Nice piece on immersion in the Guardian – the Science of Immersion.
We have to be very careful with terms, because a game that’s very immersive is Tetris, but there’s no sense that you’re IN the experience.
Aside from illustrating how varied and elusive definitions of immersion can be, the article highlights the role of the personality of the user. This is a significant issue for education in virtual worlds. If we base benefits on some notion of how immersive the environment is, then what does this mean for students whose personalities limit their sense of immersion in digital 3D worlds?
(This post somewhat painfully prepared on a mobile phone)
Download copy of call for special issue on 3D learning (pdf)
IJTEL fosters multidisciplinary discussion and research on technology enhanced learning (TEL) approaches at the individual, organisational, national and global levels. Its key objective is to be the leading scholarly scientific journal for all those interested in, researching and contributing to the technology enhanced learning episteme. For this reason, IJTEL delivers research articles, position papers, surveys and case studies aiming:
This special issue seeks to bring together research, from different perspectives, on a range of 3D technologies that may be used to enhance or support learning.
Suitable topics may relate to, but are not limited to, the use of a range of 3D technologies in enhancing learning:
Prospective authors are invited to notify the intention to submit a paper by
sending a one-page abstract to the editors by 6th August 2010 and submit the full
paper by 6th September 2010.
Abstracts may be sent to the editors at cdk@it.uc3m.es or
daniel.livingstone@uws.ac.uk
Final papers should be submitted electronically via the InderScience online
submissions system at: http://bit.ly/ijtel
6th August 2010: Title and Abstract deadline (optional)
6th September 2010: Full paper submission deadline
15th October 2010: Decision notification
12th November 2010: Camera-ready version
Early 2011: Publication (tentative)
Carlos Delgado Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés (Madrid, Spain), cdk@it.uc3m.es
Daniel J. Livingstone, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley PA1 2BE (Scotland, UK), Daniel.Livingstone@uws.ac.uk
Ignacio Aedo, UC3M, Spain
John Belcher, MIT, USA
Josep Blat, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Darryl Charles, University of Ulster, UK
Thomas Connolly, University of the West of Scotland, UK
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Canada
Lesley Gourlay, Coventry University, UK
Miguel Lizondo, Deimos-Space, Spain
Judith Molka-Danielsen, Molde University College, Norway
Mariano Rico, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Pilar Sancho Thomas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Kath Trinder, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
I’ve finally uploaded the screencast of my keynote from Games:EDU, back in May. Actually, the majority of this relates to any undergraduate teaching in a typical university. Inappropriate strategic goals, growing mountains of paperwork, innovation prevention, the bare pass student and traditional lectures all pop up as challenges – encouraging students to form effective communities of practice and exploiting technology to extend the reach of the university pop up as part of the solution.
See it here, or on screencast.com:
Like me, you’ve probably got used to calls for educators to think more like game designers, to consider how good games help players learn how to play, from James Gee and many others over the past few years.
In this months Edge (UK gaming magazine, Issue 216, July 2010), video-game design consultant N’gai Croal resets a cosmic balance when he suggests that game designers think like teachers…
the primary goal of the developer should be not to punish the player … the developer should be invested not in the player’s failure but in the player’s success
and
developers could probably learn a lot from talking to teachers
Bringing Gee and N’Gai together then tells us that educators can learn from how the best games teach their players – and game designers can learn from how the best teachers teach their students. The circle is complete!
Every so often something happens which makes me extra glad that I live in Scotland. Currently its the ConDem government rushing ahead with their plans to take schools out of local authority control (and into the control of anybody else who wants to run them, including for-profit companies).
First up, Becta was summarily dismissed. This has had a mixed reception amongst teachers – with reports of the agency wasting some of its money, or some of its services not being used by all schools. A good collation of responses here, courtesy of OLDaily. (The British Journal of Education Technology is owned by Becta currently – I presume and hope that arrangements will be made to transfer ownership before Becta closes for good)
Whereas in Scotland, LTS is not being closed. I doubt very much that every spending decision made by LTS is the best decision possible – but there is a lot of good work coming out of LTS, and some very dedicated people who work hard on making schools better, supporting teachers and supporting a forward looking curriculum.
Michael Gove outlined plans to encourage the best schools in England and Wales to leave local authority control (as a first step to taking all schools outside of local authority control), and to make it easier for parents and companies to start new schools. The BBC’s initial coverage of both didn’t delve too deep into the possible problems – with naysayers given relatively small soundbits on pieces about new academies and free schools. Schools (such as the new academies) which have been rated as ‘outstanding’ will also be free from future inspections. Even though there is now an example of an outstanding school turned academy failing a subsequent inspection.
