Tag Archives: Educational Computing

Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of the service, I don’t see how this is significantly different than Twitter. In fact, the Twitter API could be used to build a service like this. So while this is nothing groundbreaking, it caused me to reflect on some of the significant changes in social networking of the past year, and how those changes are trickling into online educational tools.

In my judgment the largest shift we’ve seen is that of a “friends activity feed.” In the case of Facebook, I can be notified when my friends modify their profiles, add other friends, or perform any activity (as long as they haven’t disallowed the display of these messages). And while that information was available before, its display is now one of the core features of Facebook itself. Your “news feed” shows the activities of your friends upon logging in. Since then, Myspace has followed suit with a similar feature. These features encourage users to be active on the site in order to gain the attention of others, or be seemingly overlooked among your other collection of virtual friends.

The other change that has been developing is the idea of providing your “status.” In some ways, I see this as an outgrowth of the AOL Instant Messenger away message. Depending on the person, away messages can be informative, have song lyrics, or be an ambiguous word. So has become the nature of the social networking “status.” The free-form nature of it allows anyone to express what they’re feeling or doing at the moment. Twitter’s sole purpose is to express these statuses, while many other social networks offer it as a feature of a larger and further complex social network.

The merging of these two ideas offers interesting pedagogical possibilities for educators who can think outside the box. What are ways that providing a “status,” or sharing text-messages in a public space engages students? What is the benefit of students seeing the activity of their peers in real-time? How can these tools build a greater sense of community and cooperative learning between students?

The nature of social networks often demands a high level of participation in order for them to be worthwhile to participants, and seeing the activity stream of your classmates is only helpful if you check it once, or several times a day. So while the tool can facilitate rapid dialogue between classmates, its usefulness is based upon the students in the class and their decision to be constantly hooked-in, or to not be. Its worth mentioning that other web tools for learning like wikis, blogging, forums, and listservs facilitate the public distribution of analytical work, while Twitter and microblogging services are better-suited for shorter messages in greater frequency. Although I’ve seen microblogging in the classroom, I wonder if its asking too much from students.

Not necessarily looking to displace other tools as ways of classroom communication but rather augment them, Twitter and Edmodo offer interesting possibilities. How can these tools for sharing basic knowledge and engaging in public discourse be integrated into pre-existing tools and computer-based strategies for teaching? The next step in my judgment is integration into courseware management tools like Blackboard, and even ScholarPress CourseWare.

The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) was instrumental in not only deploying the earliest computers into public schools in Minnesota, but also developing software that would become nationally popular like The Oregon Trail computer game. A window into the past, I’ve come across an oral history interview with Dale LaFrenz, the founding assistant director of MECC who recounts the creation and growth of MECC. The interview is available for download in its entirety through the Charles Babbage Institute’s website.

Many people may not realize that The Oregon Trail was originally a game written for teletype machines – what were essentially typewriters connected to a computer mainframe. Those computers originally made-up MECC’s backbone, with one computer shared by each school district using time-sharing. Dale’s interview gives insight into MECC’s decision-making process in 1973, explaining decisions that had a ripple effect across the world of educational computing. Dale recounts:

MECC dispatched two people out to talk to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who were the 21-year-old kids with the new Apple computer. They had already announced their intent to save the world and they were going to help education using the computer. They had no information about what we were doing in Minnesota. They didn’t know anybody was using computers in schools. We told them about MECC and said we’d like to buy five Apple II’s at a special price. They gave us a special price. We brought the five back to Minnesota to sell to Minnesota schools. Minnesota schools not only bought five, but that year we sold over 500 Apple II computers. [...] Moving on to 1980, MECC became the largest seller of Apple computers. And so it happened that Apple got its start in the educational computing business through its Minnesota connection.

What’s also interesting is Dale’s discussion of the decision made to sell MECC, which was a state-owned operation, to a company (MECC would then become the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation). According to Dale, both IBM and Apple weren’t interested in such an acquisition.

By now you’re probably familiar with college courses being taught about Youtube or in Second Life, but last Thursday began something new: a college course taught at Stanford University on Facebook applications. Cramming over 100 students into a temporary classroom, professor BJ Fogg wrote the following in the Stanford Persuasive Technology blog about his class:

We’re focusing on the psychology and metrics of Facebook, and how understanding these two pieces can help developers create superior applications on Facebook–or on whatever platform opens up next (and apparently more are coming soon).

