As for what I learned, honestly, I’m more interested in what I learned with the follow up activity for the quest. This time, instead of just a “go reflect in your blog” instructions, we were asked to participate in a VoiceThread.

And I can honestly now say...I’m sorry former students who I made respond to a VoiceThread with LOTs of other students. There was NO way I was going to read and/or listen to everyone’s comments before posting. Reality check...I just wasn’t going to spend the time. Not that I haven’t read about and/or heard about one of the good practices for online discussion management is to keep smaller groups...but this experience really drove that home. Currently I don’t use lots of discussion boards (I’m more of a “go blog and read a few of your classmate’s blogs” kinda girl); however, this activity has got me seriously rethinking how I manage reading and replying to student dialogue in my classes. 

First I watched Tom Chatfield’s “7 ways games reward the brain.”

The second video I watched was David Perry’s “Are games better than life?” The video includes an excerpt from Michael Highland’s film “As Real as Your Life.”

The third video I watched was Jane McGonigal’s “Gaming can make a better world”

Chatfield’s video gave overwhelming numbers about how many people are playing games, how many hours, and how much real-world money is being spent in virtual worlds on virtual objects (the other videos also gave awe-inspiring numbers as well). Ultimately, all these statistics got me thinking about “what motivates the game play?” How can education tap into that motivation? The face that McGonigal showed of the gameplayer on the verge of the Epic Win (I think that was the term) got me thinking about this dichotomy between how we construct younger generations as unfocused multitaskers (when we talk about them and their mobile technologies) and overfocused addicts (when we talk about them and gaming). This is a fascinating distinction that is tied to the type of technology associated with the assumption being made. Something I’ve been thinking about is how to get students to learn to distinguish between “work” that can be done while multitasking and “work” that requires time, energy, and focus. Duh…it appears they already have. How can we help construct learning exercises that engage both of these behaviors and help students become self aware about engaging them as well?

I really enjoyed how both Chatfield’s and Perry’s focus on the emotional, social, and cultural aspects of the game. This actually got me thinking about how people who are “engaged” by technology are sometimes dismissed as “just wanting to play with the new toys” (especially teachers). In other words, teachers who distrust technologies dismiss those who play with new technologies. One aspect of my dissertation data I loved was how every teacher, whether they were a bleeding-edge Beta adopter or the latest-of-the-late adopter, said they would not implement a new technology unless they could articulate how/why they thought it would better facilitate learning. This gets back to the point about emotional, social, and cultural aspects of gaming…gaming and gaming technologies are just the tools or applications to DO the emotional, social, and cultural work.  Of course the technologies can carry biases to how the designers and programmers think (yes, yes Cindy Selfe…that article always sticks!), however, it is still the human pushing the button or pulling the trigger.

I liked when Perry (I think, maybe it was Chatfield) was talking about all the data gaming systems are collecting about their players. On the one hand, this is Orwellian scary; however, as an educator it got me thinking…”all that data might appease the politicians screaming for data.” In other words, could constructing courses more like games give us access to more data that would help feed the quantitative assessment Nazis? And what I like about this is that we can still ask for qualitative assessment within the game; however, the act of gamifying it turns some of that qualitative materials into the quantitative numbers the bean-counters want.

Finally, I do appreciate Chatfield and McGonigal giving lists and terms to work with as I think about teaching and learning. (It’s the lingering modernists/structuralist in me…hey, you can’t go post-modern/structuralist without first having the walls, barriers, or categories to break.) Chatfield’s 7 rewards are useful in thinking how to design courses/learning:

1. Experience bars measuring progress…how easy is this with gradebooks, really?!
2. Multiple long & short term goals…this connects to the need that faculty need to give students both short-term, low-stakes learning activities besides the longer, high-stakes assessment activities.
3. Reward effort-don’t punish failure…this definitely jives with how I’ve been constructing homework increasingly with a “just do it” attitude; and if they really need to revise it, let them!
4. Rapid, frequent, clear feedback…yeah, I wish I was better at this. This is how these mass-courses (especially seeing in math) are being developed. I think this is going to be the crux of the problem of trying to make mass-FYC courses; most of us who teach FYC don’t trust computer graded assessment of writing and reading/responding takes time.
5. An element of uncertainty…or, build in surprises. I think this is smart and asks instructors to be creative; most of which contemporary politics has squashed out of teachers. Could this be an opportunity to reclaim it (and reclaim all the amazing people who have left the teaching profession”?
6. Identifying Windows of Enhanced Engagement-a period when the brain is read to learn in terms of activity memory and confidence…ah, yeah…of course I want to learn how to better identify and engage this time/window.
7. Other people-aka, we are social critters and enjoy working together…Interestingly this is one of the skills that business and industry is always howling that graduates don’t have enough practice doing. Will building course activities into a game make cooperative/collaborative learning both easier for the instructor to facilitate as well as for students to pallet (many don’t like doing it)?