Mike Baker finally provided some analysis on Saturday, which includes some worthwhile observations.
On local authority control over schools:
Perhaps the most misleading, and frequently repeated, claim is that becoming an academy allows schools to “escape local authority control”.
This is ridiculous because local councils no longer have “control” of schools.
… Town halls no longer determine how schools spend their money, what or how they teach, or how they are held accountable.
Schools are constrained in many ways. But these constraints come from national government or national bodies, be it the national curriculum, national tests, Ofsted, or government legislation on issues such as safeguarding or Every Child Matters.
What do local authorities do?
Their last remaining influence is in the provision of school places, organisation of the school admissions process, and as the stretcher-bearers when schools fail. …
They provide vital services such as educational psychologists and special educational need support and more humdrum, but essential, functions such as payroll management and legal advice.
And with local authorities having little actual control over schools, there is really one reason driving the academy agenda – money:
… academy status brings a cash uplift of 10% or more.
This is the money otherwise held back by town halls for central education services. For a large secondary school that could be £400,000 a year.
Many heads believe they can make better use of that money themselves, even though they may continue to purchase some services from the local authority.
This hints at one way in which academies will be able to save money. Limiting their use of central psychological services and special needs support. Cutting back on support for the most expensive pupils – i.e. those with the greatest need – will free up more money for prestige facilities (to attract better students) and better pay (to take the best teachers away from other schools). And even to allow companies running schools to profit from the public purse and parent contributions.
As Mike Baker’s analysis points out, there will be little in terms of academic freedom or control over allocated budget to distinguish a local authority school and a new academy or free school. All that is left is whether or not the school contributes to a local fund for specialist services to support the most needy (academies won’t), whether the people running the school can make a profit (yes for academies), and whether voters actually have any power to effect change in their local schools (academies “unlike local councils … cannot be turfed out by parents and local voters.”).
As I say, every so often something happens that makes me glad that I live in Scotland.
Related:
The Guardian asks head teachers if they will opt for academy status. Not all are in a hurry – those that are tempted are tempted by the extra money.
The Independent reviews the free schools policy:
“The Tories have misrepresented the case for free schools by only quoting the good part of some very mixed evidence from the US and Sweden,” says McNally. “There are serious issues here. It might raise standards but I’m concerned about social mobility. Will the pupil premium for disadvantaged children be big enough to attract people to run schools in poor areas? If not, non-free schools will have to pick up all the social problems and will struggle to get teachers because they won’t be able to pay as much as other schools.”
I haven’t managed to make it to a Games:Edu event till now (the events previously had a tendency to clash with my vacations, and I sometimes get tired of travelling during the course of the year). I greatly enjoyed today’s (well yesterdays – posting this just after midnight) event however – and was happy to see that there was actually a lot of agreement between industry representatives and academics during the course of the day. In particular, a number of speakers (myself included) emphasised the need for group projects that help develop team work skills, and open-ended projects which give room for the best students to excel. How we do this while also supporting students who are not excelling was one issue that was discussed – without a definitive answer.
I’ll post my own presentation soon – my keynote was on the challenges facing games education in universities in the UK – most of which are actually challenges facing the whole sector in the UK. I even got to include my “University of Somewhere” org chart – featuring the Dept. of Innovation Prevention. This particular slide had a very good response, and discussion during tea breaks confirmed previous reports that such a department seems to exist in most universities.
The programme was nicely balanced, with some discussion on teaching game development in schools and FE (courtesy of David Brockbank), alongside a number of university and industry speakers.
A late addition to the programme, Mike Reddy discussed paizogogy – the pedagogy of making games. This builds on Papert’s constructionism, and in an engaging talk (sat next to Mike, I was impressed as he developed his game-art homage graphics immediately prior to his presentation) Mike challenged us to spend more time creating games ourselves – using cards, paper, boards or possibly even computers. Can’t say I’m not tempted.
Saint John-Walker from Skillset encouraged universities to apply for accreditation – and to initiate discussion with Skillset if they are interested. Don’t let fear of failure hold you back was his message. This talk was nicely balanced by a presentation from Michael Powell (De Montfort University) who gave an engaging talk on the challenges of applying for (and obtaining) Skillset accreditation. This brought back some memories and really emphasised one of the challenges I identified – the paper mountain facing lecturers and course leaders.