What’s new here is how Facebook Platform has brought the creator and user close together through Facebook product features like Reviews and Discussion Boards, as well as built-in metrics of uptake and engagement. Anyone can see exactly how people are responding to a Facebook app, both individually and collectively.

BJ Fogg and Dave McClure have framed this course well by probing the relationship of creators and users in these applications. And while the course itself focuses on Facebook applications, I imagine that many of the discussions could be extrapolated and applied to other trends in web applications that are moving toward similar models. The class’ second assignment is to create a Facebook application that aids teaching and learning – it will be especially interesting to see the outcomes of this. Can similar observations for commercial applications be applied to educational apps? And, as I brought up in a previous post regarding Facebook apps that libraries are beginning to develop, is it possible to cross an “invisible line between school and cool?” In what ways do the approaches of these applications differ from other applications?

If you’re interested in the class, they’ve set up a public Facebook group (now exceeding 500 members) and have their course syllabus online. Hat tip to Amy Stephen at Open Source Community for sharing this.

In another move to distance themselves from their college-oriented roots, Facebook has removed their “courses” feature that allowed students to indicate what courses they’re taking and the profiles of their classmates. On the Facebook Developers blog, they announced:

Facebook will be phasing out its Courses feature in early August, and we wanted to make sure you were the first to know. Collaboration services and applications are a big part of the world of Education. Especially on college campuses, where we first found our roots. Many of you have probably used some kind of collaboration software as a part of your courses. Our courses application was a great way to connect with new friends, and find your classmates. But, we think Facebook Developers can create even more robust ways to create, connect, and collaborate around teaching and learning in the classroom.

As I previously discussed, librarians are creating promising Facebook apps – who will be the first to create a popular Courses app?

Unrealistic uses of Second Life:
The University of New Orleans plans to continue instruction in Second Life in the event of another Katrina-like disaster. I’m highly skeptical that this would work on such a large scale; I’ve never thought that Second Life or virtual worlds are the solution to learning, but they offer new methods of teaching. Teachers and students alike won’t have the skills to make this feasible, not to mention the fact that displacing such a large number of people would likely leave them at inaccessible workstations (the system requirements to use SL are rather high).

Promising uses of Second Life:
The article briefly mentions Jim Mokhiber, an assistant professor of history, who’s using Second Life to build authentic African villages for his students to explore. Add Jim to the list of history educators using simulations in their classrooms.

Thanks to Brett Bixler at the Penn State Virtual Worlds blog for pointing out this article.

The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, apart from the rest of the company. With his hand on the yoke of the oxen, it’s clear that the male is both leading the oxen and holding the gun. When hunting, the pixilated character the user controls can only be discerned as having a male appearance. While the user is able to choose the name of the character for him or herself, the visual representations of the game’s protagonist remain male.

Women only appear to have subservient roles and are pictured wearing pink dresses and bonnets; usually beside the children. They are absent from hunting, and infrequently appear throughout the game. By focusing on male-oriented jobs within the game, the role of females is erased (Bigelow 86). Along the journey, the user playing the game can choose to “ask for advice”, where another character in the game offers advice on how to get to Oregon safely, or shares his or her fears of the journey. The only time female characters are featured is to offer advice, for example, Aunt Rebecca Sims tells you:

I hear terrible stories about wagon parties running out of food before Oregon – the whole party starving to death. We must check our supplies often; we might not get there as soon as we think. Always plan for the worst, I say.

While she offers helpful advice along the trail, such concerns are consistently voiced only by female characters. The recurrence of female characters in this role portrays them as powerless and unable to contribute toward the journey. Conversely, men are portrayed as workers and decision makers on the trail. However, in 1848 and in preindustrial America when the game’s narrative takes place, there was no developed ideology of a “woman’s place.” Women often contributed to a family’s income and did physical labor on the farm (Faragher and Stansell 152). This role is wholly absent from the characterization of women in the game.

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Using the new Facebook platform, several libraries have established a presence by creating applications. These applications are added by users and allow information to be displayed within Facebook’s website — even a user’s profile. Michigan, UIUC, and Ryerson U have all led the pack with the earliest of these academic applications.

While these new apps gesture toward the possible future of social networking sites and create a tacit relationship between academic institutions and individuals, I’m uncertain if that’s desirable for most users. A friend recently remarked that it seems to cross the “unspoken line between school and cool.” She may be onto something. For the average student, adding a library application on Facebook isn’t the least bit desirable considering these apps simply put a library catalog searchbar within the Facebook canvas – things you can already do on the library’s website. Adding an application that’s solely a utility for school seems to cross that unspoken line. Moreover, the function of “adding” something in Facebook, be that a friend, special-interest group or application is a representation of the user, and if a user doesn’t already have a relationship with the library and that’s all the application is, then there’s little reason for them to add that app.

