I remember Monopoly from my youth. We called it Monotony because of the interminable length of game play and how long it took to actually make it around to where you could move. In spite of that, we had a great time playing with all the little pieces. Here’s an interesting bit of news and I think the “Wednesday” referenced was yesterday!

But when I played the new online version this morning I was free from such a driven competitor. Monopoly City Streets, a link up between game owners Hasbro and Google Maps, launches on Wednesday for a four-month period. It enables one, in theory, to buy any street in the world.

via New online Monopoly game is streets ahead | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Go read the whole piece and maybe I’ll see you in the game.

The game site appears to be overwhelmed. Gee, I wonder why?

September 10th, 2009
Posted in 688, Education, Games
3 Comments »

I won’t single out the individual who identified this “disadvantage” of ‘distance education’ – you’ll find it if you look, I’m sure, and there’s more than one person who’s made it. It’s an excellent point:

I think that a major disadvantage is the lack of personal connection.

Here’s the problem.

I’m sure we’ve all been in classroom situations where there’s a guy who rushes in 30 seconds before class, says nothing unless asked a direct question by the teacher, offers no word of greeting to the students around him, and leaves as soon as the bell rings, never to be seen again until the next class meeting.

That person lacks “personal connection” but is it the fault of the teacher? The structure of the classroom experience? Something with the way the school is organized?

No. It’s because that particular student chooses – for whatever reason – to have no personal connection with anybody in the classroom.

I will grant that Blackboard is designed to keep you isolated from each other. It’s the classroom management thing where they want you “in your seat and paying attention to the teacher” and not socializing with your neighbor. There are no mechanisms built into Blackboard to enable that kind of conversation. They do that on purpose. Teachers want you focused on the content. Yes, you could use the chat room, but to find out if anybody’s there, you have to first log into Blackboard, go to the chat and wait to see if anybody joins you.

This class, however, breaks all those walls down. I have given you the capability to connect to each other with email, instant messenger, and blogs/feeds. I’ve taken you into Tapped In and shown you how to use it to chat. You have access to a listserver where you can invite everybody in the class to join you if you like simply by sending email to the list. You can have full conversations with the whole class that way, altho nobody has.

Furthermore, I’ve given you plenty to talk about amongst yourselves by forcing you to consider technology in ways that are totally foreign to you and the people around you. I’ve put you in positions of cognitive dissonance where some of your most closely held beliefs are being debunked before your eyes.

So you all have stuff to discuss. You all have the means to discuss it with your peers (and with me if you want). You all have *more* opportunity for “personal connection” than you have ever had in any class in your lives. That opportunity extends outside the four walls of the class, beyond the bounds of the classroom period, and gives you the opportunity to see who – exactly – is “in the room” with you every time you log in.

If, after all that, you still feel the lack of “personal connection” – and it’s an ongoing theme in this class – then I suggest to you that the fault is not with “distance education” but rather that personal connection is not possible unless you’re willing to make it yourself.

Even in the classroom setting, your personal connection is not with everybody in the room, but rather with those 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) people with whom you have broken the ice and started talking with before, after, and even during class. You broke that barrier in the classroom because you recognized a fellow traveler on the road to the Final Exam by virtue of their sitting next to you, or behind you, or parked next to you in the parking lot.

That little green dot beside their name in the IM window is the person sitting next to you. I’d bet they’d love to talk to you, too, but somebody has to talk first. All of you people who are complaining that we’ve got too much reading and not enough doing?? Do something. Talk to your neighbor.

And if you haven’t added at least a few people into your IM Buddy list for the class, do that. It’s not an academic exercise. Note that you can only add people if you have an account on their service — MSN, Yahoo, whatever. But the idea isn’t to make a personal connection with *everybody* in the class – any more than you would a classroom based class.

The point is to explore how these tools – when used correctly – create a rich and connected environment that in many ways is better than this mythical classroom personal connection experience so many of you seem to be desiring.

Stop being wall flowers. Join the party.

September 5th, 2009
Posted in 685
5 Comments »

I love twitter because sometimes I see links to things like this:

It's interesting that face-to-face instruction is still the measure by which all other forms of instruction are evaluated. As the standard model of instruction for decades, it's often assumed to be the proven method, while other methods have yet to prove themselves. This assumption is not only misleading, but it might also be helping to diminish potential opportunities of better learning for our students.

via 5 Ways We’re Diminishing Learning by Assuming Face-to-Face Instruction Is Best — THE Journal.

