BBC study on Brain Training

April 21, 2010 — Daniel

The BBC will tomorrow broadcast a programme on a study they funded on ‘Brain Training’ type programs – and which has had its results published in Nature. The study found that:

While players got progressively better at the games, the gains were not transferable, Nature journal reports.

Players gained nothing in terms of general reasoning, memory, planning or visuospatial abilities, experts found.

But they say more work is needed to see if workouts for the mind can help keep the brain “fit” as it ages.

More on the program here.

Note that this is distinct and quite different from the Brain Training study that LTS ran in Scottish schools – which did find that math Brain Training games did help students learn math (published in BJET). There will be a number of reasons for the difference – the LTS study was using games which asked students to do exercises similar to normal arithmetic exercises – and math was still being taught in class. Perhaps successful transfer of learning is boosted when learning in a game is reinforced with learning in a second setting?

(Offhand, a lot of work on transfer of learning has shown that being able to apply problem solving skills in multiple domains requires learning in multiple domains – which is why some children can solve problems in math class but not solve similar problems in different settings, or vice versa).

Posted in Games Based Learning, Learning. Tags: . No Comments »

Free webinars on learning games

April 20, 2010 — Daniel

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

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Teaching, Technology, Uncategorized. No Comments »

SLOODLE Moot 2010

April 8, 2010 — Daniel

From http://www.sloodle.org/blog/

SLOODLE Moot 2010 is approaching!

This weekend SLOODLE Moot – a free, online conference will be taking place in Second Life. A range of presentations, discussions and demonstrations will take place over the weekend including:

  • Devil Island Mystery. Learn how freshman students in S. Korea were stranded on a virtual island – and had to develop their English skills to survive – and solve the Devil Island Mystery!
  • Hacking SLOODLE tools. SLOODLE is open-source – in this sessions learn why you might want to change SLOODLE to suit your own ends – and how you can do so.
  • SLOODLE at the Open University. With around 250,000 online students, and individual courses with student numbers in the thousands, the OU faces some significant challenges in using virtual worlds to support its courses. Learn how the OU has been using SLOODLE to meet this challenge.
  • Cypris Chat demonstration. After a very successful set of demonstrations earlier this year, Mike McKay gives another demo of SLOODLE and the Awards system.
  • Saturday night social. Lights, music, dancing!

Get more details at the SLOODLE home page – http://www.sloodle.org/

( hashtag: #smoot )

Posted in conferences, Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: . No Comments »

Researching Learning in Virtual Environments – ReLIVE book now out

March 4, 2010 — Daniel

Caught a little off guard with this, but the ReLIVE book (which I had a hand in helping edit) is now available online at SpringerLink here. The promo blurb:

Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds covers a range of research undertaken in 3D virtual environments, looking at both the methods and results of the studies.

This groundbreaking book is the first to specifically address research methods and related issues for education in virtual worlds. It opens with an accessible introduction to the book and to the subject, providing an ideal springboard for those who are new to research in this area. The subsequent ten chapters present work covering a range of research methodologies across a broad discipline base, making it essential reading for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate researchers working in education in virtual worlds, and engaging background material for researchers in similar and related disciplines.

Many of the chapters in this book are extended papers from Researching Learning in Virtual Environments (ReLIVE08), an international conference hosted by the Open University UK. Authors of the best papers and presentations from the conference were invited to contribute to Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds.

The book is actually a little cheaper at Amazon.co.uk – but no information yet on when the hardcopy will be available. But due before the end of the month. I enjoyed working on parts of this book – many thanksare  due to Anna Peachey who had the lions share of the work and did a sterling job, and to co-editors Julia Gillen and Sarah ‘Intellagirl’ Smith-Robbins.

Posted in Education, Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: . No Comments »

Where next for virtual worlds?

January 29, 2010 — Daniel

On Monday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Eduserv ‘where next for virtual worlds’ workshop. Being asked to talk about the future gave me a nice opportunity to widely name-check a whole bunch of stuff and try and imagine how it might all tie into virtual worlds and learning environments a few years down the line. Since then it’s been full on marking and grading, just enough time to post this…

All of the presentations from the day are online at the Eduserv website. Most of these are in the form of embedded SlideShare presentations – though there is also a (slightly noisy) video of Ralph Schroeder’s presentation there. Hopefully other videos will follow. A wee note tho – if you are looking at John Kirriemuir’s presentation or my own, you’ll find a lot of extra supporting text and notes is only visible when viewing via the SlideShare website itself.

This is a bit of a problem with SlideShare embeds – it isn’t at all obvious when there is a lot of hidden extra content that you can only get via the SlideShare site itself.

(It also took me three attempts to get my slides to load up correctly without blank slides. And I’m not too sure why…)

As to the talks themselves… I enjoyed Ralph’s presentation – some good examples of the differences between high-end video conferencing, immersive virtual reality and virtual worlds and their strengths and weaknesses. His argument that there are two end states got a bit of a picking over on twitter afterwards.

Over on her blog, JISC’s Heather Williamson provides a summary of the day.

Posted in Augmented Reality, Communication, conferences, Education, Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: , . No Comments »

Intl. Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments 1(1)

January 15, 2010 — Daniel

The launch issue of the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (of which I am an associate editor) is now available. Contents here.

A few papers relevant to games and learning. The late (and sadly missed) Leslie Jarmon’s article Homo Virtualis: Virtual Worlds, Learning, and an Ecology of Embodied Interaction. I’m not overly taken with the idea of the emergence of a new type of human (similar to my disquiet with many of the notions around Digital Natives), but
the paper does provide some good material on how immersion in Second Life affects many of its users – both in and out of the virtual world.

