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:
From John Kirriemuir:
Hi folks,
Virtual World Watch is now collecting information for snapshot #9 of virtual world use in UK Higher and Further Education. Go to www.virtualworldwatch.net to see the previous 8 snapshots from the last three years.
Do you work in the sector? Use virtual worlds? Have used them? Then it would be appreciated if you’d have a go at answering one or more of the following questions. It’s up to you what you answer, and how formally or informally you answer. Or just ignore the questions if they aren’t helpful and write your own thing. We’re flexible 
This is an opportunity to tell the world, and the academic virtual world community, what you are doing, have done, will do, and/or how it went. As happens regularly, people with a similar interest may then discover what you’re doing, so you may pick up a few useful contacts through your contribution.
Some points:
- The answers are stuck into a report which will go live on Monday, July 12th.
- Data collection is for all of June i.e. June 1st to June 30th only.
- Sorry, but no extensions after June 30th as VWW is keen to get the report out much closer to data collection than previously. Contributions that miss the deadline can, if you wish, go up as blog entries on this website instead.
- Unless you request anonymity, your name and job title (please supply preferred) will be included as a reference.
- Submissions can come from academics and students in UK HE or FE, as well as developers who develop directly for UK academia.
- Yes, you can be negative (honesty and frankness much better than spin) – but nothing personal and no swearing.
- Examples are awesome.
Send your submissions to john@virtualworldwatch.net – thanks.
Oh – and, as per the previous snapshot, 5 respondents who get their answers in by June 30th will be drawn out of a pickle jar and win £10 each (n.b. there’s a few winners of £10 from snapshot #8 who still haven’t claimed their loot).
+ + + + + The Questions + + + + +
Please do some or all of these – or ignore the lot and write something relevant instead.
1. What are you doing in virtual worlds? Teaching, learning, research, publicity, and/or anything else?
2. Going well? Not? Want to say why?
3. Money is tight. The ‘golden age’ of education money may be ending. How are you getting funded? How do you think your virtual world activities will be funded in the future?
4. Long distance travel is increasingly precarious. Ash, strikes and airlines going under ground flights. Travel is expensive (even in the UK with extortionate train fares) and takes up a lot of time. Virtual Worlds could, possibly, be used instead of many workshops, conferences, meetings et al. Your thoughts on this? And how do virtual worlds such as Second Life stack up against other event-replacing media such as Elluminate and Skype?
5. Second Life. Using just that, or considering other virtual worlds? If so, why?
6. Problems with universities blocking access to Second Life. Is anyone still having that, or are we over it now?
7. Handling large numbers of students in virtual worlds simultaneously i.e. more than 30. Do you have experience of this? How did it go?
8. What do you think of the new Second Life viewer, both the UI/usability changes and the new functionality it enables (e.g. media on a prim)?
9. Do you have a view on the new Second Life Terms of Service conditions and ownership rights which are creating a bit of a hoo-hah in some quarters? Do you think it will affect you? Does it matter in the grand scheme of things?
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.
Open Access Week has moved to Ning (funnily at the same time that lots of educators are considering ways to move out of Ning!). OA Week 2010 will run from October 18th to 24th – plenty of time to start planning and thinking about what you’ll do to support and promote Open Access…
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
Writing today at the Innovation in Application Development event in Stirling, put together by Scotland’s Colleges (formerly SFEU). Just now Nigel Kennington is demonstrating using Alice to teach programming, and discussing what aspects of computer programming can be taught with Alice. He’s had a very good experience in the lower levels – with much higher engagement from students.
Next up is a demonstration of using XNA, and this morning there were a pair of Apple talks on iPhone development. I’ll be closing the day talking about teaching programming with scripting in Second Life and OpenSim. As this talk is for colleges where many students will be under 18, I’ll be focussing on OpenSim. I was going to use Tony Hirst’s feedshow but it seems to be broken – but you can grab the ‘presentation’ part of my talk (I’ll try to spend more time actually *in* OpenSim, showing how it works, and what can be done) from delicious here:
(After a number of slow months with few posts, March looks a lot busier as I try to get back into the habit of keeping notes!)
The Higher Education Academy’s subject centre in Information and Computer Science is holding it’s 10th workshop on teaching programming at the end of March in Brighton. Details on the workshop here.
The afternoon of the workshop is heavily loaded with presentations related to the use of game based learning, and learning through game development – the final three presentations being:
Michaela Black – Successful Game Based Learning for Programming
Colin Price – Learning and Teaching Programming using the Unreal Tournament Game Engine
Kent McClymond – Teaching and Learning Programming Through Computer Games
Places are still available if you want to attend. I won’t be there, sadly, but I’ll be checking back after the 30th – the HEA ICS usually put presentation materials online.