How many of these assumptions do YOU hold?

September 2nd, 2009
Posted in 685
3 Comments »

Most readers of this blog know that I think the term distance education is terminally flawed, but it continues to be used in the common vernacular so we need to address it. One problem is that many practitioners today think the the terms “distance education” and “online education” are equivalent. We need to address that by examining the history of “distance education” and see where “online education” falls on that timeline.

In the beginning there was the word. In my perspective – one that’s not generally shared in the field, I should point out – distance education began with the first technology that allowed the relatively accurate transmission of instructional messages from the teacher to the student. In this case I’m referring to physical distance but synchronous mode, that is both people are able to exchange communications in real time. It’s the “I-talk-you-talk” model we’re most familiar with. That first technology is spoken language. The codified collection of symbolic utterances which follow rules of pronunciation, grammar, and syntax represents a technology that is used to bridge the physical distance between teacher and learning. This is thought to have occurred sometime before 30,000 years ago. Whether it occurred simultaneously with the evolution of Genus Homo or shortly thereafter, is open to speculation.

The next milestone in the development of “distance education” occurred with the development of a tool that allowed the communications channel to become asynchronous – that is, separating the teacher and learner in time. The teacher speaks. Sometime later, the learner hears. The learner speaks. Sometime later, the teacher hears. They don’t need to be together in time for communications to occur. That milestone is “written language” and the earliest known use of written language is about 5,000 years ago.

It’s significant to note that without the precursor technology, spoken language, writing technology would have had no basis upon which to be developed. The encoding of the spoken word sounds and the grammatical ordering of those encoded sounds into words, sentences, and paragraphs depended on having the system of sounds to encode.

After these two technologies, all other contributions to “distance education” are largely just new ways of transmitting either spoken or written words. The invention of print – and eventually moveable type – was just the next step in the mass production of the written word. Mail, telegraph and teletype are ways to move those words across large distances. Telephone and radio move spoken language quickly and expand the range of a speaker’s voice from in-the-room to around-the-world.

In our timeline of “distance education” the generally accepted beginning of the use of these media for instruction in a mode which has become known as “distance education” occurs with the advent of the “correspondence course” in the early 1700s when a Boston teacher is reputed to have offered the first class using the mail service to send and receive lessons. This laid the groundwork for the modern model of so-called “distance education” and represents, in my opinion, one of the first instances of an educational use of language to corrupt meaning by assigning a general term – “distance education” – to a specific application of technology – “correspondence course.” We’ll see this again.

An anomaly on this time line is the use of graphical materials. Earliest man used drawings and graphically symbolic representations of the world to record and explain what he saw around him. From the three dimensional renderings of Stonehenge or the Anastasi arrows to the cave paintings in Europe, this graphical representation of the world has been around for a long, long time. The use of diagrams and images is probably most famously documented in Da Vinci’s notebooks where he drew meticulously accurate renderings of this ideas. The key element of the diagrams – at least in terms of an educational use – is the text and explanation that went with them. While it’s true that an image carries meaning unto itself, from an educational standpoint, one really needs to make that meaning as unambiguous as possible in order to be sure that the messages that are being exchanged are the messages that are intended. This application of graphical recording was expanded to photography – a process of mechanically reproducing an image from the world and rendering that image more or less permanently onto a page – in the early 1800s.

Media convergence began almost as soon as there were media that could converge. Earliest printing sometimes included drawings and sketches. In the 1800s we began to see the convergence of synchronous media with the advent of movies. Movies permitted the encoding of moving graphical images and written language. This is a significant development in that it led to the rise of “talkies” that merged spoken language with moving graphical images, permitting a more natural appearing rendering of the world that could be manipulated for the purpose of instruction. The primary purpose of film for this discussion is the invention of the documentary. Short films of a documentary nature were produced in the late 1800s, but Nanook of the North (1922) is considered to be the first example of the modern documentary.