Carol Clark outlined the RealTimeWorlds approach to mentoring new graduate employees. The emphasis here was on learning by doing and becoming a member of the team. This idea of teaching game developers by placing them into effective communities of practice (to put an academic spin on it) seemed to be one of the main themes of the day – as these ideas recurred in several talks. Including Grant Clarke’s. Grant leads the Abertay Master of Professional Practice course – in which students work as members of their own game development teams in a studio setting.
Finally, Maria Stukoff of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe outlined the current PlayStation Edu schemes and opportunities – most exciting of which is that universities can now apply for the same PS3 DevKits as used in industry – no longer any need to rely on PS3 Linux (with its many limitations) for courses wanting to explore developing for the Cell processor and PS3 hardware. Included in this is the cross-platform Phyre engine and access to the PS Dev network. The costs are such that I wouldn’t expect many places to establish a full lab of 20 PS3 DevKits, but with shared access it should be possible to integrate into console development modules with just a few machines. Fingers crossed we can free up some money from our budgets to get a few of these soon…
Next Thursday I’ll be giving the Academic Keynote at Games:EDU at Abertay University up in Dundee. There is a packed programme, and some great speakers lined up. I should be sharing my own talk with one or two of my former students now working in Dundee at Cohort Studios – they’ve been working on The Shoot for the forthcoming PS3 Move controller.
While the former students will be talking about the transition from student to working in the games industry, I was asked to talk about the current challenges in delivering games technology courses. Excuse me while I yawn… So I’ll be working hard till then on turning this into a more lively reflection on the state of (games technology) education in what is just the start of some troubled times for the education sector – with looming cuts and a general squeeze on funding. The title for the talk is “More for Less: The Hidden Challenges of Games Education” – where hidden mainly refers to the aspects of university that are hidden from students and outside bodies.
The working title was a bit more direct – but I had to agree with the conference organisers that it perhaps sounded a little too cynical. So I’ll not be delivering the talk “Bums on Seats: The Hidden Challenges of Games Education” after all.
EDIT: ps it turns out that there already is a University of Bums on Seats.
On the Horizon is the strategic planning resource for education professionals in the international post secondary and life-long learning arena. An environmental scanning journal, On the Horizon covers corporate universities, e-learning, private for-profit degree granting institutions as well as the traditional university. Areas include the business of education delivery, content and certification, as well as rules and regulations in areas such as institutions and intellectual property.
And for this week, as the featured journal of Emerald Press, online access to the journal is free – including full text of all articles. See the list of issues here [EDIT: Link broken as of 10am 29th April - hopefully a temp problem at Emerald - the journal page is here, but no access to contents until link fixed]. The 2009 issues are well worth a view – including special issues on virtual worlds, gaming and simulation, distributed learning environments and (an intriguing title!) Future consciousness in learning.
Remember – this is for one week only!
This Saturday, April 24th, The Future of Education has two free online webinars on learning games:
From Steve Hargadon / The Future of Education http://www.futureofeducation.com
Browsing OpenJorum… and its not a fun experience. A shame as OpenJorum is a fantastic resource and needs to be supported by the UK education sector – not just the funders but the tutors and students who stand to benefit by using the resources that exist on OpenJorum. The HEA-ICS recently published a number of complete courses on OpenJorum, so there are some fantastic resources there – I think. I’m sure I’ll find them eventually – though the search features seem a bit underpowered and the browsing experience is simply awful. Worth comparing with the advanced search features on OER Commons to see how it could be done…
Start browsing OpenJorum, and it isn’t long before the problem becomes apparent… browsing for content relating to computer science in HE, the following is an excerpt from the first page of results (click here to see how it looks on OpenJorum itself with formatting intact):
Tom Boyle (2010-01-13)Tom Boyle (2010-01-13)UKOER; Open Educational Repository in Support of Computer Science; Rong Yang (2010-02-02)(2010-02-01)(2010-02-01)(2010-02-01)(2010-02-01)(2010-01-21)(2010-01-21)(2010-01-21)(2010-01-21)
This set of results seems pretty typical – a page can have anywhere from 3 to 9 identically titled resources with no information to explain what the difference between them is – without clicking through each one individually. Compare with browsing on OER Commons. As soon as I start browsing, a rich set of options on the left allows me to specify more exactly the type of resource I’m looking for, and an ‘expand all’ button at the top of the results allows me to see a summary of each resource without having to click through each one individually.
If it takes too long to find useful resources in a repository, I won’t use that repository much. Luckily OER Commons is an index to materials on other respositories – with any luck they’ll provide the interface that OpenJorum needs.
