E-Learning and Digital Media |
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Volume 2 Number 1 2005 |
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Other issues available | Journal home page | Publisher home page | |||
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CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text] | |||
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| Editorial,
pages 1‑4
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| EDITORIAL |
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| In the second article in this issue Martin Oliver & Keith Trigwell pose the question of whether and how the concept of ‘blended learning’ might be redeemed. In the course of their argument Oliver & Trigwell note that it is notoriously hard to define what counts as ‘e-learning’ and that from some perspectives ‘almost anything that has had any connection with computers may count as e‑learning’. In the context of trying to make sense of blended learning as some mix or other of ‘e‑learning’ and ‘traditional learning’, this presents deep conceptual as well as theoretical and practical issues. At the same time, and on the other hand, however, this same ‘elasticity’ portends rich diversity and relatedness among themes that might productively be explored within a forum dedicated to academic investigation of e-learning. This fourth issue of the journal cashes in this promise with interest. The issue opens with an article by James Gee called ‘Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines’. This article draws upon and extends Gee’s powerful and influential work in his two recent books, What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, and Situated Language and Learning, and rehearses the theme of empowerment through gaming developed in his forthcoming book Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul. Gee discusses 13 effective learning principles evident in ‘good’ video games in relation to ‘Empowered Learners’, ‘Problem Solving’ and ‘Understanding’. Each principle is treated systematically in four steps. The principle is spelled out, its application in gaming is described, typical examples are sketched, and a brief comment about the principle in relation to education is provided. The gulf between the learning worlds of video gaming and formal education respectively widens as the argument proceeds. The conclusion unfolds, inexorably: When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong. They trigger deep learning that is itself part and parcel of the fun. It is what makes good games deep. For those interested in spreading games and game technology into schools, workplaces, and other learning sites, it is striking to meditate on how few of the learning principles I have sketched out here can be found in so-called educational games. ‘Non-educational’ games for young people, such as Pajama Sam, Animal Crossing, Mario Sunshine, and Pikmin, all use many of the principles fully and well. Not so for many a product used in school or for business or workplace learning. It is often said that what stops games from spreading to educational sites is their cost, where people usually have in mind the wonderful ‘eye candy’ that games have become. But I would suggest that it is the cost to implement the above principles that is the real barrier. And the cost here is not just monetary. It is the cost, as well, of changing people’s minds about learning – how and where it is done. It is the cost of changing one of our most change-resistant institutions: schools. Martin Oliver & Keith Trigwell take up the theme of blended learning raised by Neil Anderson and Michael Henderson in the previous issue. Oliver & Trigwell’s argument can, perhaps, be seen as a specific (remedial) case study of a quite pervasive phenomenon: namely, a conceptual ‘slackness’ associated with this early moment in the development of computer-mediated learning cultures. They undertake a critical philosophical analysis of the following range of different ‘mixes’ that authors have identified as forms of blended learning:
From their analysis they conclude that ‘by any definition there is little merit in keeping the term ‘blended learning’ as it is currently understood’. Not the least of the anomalies they detect in the term is the tendency for definitions of blended learning to emphasize aspects of teaching/ instruction and the teacher/instructor/technology. Rather than giving the term up as lost, however, they draw on recent work from variation theory to try and redeem blended learning for useful educational ends. Variation theory builds on the idea that if learning is to occur learners must experience variation. Unless human beings experience certain patterns of variation they simply cannot develop certain ways of thinking. From this basis they argue for a radically different concept of blended learning from those currently available: Rebuilding the concept of blended learning from a grounding in learning theory highlights the potential of designing around varied experiences that may lead to learning. This subversive (but logical) reinterpretation shifts the emphasis dramatically, from teacher to learner, from content to experience and from naively conceptualised technologies to pedagogy. Angela Thomas’s article, ‘Children Online: learning in a virtual community of practice’, explores the practices of a group of 60 young people participating in an online role-playing game space based on the Tolkien world of Middle Earth. Thomas argues that the type of learning the young people engage in within the Gathering of the Elves community reflects Etienne Wenger’s social model of learning within communities of practice. The argument draws on a rich store of data collected in extensive online interviews and conversations with key participants in the Elves community to elucidate the four key constructs in Wenger’s model: ‘meaning’, ‘practice’, ‘community’ and ‘identity’. Key points in Thomas’s account resonate with elements in Gee’s work – notwithstanding differences in their respective orientations to communities of practice. For example, Elianna, the 13-year-old girl who established the Elves community, makes light of the achievement, deflecting appreciation to the team of friends who help administer the site. Elianna says she just had the idea to create the community, and it was easy because her friends helped develop it. Similarly, Elianna saw nothing remarkable about working through diverse processes to set up the site and its community: nah, it’s easy ... you just mess around for a bit and you get it ... . You just have to figure out which ‘button’ works which part lol ... . and yeah, just about ... most of it you have to change back and forth, and it’s like, ok, so this one changes this and that one changes that, and you just kept messing with it til you work it out. Thomas homes in on two important points here. The first is the significance of collaboration. Making the world and participating in it together with her friends constituted, in Wenger’s terms, ‘a negotiated world of experience and meaning’. The second key point involves Elianna’s account of the method employed for learning what to do, which was a process of trial and error, or puzzling it out. The argument develops into a data-rich portrait of deep, motivated learning. In The Gathering of the Elves: children are working at a complex level in order to communicate effectively and efficiently. But through their desires to negotiate the mediated environment of communication, children work together to solve problems, or they teach themselves through self-study, self-initiated research, and trial and error. Sometimes children do have an expert other to assist them, as articulated in Vygotskian notions of learning. But more often than not, the desire to get things done quickly, for the social purposes of both personal development and for the betterment of the community, inspires a passion and hunger in them to learn for themselves or in collaboration with other novices ... the level of skills children achieve in the pursuit of active and committed citizenship in virtual communities may exceed expectations of teachers in schools. The opportunities for freedom of expression, for the exercise of power, and for the opportunities to create meaningful relationships with others, offer children a place where they can be themselves, and the motivation to belong is the drive for learning. In the fourth article James Levin, Nicholas Burbules & Bertram Bruce present related case studies of how student work can be made systematically available for use by other people beyond the immediate learning context in which it has been produced. ‘From Student Work to Exemplary Educational Resources: the case of the CTER White Papers’ is based on work done by student cohorts in CTER OnLine, an online Master of Education program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The article begins by describing three interactional frameworks used to support creating and maintaining – producing, editing and updating – a series of White Papers on ‘Technology Issues for Educators’. (The ‘papers’ were websites containing student-drafted texts on dimensions of issues like access, credibility and web evaluation, privacy and commercialism, as well as collections of web resources pertinent to the issues, and specific policy recommendations associated with some of the issues.) The authors then evaluate the impact of the ‘papers’ on the students who produced them and on the wider world of web users. Finally, the article presents a general framework by which student work can be embedded in the wider world beyond school-based learning, such that the world of learning can serve as a valuable resource for the world outside education. This framework is conceptualized as ‘the open publishing of exemplary educational resources (OPEER)’ and argues that it has two important distinctive advantages beyond normal web publishing:
In ‘Digikids: cool dudes and the new writing’, Guy Merchant reports research from a project investigating on-screen writing by a small group of 9 and 10 year-olds involved in an interactive writing project in England. During a six-week period eight students worked in pairs to create a local myth, collaborating with researchers who wrote in role as web journalists. The children transformed real and imagined places, events and characters into local myths which were written up on screen and published as web pages. Data collection included written narratives, notebooks, archived email communication, graphics, the screen-written myths, and interview data based on questions intended to explore the children’s attitudes toward and experiences of digital writing. The article explores four main themes that became coding categories for the data:
‘New Media: from metaphors of inevitability to metaphors of possibility’ by Susan Braley is a short monograph that invites humanities professors (and others) to reconceptualize the computer as a lively creative medium and a space to be entered and explored. It sets out from Steven Johnson’s argument (from Interface Culture, 1997) that rather than our interfaces lacking in imaginative depth and complexity, we lack the ‘critical ability to deal with them in anything but the most rudimentary terms’. Braley’s article builds on her conviction that ‘a crucial step in transforming our perception of educational technologies’ involves examining ‘the metaphors we use to describe them’. Drawing on rich examples from contemporary pedagogy, fiction, and theory, Braley elaborates metaphors designed to allay fears of computing culture that are widespread within the humanities: namely, that the computer:
Throughout the larger second part of the article, Braley continues to interweave theory, fiction-art, and examples of cutting-edge projects (pedagogical and otherwise) into vivid descriptions of possibilities for engaging electronic media in classrooms. These lively descriptions are pursued under a series of evocative themes: Post/Polyliteracy, Post-humanity, Post-identity, Postnation/ transculture, Post-discipline, and the Post-symbolic. Fittingly, the spirit and purpose of Braley’s article is, perhaps, best expressed in the final words of her text, where she reflects on how the work of one of her key informants, Diane Slattery, might (hopefully) appear to ‘the still book-bound humanities professor’. For this person: Slattery’s vision is bewildering, other-worldly; however, it is also unmistakably exciting. Slattery herself acknowledges that the warp-speed shifts in technology are unsettling, yet, as extraordinary female flaneur, she invites us to leap the gap and – ‘quite physically – dance with our machines’. (Slattery and others, ‘From Interface to Interspace’) The issue concludes with Brian Boyd’s review of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s book New Literacies: changing knowledge and classroom learning (Open University Press, 2003). COLIN
LANKSHEAR |
| Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines |
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| This article asks how good video and computer game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games. The short answer is that designers of good games have hit on excellent methods for getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. The longer answer is more complex. Integral to this answer are the good principles of learning built into successful games. The author discusses 13 such principles under the headings of ‘Empowered Learners’, ‘Problem Solving’ and ‘Understanding’ and concludes that the main impediment to implementing these principles in formal education is cost. This, however, is not only (or even so much) monetary cost. It is, importantly, the cost of changing minds about how and where learning is done and of changing one of our most profoundly change-resistant institutions: the school. |
| Can ‘Blended Learning’ Be Redeemed? |
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| Although the term ‘blended learning’ is widely used, this article argues against it. Two arguments are advanced. The first is primarily philosophical, although it has several pragmatic implications. It proposes that ‘blending’ either relies on the idea of dichotomies which are suspect within the context of learning with technology or else becomes ineffective as a discriminating concept and is thus without purpose. The implication of this is that the term ‘blended’ should either be abandoned or, at the least, radically reconceived. The second argument proposes that learning, from the perspective of the learner, is rarely, if ever, the subject of blended learning. What is actually being addressed are forms of instruction, teaching, or at best, pedagogies. The implication of this is that the term ‘learning’ should be abandoned. The second half of the article attempts to redeem the concept of blended learning by arguing that learning gains attributed to blended learning may have their explanation in variation theory. It offers a new way to conceptualise what is being ‘blended’ that is theoretically coherent, philosophically defensible and pragmatically informative. The article concludes by setting an agenda for further work in this area. |
| Children Online: learning in a virtual community of practice |
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| This article argues that children in a particular virtual community are learning through their participation in the discursive and social practices of the community. Using Wenger’s model of ‘communities of practice’ the article illuminates examples of children’s learning that were a direct result of collaboration towards a common goal. Children regularly puzzled out problems together to find the answers, motivated by the desire to be successful and to gain status in the community. This type of learning is rarely attributed to children, as the field of education often relies upon a Vygotskian theorisation of learning through interaction with expert others. In this study, children often learned without an expert, using strategies such as trial and error, and discussion, and through the construction and transformation of their identities, both in and out of the fictional role-playing context. |
| From Student Work to Exemplary Educational Resources: the case of the CTER White Papers |
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| Within the existing system of education, student work rarely has any value beyond the particular course that it is created for. The work is graded and then usually discarded. The authors describe in this article a way that student work can be systematically made available for use by others beyond the immediate learning context within which it is created. They provide a case study in which this mechanism worked. They describe the benefits and costs of doing this, along with the broader implications this systematic publication of exemplary student work might have for the changing relationship between learning and doing, between education and the rest of society. This publication mechanism, called OPEER (open publishing of exemplary educational resources), can enable education to have an additional major positive impact on the rest of society, creating and maintaining quality-assured resources at a minimal additional cost. |
| Digikids: cool dudes and the new writing |
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| Research into the uses of digital literacy in the classroom is still in its infancy. Despite the proliferation of theoretical literature on ‘new literacies’, ‘multiliteracies’, and ‘technoliteracies’ and their impact on education there are fewer studies based on a systematic analysis of the new literacy practices that are beginning to emerge. The work of Werry, Shortis and Merchant has begun to investigate the new, hybridized language of digital texts seen in synchronous online communication, emails and text messages. These digital texts have been described by Ferrara as Interactive Written Discourse (IWD). This article builds on this work, drawing on an analysis of the on-screen writing of 9 and 10 year-old children involved in an interactive writing project. It shows how these young writers use and share their existing knowledge of popular electronic communication, developing sophisticated insights into the characteristics and possibilities of digital writing. |
| New Media in the Humanities: from inevitability to possibility |
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| The study ‘New Media in the Humanities: from metaphors of inevitability to metaphors of possibility,’ argues that using digital technologies in humanities classrooms (at the post-secondary level) is transformative for both students and professors. It begins by identifying and then allaying the fears that scholars in the humanities harbour: the computer reduces literacy, diminishes knowledge to mere information, annihilates the metaphysical in the academy, and disconnects the student from his/her humanity. The second section of the article outlines in detail the exciting possibilities of engaging electronic media in the classroom, which include moving beyond a single literacy to multiple ones (post-/polyliteracy), recognizing digital technologies as potential cognitive systems parallel to our own (post-humanity), evolving from notions of a single subjectivity to global interconnectedness (post-identity/ post-nation), transcending one’s chosen discipline in order to discover new interdisciplines via the Web (post-/transdiscipline), and exploding the confines of print in order to discover new e-discourses (post-symbolic). The study also provides case studies of Canadian and international scholars in the humanities who are putting these novel ideas into practice in the classroom. |
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