Television permitted the synchronous distribution of pictures and sound in a broadcast mode — that is, you needed to be watching when the message was sent in order to be able to receive it. That quickly changed with the invention of video tape. Video tape permitted the sender to record his message and store it for later transmission. That same technology was eventually available to the receiver which permitted a true asynchronous application of broadcast media. This medium had the draw back of being one-way. They could send but in order to respond, you needed a separate channel — usually mail or telephone — to send your messages back.

In later half of the 20th century that all changed with the advent of teleconference and the ability to have two way, live, communications between two locations. This gave rise to a huge program of linking in “remote campuses” across the US. These networks are still in use today.

Eventually, near the end of the 20th century, the invention of the personal computer, the evolution of computer networks, and the convergence of telephone and computer technology has given rise to one of the single most powerful forces for social change since the advent of the automobile — the internet. By using digital modes of encoding and transmission, almost any form of media can be sent and received across a global network. The communications options include both synchronous and asynchronous modes, the use of video conference, text, audio, and even real time handwriting and drawing.

This evolution of correspondence course to online delivery has led to the next conflation of general term “distance education” to the specific application of technology — “online course.” These are not simple splitting of semantic hairs. As I have made clear here and in other postings, I believe the term “distance education” is redundant. All education is, by definition, at a distance. The term “distance education” in the modern vernacular has been applied to the system of teleconference and other remote delivery modes as an omnibus term intended to relegate all such modes of mechanical transmission of instruction as somehow different — a semantic segregation of “distance education” from “real education.” This is, I believe, a deliberate attempt to maintain the educational status quo without consideration of what that segregation means to the field.

By making “distance education” something other than “education,” it robs practitioners of the opportunity to use established educational research as a foundation. “Well, that was classroom based instruction and that tool hasn’t been validated for use at a distance.” As long as “distance education” is different, that becomes a valid obstacle. In return, by failing to recognize the continuum of technology used in the classroom setting, educators forego the opportunity to fully realize the potentials by not being able to see how those technologies might be manipulated and leveraged to take advantage of the opportunities.

September 1st, 2009
Posted in 685, Resources, culture
No Comments »

Some of you will have seen this on Remote Access. Clarence’s comment is “A lot of teachers won’t like this.”

Pink has some really interesting ideas in this but the key one has to do with application of intrinsic motivation. We’ve been enamored of Maslow’s “drives-based” theory that we lose track that motivation has some other theories as well, including an instrumentality theory that really addresses intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in a meaningful way.

How do these three ideas – mastery, autonomy, and purpose – relate to education in general? How do we take advantage of this motivation as teachers? And, an important consideration for the Games class, how do you see these three factors feeding into what makes a “good” game?

Discuss.

(Thanks, Clarence. Great Find.)

August 31st, 2009
Posted in 685, 688
6 Comments »

Some of you have found the post already, but for those who’ve missed it, it’s time to reveal my own perspective on the phrase “Distance Education”

The phrase “distance education” is redundant. All education is done at a distance. The problem is that we’re so close to the issue — and so fluent in certain technologies — that we fail to recognize one existential truth. Education involves two people — the teacher and the learner. As soon as you’re dealing with more than one mind, you have a distance that needs to be bridged and the only bridge we have — barring the psychics among you — is technology. The distance is almost always due to physical displacement, but may also involve temporal shifts.

via phaedrus » Blog Archive » On Distance Education.

Go check out the whole post. Tell me what you think of it.

August 29th, 2009
Posted in 685
1 Comment »

Here’s an interesting take on management that lists 12 characteristics that managers in the 21st Century need to keep in mind.

I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.
Via Gary Hamel on Managing Generation F

These are interesting ideas if we substitute the Business and Industry context for an Educational one.

How do these play out in school?

(Hat tip to @shareski for the link on twitter. Thanks, Dean.)

August 27th, 2009
Posted in 685
3 Comments »

The link to this article came across in the Twitterverse this morning and I thought it was worth looking at:

Debunking videogame stereotypes, but not necessarily in a good way, a new study into gaming habits has revealed that today’s average games player is not a pallid skinned, socially backward teenager but rather a 35-year-old couch potato prone to bouts of depression when not submerged in the escapism of virtual game worlds.
Via The Tech Herald

As we begin examining some of the so-called findings, it’s often important to look critically at primary sources. The title of this article is catchy, but not exactly accurate. Read the whole story to find out where the mis-leading bit is. And given the red-flag on credibility, one has to wonder what the original study has to say. The article itself doesn’t have a link to the primary … Wonder why.

