Mobile Learning

Today is a big day.

I sent an email to the main groups on campus, announcing a time to gather together to discuss the ramifications of this this new media on the process of learning.

The problem is that I’ve drunk the coolaid.

I really believe that as much as personal computing has changed our world, as much as the networking of digital devices have changed our lives, mobile, hyper-personal networked devices are going to to bring us around to a post Gutenberg scenario that no one can imagine. This time around we have the legal definitions of creative commons licenses combined with the culture and technology of a Wikipedia generation. But now all that is in your pocket.

As my mentor Kurt Squire has said, “What are you going to do when every student has a broadband connection of their own?” Its a valid question. Education is more than a process of curation. The postmodern theories and constructionist philosophies of the last 50 years are being proven through instantiation. Folks call it web 2.0, participatory media and many other things. The bottom line is that we are gaining the ability to communicate and interact with each other in ways beyond our imagination. All of a sudden we have the tools to enable democracy in an order of magnitude beyond what even Dewey ever dreamed.

At the same moment, 8th grade math failures are being elected the king of hundreds of human players in massively multilayer videogames played online. Socially awkward teenagers are writing the guts of the next 200 million dollar screenplays of angsty vampire and British magician tales.

The world has turned upside down and we are all humbled before one another in a wold of distributed expertise and relevance. Our qualifications are not evaluated in terms of qualification or diploma but practical value. Phds are purchased over paypal by $50 ads found on the back of wired magazine for $200, but an invitation to speak at TED about what you have actually done is priceless.

As these epistomologies mate with new medias and technologies, fascinating things emerge in many areas of our society. For the time being, I’m excited to be part of the next generation of dreamers that are looking forward to how we can enable kids to overcome the oppression they are living under and embrace the a passion to learn and grow in the areas that make them unique. I pray that not a single student will ever have to hear that they are stupid because they are smart enough to see that school is irreverent and aims to steal their individuality.

Informal, Situated, Embodied, Personal. These are the concepts that lie underneath the mobile learning revolution. I’m looking forward to see how through new medias we can re-address the old topics and dream again about what we would like our world to look like.

My vote is on an educational system where teachers and students alike are humbled before their domains, encountering each other in authentic experiences and practical inquiries into what makes our world so fantastic.

Its a bold wish I know, but hey, we have to start with a vision.

Best .22 Ammo in Savage Mark II

I know,It’s kinda weird.

I live in one of the most progressive cities in the States united and I’m really into shooting guns. My favorite gun is a CZ 550 chambered for a .270. I also have a 12 gauge semi-automatic and most recently, a Savage Arms Mark II, .22 bolt action with a 4-12×40mm adjustable objective scope.

I wanted the .22 to learn marksmanship and to do that, I need to make sure that my rifle is as accurate as it can be (so I can see what mistakes I am making) and I wanted it to feel substantial like my .270. Overall, I’m quite happy with the Savage. In all honesty, its a bit of a toy in comparison to my CZ, but it has a nice weight and a good trigger and I’m hoping can be quite accurate out to 100 or 200 yards, even if it does drop about 3 feet!

After I picked it up and headed out to the range, I discovered the age old optics issue of parallax and upgraded the scope. Now I’m on to tuning ammo.

That said, here are the results of today’s shooting 15 rounds or 6 different kinds of inexpensive ammo in a series, then following up with 10 rounds of each. All shots were at 25 yards with some 10-15mi/h winds. Judge for yourself which held the tightest groups, but from here on, I’ll be buying the Peters and the Thunderbolt, that is after I try some proper CCI and Eley.

Tuesday FIE 2009 Schedule

Yesterday I found my iphone’s browser pointed at my schedule blog post quite a few times to remind me of where to go. I thought I’d do it again.

Tuesday Morning 10-11:30am

Start in La Duquesta Room

• ASSESSING INQUIRY LEARNING IN A CIRCUITS/ELECTRONICS COURSE
• INTEGRATING SENSING AND INFORMATION PROCESSING IN AN ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM
• A STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA IN AN UNDERGRADUATE ELECTRICAL CIRCUITS COURSE
• WORK IN PROGRESS – INTEGRATING ENERGY ISSUES AND TECHNOLOGIES INTO AN ELECTRICAL OR COMPUTER ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

Switch to La Espada Room

• DO MULTI-USER VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS REALLY ENHANCE STUDENT’S MOTIVATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION?

Tuesday 1-3pm

La DuQuesa Room

• THE BUSINESS OF SERVICE LEARNING
• WORK IN PROGRESS – USING THE VIRTUAL WORLD TO IMPROVE OUR WORLD
• WORK IN PROGRESS – DESCRIPTION OF A SERVICE LEARNING PROJECT TO DESIGN ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES TO AID THE VISUALLY-IMPAIRED IN INDIA
• INTEGRATING STUDENTS’ LEARNING EXPERIENCES THROUGH DELIBERATE REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
• WORK IN PROGRESS – INTEGRATING HUMANITARIAN COURSE MODULES INTO ENGINEERING COURSEWORK

Tuesday 3:30-5pm

La DuQuesa Room

• SOCIAL MEDIA THEORY AND PRACTICE: LESSONS LEARNED FOR A PIONEERING COURSE
• WORK IN PROGRESS – BREAKING FREE OF THE LABORATORY USING PDAS

Beautiful Game Trailer: Machinarium

Gorgeous 2d art, subtle music, puzzles galore and I love the way they demo a pictorial version of a dialog system with a though bubble instead. Anyone played it?

