing...the brakes on your car could be considered a control mechanism..I think the realization of that just helps us move the discussion along...
 

"Theories and Models Of and For Online Learning" (First Monday)

Abstract: "For many years, discussion of online learning, or e–learning, has been pre–occupied with the practice of teaching online and the debate about whether being online is ‘as good as’ being offline. The authors contributing to this paper see this past as an incubation period for the emergence of new teaching and learning practices. We see changes in teaching and learning emerging from the nexus of a changing landscape of information and communication technologies, an active and motivated teaching corps that has worked to derive new approaches to teaching, an equally active and motivated learning corps that has contributed as much to how to teach online as they have to how to learn while online, with others, and away from a campus setting. We see the need for, and the emergence of, new theories and models of and for the online learning environment, addressing learning in its ICT context, considering both formal and informal learning, individual and community learning, and new practices arising from technology use in the service of learning. This paper presents six theoretical perspectives on learning in ICT contexts, and is an invitation to others to bring theoretical models to the fore to enhance our understanding of new learning contexts."

"How to Read A Blog (With a Nod to Mortimer Adler)" (AJ Fortin)

(excerpt)

"But seriously, most would agree that the blogosphere is here to stay, at least for a little while (even the two authors above have blogs), and if we say for the moment that the phenomenon is a modern day ‘meaning-construction project’ in process, then why and how should we read blogs?

To get some perspective, I went back to the wisdom of an ‘ancient’ text (paper-based, of course) written by Mortimer Adler in 1940  (a bestseller no less) entitled, simply enough, How to Read a Book. Yes, I know, blogs are not books, — or magazines or newspapers — but we do read (and often listen) to them and want something from them as well. So let’s look at some of Adler’s observations and see how they hold up to today’s demands."

(link)

Learning Styles and Visualization

I know that recently the whole idea of learning styles has come under attack. While the original article in the Telegraph is interesting, I heartily recommend heading over to the post that Stephen Downes' did on this and read the comments. Specifically, the comment by 'Kevin Kelly' deserve some additional unpacking.

I think the heart of this is echoed by other comments on Stephen's post and that is that while people may demonstrate preferences - all things being equal - toward one medium or another - these preferences are like personality traits and as KK asserts "a preference does not imply exclusivity." We can be aware of their presence without doing something as rash as the Brits and use them as a classification model for students.

All that being said, I have a strong preference these days for the visual/graphic. Perhaps this is a small rebellion of the textual hegemony of my grad school days...history doesn't allow for a lot of pretty pictures. So in honor of that preference (are learning styles a lifestyle choice or are they biological?) I present the following visual resources I have stumbled across of late:

• Harold Jarche has a post on online Mindmapping - be sure to read the comments for a number of other suggested sites. I like MindMeister but I really use Mindomo.
• From Mashable comes this post on "16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools"
• TouchGraph offers a search/data visualization product that reminds me of Search Crystal.
• Smashing Magazine offers this look at "Data Visualization: Modern Approaches"
• I saw this post about Jing on Beth Kanter's blog, Stephen also found Jing and tries it out a bit, looks like a very slick/easy way to capture and share screen grabs etc.
• I also love these re-mixes of the periodic table of elements for both the Periodic Table of Visualization Elements and the Elements of Collaboration.
• NEW: How did I miss this post from George Siemens on visualization?

More Truthiness from Will Thalheimer - Check the Truthiness of Your Slides

Will Thalheimer, the Geraldo Rivera/investigative researcher of the learning world, has found more "bogus research" floating around in slide decks that MUST be eliminated. Look at the slide below.

If you use this slide, STOP. Then go read Will's research. Then tell all your friends who use this slide to stop. And just to remind, also stop telling that story about the Chinese character for crisis being a combination of danger and opportunity - 'cause that one isn't true either.

Learning in Immersive Worlds: a review of game based learning (via Stephen Downes)

(Link from Stephen Downes)

From the JISC site: "scopes out   the current use of games for learning in UK HE and post-16 education   and has been produced to inform practitioners who are considering   using games and simulations in their practice."

Stephen also links to a game design document from Gamasutra. I think that while the report is good, the design document might actually prove even more interesting and useful to instructional designers and developers. I don't know how many people have actually read a game design document but doing so is instructive.