Michael Vallance, et al. have a paper which extends their ALT-C presentation on Designing Effective Spaces, Tasks and Metrics for Communication in Second Life Within the Context of Programming LEGO NXT Mindstorms™ Robots.While the students were working to programming robots inside Second Life, the focus of this paper is the communication between students. A number of factors supporting effective communication were identified, including such simple but effective points such as:

  • “Blend familiarity such as use of print-based materials”

A third article, from fwo of my UWS colleagues – Thomas Hainey and Thomas Connolly, is on Evaluating Games-Based Learning:

One of the main problems with games-based learning is that there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence supporting the approach. This paper will describe the evaluation of the requirements collection and analysis process using a newly developed framework for the evaluation of games-based learning and will focus on evaluation from a pedagogical perspective.

The other two papers in the issue will be of interest to a wider audience – in these Martin Weller and Niall Sclater (both of the Open University) consider The Centralisation Dilemma in Educational IT and eLearning in the Cloud respectively.

Subscription required for access to full text (or online purchase for individual articles) – though I note that there is a form to request a free sample issue. <SHAMELESS PROMOTION>And of course you can request the journal for your institutions library.</SHAMELESS PROMOTION>

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Second Life, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: . 4 Comments »

Computer Programming as Digital Literacy

December 22, 2009 — Daniel

If the so-called ‘Digital Natives’ don’t know how to program a computer, are they really digitally literate? In his blog, Tony Forster presents an “argument for the authoring of interactive or programmable multimedia as an important meta-literacy skill.”  It’s a good start to this particular discussion, I think.

Certainly, in traditional schooling literacy is not just about reading – it is also about authoring. With digital literacy, in writing blogs or posting videos to YouTube students are using digital technologies while authoring written or visual content. They are acting as consumers of digital technology while producing content. Full digital literacy requires the ability to create new interactive experiences – i.e. programming. This view is also presented by Mitch Resnick et. al. in their recent paper for CACM:

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., et al. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM, 52(11), 60-67. doi: 10.1145/1592761.1592779

Posted in Digital Natives, Game Development Based Learning, Learning, Net Generation, Technology. Tags: , . No Comments »

Handheld Learning 2009

October 29, 2009 — Daniel

I *still* haven’t found time to watch all the videos from ALT-C, or review all the virtual world related papers that I picked out from the proceedings. Now the video and audio proceedings are available from Handheld Learning 2009, here: http://www.handheldlearning2009.com/proceedings.

I wonder if I download the proceedings to my phone and put it under my pillow if I’ll be able to absorb all the information by osmosis…

Posted in conferences, Education, Learning, Mobile, Teaching, Technology. No Comments »

Answering demand for instruction and guidance… in real-time

October 15, 2009 — Daniel

A mind-blowing article in November issue of Wired (17.11 – not yet on the web) on page 158 – and it isn’t even on the cover. Demand Media, which runs sites such as eHow and has published tens of thousands of instructional videos on YouTube produce over 4,000 articles and videos EACH DAY.

Demand use a few computer programs to mine current search engine terms, the ad market and competitor articles to determine daily what topics and articles to produce. A computer algorithm generates suggested article titles based on this information, these are then proofed and edited by humans proofers before the titles are added to an online repository of articles needed. Freelance writers and video producers trawl this site, write up their articles or shoot their videos for low, low fees (a typical video producer might need to make 10 videos a day to earn a wage).

This is a highly industrialized method of production, production to meet demand in real-time. And all of this is funded through advertising revenues…

Are there ways that academia could better use some of these notions? I would hate to see such an industrialised mode of content production, but the contrast with institutions, consortiums and even nations that have in the past spent millions of pounds on distance learning initiatives that have failed to return even one tenth of the investment could not be starker.

Posted in Education, Learning, Social Networking, Teaching, Technology. 1 Comment »

Distance Learning initiatives reviewed

October 3, 2009 — Daniel

On Friday, Paul Bacisch of Re.ViCa gave talk and led some discussion at the University of the West of Scotland, just along from my own office. One of the key aspects of his talk was consideration of the Open Learning Innovation Fund – a large HEFCE initiative to support the development of distance learning activities of UK universities. But not for all the UK – as HEFCE’s remit only covers England, Scotland (along with Ulster and perhaps also Wales) is not covered. This would seem to put Scottish universities at a significant disadvantage, however as Paul’s talk amply showed large investments of money do not always lead to success.

Indeed many of the largest and most well funded distance learning projects fail to cover their own expenses. Paul has some direct experience of this from his time at the UK eUniversity, and his presentation was on the same day that THES reported on the small returns on investment so far from the large international U21Global collaborative distance learning project.

Technology is not a differentiator, with VLEs available to all – pedagogy is more important than technology. But Paul he was particularly critical of the lack of market research involved in many of the larger projects, and highlighted a number of success stories. These tend to be home grown, organically developed, and as likely to come from the FE or commercial sectors as from a university. Basically, universities that are doing it right have got a head start and are succeeding – most universities are not.

Meanwhile world markets are not sitting ducks – Paul pointed out that distance learning offerings come from over 100 countries. As well as other British institutions, American, Canadian, and European universities, colleges and companies, recruiters have to also consider the local competition.

At the end of the meeting it was interesting to discuss with other faculty from across the university about where we might be going wrong with some of our own DL offerings. Illuminating, but nothing I can share here ;-)

Posted in Education, Learning, Teaching. Tags: . No Comments »
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