McGonigal said that gamers were good at the following:

• Having Urgent Optimism, extreme self motivation
• Weaving a tight Social Fabric
• Blissful Productivity…happier working hard
• Desire Epic Meaning—attached to meaningful work

Therefore, she claims, “Gamers are Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals…only problem is, only believe can change virtual worlds instead of the ‘real’ world.” Isn’t this just an issue of transfer? Haven’t those of us in education been juggling this problem…forever? But maybe we’re the ones to help with it?

Right now I’m thinking about a couple things as I consider building courses, or major units in a course, as games. First, building in rewards that support collaborative and cooperative learning. Second, building serious reflective, portfolio style assessments. Third, balancing consumption quests/activities with production quests/activities. Fourth, not “giving” everything to the students; having them find materials (ideally feedback into the system). Fifth, using rewards to scaffold learning and ensure course objectives are met...also to motivate learning!
At this point all I can say is “ODU grad students, tighten your seat belts and keep your hands in the vehicle at all times; it’s going to be a wild ride!”

pic of Kix and I (Puppytoes) bald in Second Life

After today, my Follow Cost in Twitter is definitely going to go up! As of today, my follow cost is 2.27 per day with 13.55 per day with the last 100 updates. So those of you following me...watch out!

But what does this have to do with me being bald in Second Life (SL). Well, tomorrow I present at nmc‘s Rock the Academy fall virtual symposium. And we are presenting in Second Life. Well, I’ve played; however, I’ve been too lazy to really change up my avatar. And although I’ve been trying to get the time to “pimp out” my avatar, of course, I’m down to the wire and trying to do it at the last minute. When I should be grading papers for my Women & Film class tonight, I’m instead trying to run around in SL figuring out how to buy clothes, get dressed, not embarrass myself and flash the world...you know, basic newbie things.

After wandering around by myself for a while, I wailed on Twitter with a “crud, crud, crud.” And Twitter came to the rescue! Before I knew it, I had more people than I could interact with trying to help me “get dressed” in SL. So this blog is a big “thank you” to @whitetshirts (aka Something), @greenteach3 (aka Faythe), and @befitt (aka Kix) for helping me out today. This is also a general thank you to the microblog-o-sphere as well. And this is finally a reflective moment about the extreme usefulness of Twitter as a professional tool for those who work and play in our contemporary techno-culture. Not only is Twitter worthwhile to study in 21st century scholarship, it is a scholarly tool for the 21st century as well!

pic of Kix and I hanging out at the nmc virtual reception. I won $1000L for the scavenger hunt!

now if I could just figure out how to get my cool purple boots to look right on my funky SL feet…

Carlson @ TechHerding asks a good question about what would happen to technical training if it were to happen via the Radiohead model. I also think he provides some interesting ideas about what might happen. Faster availability and easier demonstration of value being two biggies that impact teaching, learning, and scholarship.

My question is, what if we did this to scholarship? I think one of the signs of scholarship in the 21st century is the move to “open” scholarship that freely shares itself and invites collaboration. Obviously the technologies are there to support this model; but, as in the music industry, it is the economic infrastructure (tenure) that heavily resists change. Not ironically, the changes that Carlson forecasts for teaching and learning are the same for scholarship:

1. Dramatically Lower Costs. No more paper journals, printed monographs, or in the red university presses.
2. Dramatically Faster Availability. Finish your content, put a PDF up on the web. Done. (not a thing changes from Carlson’s point)
3. Dramatically Easier Demonstration of Value. You could show administrators and tenure committees that some content was valued highly, and that some was not. And come on, doesn’t the hyper-specialization of cable television demonstrate that although this would not be controlled peer review, who else is going to subscribe to the output of your RSS publication feed except others in your field? And tracking of citations becomes uber-easy!
4. Dramatically Happier Colleagues. Nobody will have an issue with something they pay for only if they like it. (again, Carlson said it all)
5. Dramatically Different You. In this new world, you’ll get immediate feedback on what you’re providing, and have immediate demonstration of the value (or lack thereof) that you add. If that scares you, it probably should. (yup…Carlson got this right!)

So, does the possibility of publishing scholarship in this world scare you? If so, it probably should. If not, get cracking! Start your own blog like Henry Jenkins, request that the journals in your field have online components that publish in blog with comment features and RSS output (like Flow) or wiki format that invites reader feedback, and ideally revision (like Kairos Praxis). We can’t make this a reality until we have a critical mass doing it! But I imagine I’m preaching to the choir, so how do we spread the word of Radiohead?