Compare that story with this one from Yahoo. There’s still no link to the original story, but there’s a very different feel to reporting and even offering ancillary links to amplifying information.

It’s important to keep in mind that most research does not impute causal relationships, merely correlated factors. Do games make you depressed or do you turn to games to fight depression? Weight and depression are often linked but which came first?

Keep a critical eye on this kind of reporting. It’s seldom what it really appears to be.

August 25th, 2009
Posted in 688, Games
2 Comments »

One of the questions that we should be considering is “What are we doing here?” After the first week’s technology flood and the running start, I suspect not too many people have had a chance to actually consider it.

There’s actually a method in my madness. Go read that article for a short explanation of what I think we’re doing here.

One of the axioms of teaching is that teachers teach the way they were taught. The goal in this class is not to teach you how change classroom teaching into online teaching, but rather to show you teaching online as a discipline in itself. You need to learn how to learn using the tools that aren’t available in the classroom and combined in ways that classrooms cannot support. You need to learn how to learn using these tools so that when it comes time for you to teach others using them, you’ll have the insight you need to be more effective in your practice.

That’s not a trivial step because most teachers know how to be students. Students know that a course is finite, that the information flows from point A to point B. They know there’ll be a test at the end and that success is measured in grade points.

You need to get over that.

Learners learn. They don’t worry about grade points. They don’t think about the test. They learn. They follow leads and think about ideas. They are active in their learning and one of the things they do is tell themselves explicitly what it is they’ve learned. They participate in the communities of practice that hold the knowledge that they pursue. That’s why you’re writing in your blogs. That’s why you’re building a network in your aggregators. And the thing about learners? When they operate alongside students in educational environments, and they’re a little careful about their focus, they inevitably out-perform students.

Learn to be learners. Learn to learn with these tools and stop periodically to think about how that learning is being accomplished for you. Observe it in your fellow travelers.

And there will be a test over this material, but the test will come long after the course is over, and I won’t be grading it.

August 25th, 2009
Posted in 685
5 Comments »

We’re going to be using the blogs as communications channel this semester and I’m asking all my students to write about things. It occurred to me today that I haven’t really explained what I consider a “good post” might look like. I’ve been modeling them for a couple of years now and, frankly, as instructional technique, it leaves a lot to be desired. So I’m going to do a kind of metacognitive wrapper around what I think of as a good post and explain the critical parts.

So a good post should start out with an explanation of what the heck you’re going to talk about. Now, I’ve done that in the paragraph above, but in a “normal post” I’d probably be talking about something interesting that I found in my aggregator. In that case, I’d start the post with a bit of an intro, then cite a bit of the original post, include a link so you can go read the whole piece, and, after the citation, offer a commentary on what I think are the take-away points. Something like this:

Clarence Fischer up in Snow Lake is one of those people who is constantly using these technologies in his daily classroom practice. He’s in a permanent metacognitive mode about how the tools work, how they influence his practice, how his students relate to them, and the social implications of how that use changes who we all are. Here’s an example from one of his latest posts

Web 2.0 technologies allow us to think about moving the latest, most up to date informtion both in to and out of our classrooms, but we also need to think more dynamically about the connections we are able to make, the networks we can forge and the people we can have the students in our classrooms meet.

via Web 2.0 – For So Much More Than Publishing | Remote Access.

He’s absolutely on the money here. We have to stop thinking that education is about content and start working on the idea that learning is more important than institutions. The problems arise only if we believe in an economy of scarcity and, as Clarence has learned, the real problems arise when trying to organize the avalanche.

Now if my post-citation commentary seems a little obscure, even dense, or perhaps even unrelated, maybe it’s because I’ve written about the whole piece and not just about the bit that I cited.

Or it could be that I think that he’s identified a valid issue with regard to content and that I’m extrapolating from his point on content to an observation about the systems within which that content is (mis)used.

Or it could be that I have my head up my butt and I really have no clue what I’m writing.

Or, perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle, and this whole metacognitive experiment in demonstration is actually an example of what I think might constitute a good post.

How might you tell?

August 21st, 2009
Posted in 685, 688
2 Comments »