The applications that ARE successful so far augment interactions between friends and preexisting relationships – whether that’s sharing information on movies that you’ve seen, turning your friends into zombies, or throwing sheep at them. Facebook’s model is based entirely upon openness and sharing. Sharing is “cool.” If libraries focus on a model of sharing with their apps, they could find much greater success in attracting casual users (you know, the ones who don’t usually hang out in the library).

In my ideal library application, I should be able to share a list of the books I’ve currently signed out of the library, or books that have helped with a research project. My friends could then see the items I shared, and potentially use that information to return to the library. In that process of sharing, the library (or creator of these apps) facilitates these interactions, and becomes a larger part of our lives. If we’re looking for new ways to promote libraries or academic projects, then innovative uses of Facebook applications may be a great nontraditional place to start.

Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative instruction. Beyond the content of the game, students need ideas to be reinforced, or at least prefaced with contextualizing information. The McGill simulation’s site contains a terrific library of lesson plans, activity sheets, and information pages that should be a model for other educational sims. Here is a description of the project:

“A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in the 1890s” is a 3D world which recreates a Quebec village of the 1890s, complete with characters of that time with whom elementary school students can interact. You can use this 3D world to teach students about life in Canada (and specifically in Quebec) at the end of the nineteenth century, and encourage students to compare life in that place and time with their contemporary lives in order to understand better the changes that have taken place.

Kevin Kee, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing of Brock University helped develop this simulation while working at McGill, and is currently working on a historical simulation in Second Life. I’ll definitely be posting about this in the future

Virtual Powwow was a living museum in Second Life, proposed as a final project in Bernie Dodge’s graduate-level Exploratory Learning through Simulation and Games class. By recreating a powwow, the simulation visualized an environment hosted by Native Americans where students could experience Native American culture and dance.

Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and living museums in Second Life offer a starting point for future discussions of the educational uses of historical roleplaying in virtual worlds. It may also bring together the seemingly disparate topics of this blog, including Wild West and Native American roleplaying in Second Life, visualizing history, and educational roleplaying games. The powwow itself can be contextualized within two pertinent discussions: the shifting of knowledge from experts to amateurs, and innovation vs imitation.
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Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in specific ways while roleplaying. Rob wrote the following:

There was a vogue for simulation gaming at this exact moment much bigger than the wargaming hobby we all think we know. Yeah, there were the wargamers. But there was also, at just this time, a surge of interest in using simulation games, role-plays, and similar exercises in education. A little digging in education libraries turns up literally hundreds of simulation games for use in elementary, high school, and university classrooms—and they all date from the same era.

I have a big heavy tome in front of me. Two tomes, actually: the Handbook of Social Education Simulation Gaming, published 1972. It contains hundreds of games and goes into considerable details about the rules. Some are just “educational” versions of board games: you know, like “Congressopoly” and things of that nature. Some are un-games: free-form roleplays of a sort I associate more with therapy than gaming. But a lot of them and these are clearly the ones the author of this particular handbook was most excited by [what] sound an awful lot like what we would call RPGs.

Educational roleplaying games? Educational simulations? Rob is onto something that I’ve been uncovering in my own research as well – an interest in roleplaying and simulations within education in the very early 70′s. What I find interesting is how he is studying board and “pen and paper” roleplaying games and simulations – while my own research focuses on computer simulations and roleplaying. I’m not sure the medium matters as much as the concept of using this within the classroom. Remember that in my brief outline of the origins of the Oregon Trail computer game, I explained the original version was released in 1971 – right at this same time. Coincidence? Probably not.

The question I’ve been building to the past several weeks combines this early history of roleplaying games, the Oregon Trail computer simulation’s goals of teaching history, and Wild West roleplaying in Second Life. How can history teachers use Second Life and roleplaying within virtual worlds to teach history? As I (and others, such as Rob) uncover a greater-detailed history of educational roleplaying and educational uses of simulations my gut reaction is that the use of Second Life in this manner seems completely logical. Just as the Oregon Trail computer game adapted educational simulations to the teletype machine, we can do the same with Second Life – in an environment that I would argue overcomes many traditional shortcomings of educational computer simulations.