I had this brainstorm the other night as I was crazily putting together a course about web-based teaching and learning...a visual journal using one of the online image repositories. I guess this isn’t that “new” of an idea; in fact, I’m sure it came to my mind as Alan Levine‘s ”50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” bounced around in my head. So as I’m writing this I’m sending out a THANKS to Alan!

Here is the start of my visual journal about teaching a class of teachers about teaching in web-based environments (say that ten times fast). And if you want to see the captions and comments, or subscribe to the RSS feed, visit my visual journal.

Dear readers...do you know of any other blog postings where the “content” is in the replies? If so, please reply below.

And that is more than the well-intended platitude that knowledge is an infinite process,much more subjectively so in the humanities, and that the idea of bringing a strand of thought to completion is but an illusion, and essentially incompatible with modalities of research, scholarship, and thought in the humanities. The current practice of conferring far more cultural capital on the full length book than on the shorter work essentially pleads indifference to the unpredictable and infinite continuity of knowledge-production, which can occur even within one person’s consciousness. (pp. 650-651).

Majumdar does not discredit that some ideas need book length works; however, as those of us in rhet/comp would claim, purpose, audience, and in this case topic should drive publishing decisions, not the length demanded by a promotion and tenure committee.
Ultimately, this just makes me keep on, keepin on. Nielsen’s article helps me to understand why I might not blog as much as I want to and why my blogs tend to be a bit longer than what I regularly see. Majumdar’s opinion piece helps justify my continued push for alternative methods of research and publication.
P.S. It almost killed me to title my blog this way; however, isn’t it ironic that intellectually we love “fat” but aesthetically we desire “skinny”?

As I was reading an article to check a reference in the edited collection I’m working on, Rhetorically Rethinking Usability I came across a table (figure 1) that compares characteristics between usability testing and traditional experiments (Dieli, 1989).

Figure 1: Some Characteristics of a Usability Test Compared with Those of a Classic, Controlled, Experiment

(Dieli, 1989, p. 275).

In the article Dieli (1989) was discussing how the context of actual usability testing requires flexibility and adaptation in a manner that can not replicate nor produce the methods and products desired by traditional researchers. I think people doing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), especially those of use at a two-year college, can identify greatly with Dieli’s point. I’ll admit, I’m tired of trying to explain the how and why it is almost impossible for me to construct a methodologically “sound” empirical study in my SoTL research about teaching with technology. I think the table above provides some ways to think about how and why my frustrations are valid.

Figure 2: Some Characteristics of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Those of a Classic, Controlled, Experiment

By filling in the second table, I’m better able to articulate how/where there is breakdown between the work I want to do and produce with more “traditional” concepts of scholarship and publication. The “n” row acknowledges that these types of studies will rarely ever be “statistically significant.” This implies two things: first, more qualitative methods need to be included and accepted as valid; and second, that “experience” and “lore” do need to be given some credit an authority.

The “confounds” row acknowledges that classrooms are not sterile environments, period! Again, there will always be considerations about other contributing factors. The “time” row shows were we begin to see the possibilities to different types of SoTL research methods and publications emerging. Obviously an teacher/research can develop a traditional empirical study that uses some classes as the experimental group, others as control, and repeat it over different semesters to get a statistically significant number of participants. Reality check in my world, why would I teach two sections of the same class using different methods, especially if I’m teaching four or five courses? And then, ethically, if I sincerely believe a method is going to better facilitate learning, am I going to not do it with other students (I guess the medical field has to deal with this ethical dilemma all the time, I’ll have to ask my dad about it).

As I started to explain in the discussion of the “time” row, you could either be doing SoTL research that is much more “traditional” and use a whole session’s worth of classes as pilots. However, if you do SoTL research more like I do, either every session is a “pilot,” or they are never “pilots.” Since I like to research how new technologies better facilitate teaching and learning, I’m always trying a new technology or a newer technology in a different manner.

This always beta method of research is what I’m thinking of when I talk about Just in Time Scholarship (JiTS). Basically the research is always in pilot or process; therefore, the “reporting” or publication is just a snapshot in time of the results. Obviously this can be published in more traditional modes, journals and books; however, with the slow time to publication of those media, the content is woefully outdated by the time it is actually read by the intended audience. The JiTS is much better suited for publication in blogs and wikis. Both the publication and critique/commentary processes are faster. And just because its blogging and wikis doesn’t mean it can’t still be peer reviewed! Or, if the person is publishing “results” regularly, think blogging, the peer review can occur after the “publication” of the information in the reply section of the blog posting.

References
Dieli, Mary. (1989). The usability process: Working with iterative design principles. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 32(4): 272-278. Retrieved July 5, 2007, from IEEE Electric Library Online.