Using the WiiMote for Engagement in First Year Engineering – Tomas Daniels

Introduction to Computer Engineering is a course that has about 200 students a year.

It is important to build problem solving and make links to other courses.

The WiiMote

• can measure +/- G forces @ about 50hz, when it works.
• has an embedded system that parses data before sending
• bluetooth
• has a 1024×768 IR camera that finds the 4 hottest IR sources in the room.
• cheap!

Wiiwrap is a windows cmd tool that outputs comma seperated values that can be used by another program. For example: “wiiwrap /A | lab6″

This allows the student to write “lab6″ to do something interesting with the data.

This group does not teach physics, but programming. For example:

• Determine which end it up (if statements)
• Determine which axis is changing
• Wiidrop Lab: Put the wiimote in a foam football and throw it, measuring all the cool physics

From the earlier course that didn’t use the Wiimote, they saw a 10-29% increase in motivation based on student surveys.

In the future they are playing with a add-on that adds (2) 2-D gyros.

Pairwork in Learning (not groups or singletons)

What are the factors?

• Complementary skills, strengths and personality traits are relative to the task at hand.
• Pairs have the least amount of coordination costs
• Dialectic Creativity. With a partner, its “hard to put out bs and let it stand.” This moves the process from a mental debate to a real debate.
• Coordination Costs include negotiation, decisions, distribution of work, synchronizing information. These costs are at least linear and more likely quadratic in relation to team size.
• Motivational Leveling. We all have motivation swings, pairs put this in check.
• Negotiation in Miniature.  Instead of having different people to “side with,” the individuals in a pair have to negotiate simply.

The goal is to build three models that can be quantified to compare individual vs. pair work

In his paper, they have algebraically modeled three of the above and provided a mathematical basis to understand the gains in pairwork.

Implication: Give pairs more attention

A tool to analyze qualitative aspects of social networks

“You also have to prepare them for the work market and social competence”

Representing social networks currently allows for

• Qualitative Relations
• Clusters
• Info flow

But the Negotiation of Meaning and Multiple points of view are not represented in current models and the purpose of this study.

Studying the Negotion of meaning

• Evolution of concepts – For example, in week one we can track three meanings for a word but ass the weeks go on we can see if those converge. It might be that we just see a stubborn student stay separate.
• We can also visualize the personal/professional empathy the students have for each others point of view, which will have an effect on any collaboration

To really boil it down, the goal is to visualize different ways that social interactions and perceptions can be visualized over time. MY questions is how those relate to group performance.

Themes I’m looking for at FIE2009

Attending a conference can be hard work. There are hundreds of folks presenting about things they are really interested in and the conference organizers do their best to collect those ideas into themes into 1.5 hour sessions. The problem is that every participant is organizing based on their own theme.

If this was simply a wiki, we could just tag-cloud the heck out of it and everyone would have their own custom schedule. In real life however, there are overhead costs of switching rooms and a bunch of work to plan it all out.

That said, here are the themes I am interested in seeing:

informal learning, contextualized learning, project-based pedagogues, new media (social, interactive, mobile)

So here is the plan for today

Monday 10-11

Start in La Princeta Room

• THE USE OF DIGITAL MANIPULATIVES IN K-12: ROBOTICS, GPS/GIS AND PROGRAMMING

Leave Session early, Jump to La Vista Room

• WORK IN PROGRESS – TOWARDS A TOOL TO ANALYZE QUALITATIVE ASPECTS OF THE RELATIONS AMONG MEMBERS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS
• PATTERNS IN STUDENT ASSESSMENT OF PROBLEM-SOLVING SOFTWARE
• INCORPORATING FLEXIBLE, CONFIGURABLE AND SCALABLE SECURITY TO THE EDUCATION COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS
• THE IMPORTANCE OF PAIRWORK IN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES

Monday 2-4

Start in La Condesa East

• INTEGRATING ENGAGEMENT AND FIRST YEAR PROBLEM SOLVING USING GAME CONTROLLER TECHNOLOGY
• APPLICATION OF MODIFIED PERCEIVED LEARNING PROBLEM INVENTORY (PLPI) TO INVESTIGATE PERFORMANCE IN INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMMING

Leave Session, jump to El Mirador West

• PANEL – MEASURING THE IMPACTS OF PROJECT-BASED SERVICE LEARNING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Monday 4:30-6

Start in La Condesa East

• WORK IN PROGRESS – USE OF GUIDED INQUIRY AS AN ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUE IN ENGINEERING
• PRODUCT-BASED LEARNING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EDUCATION
• ACTIVE LEARNING THROUGH PROBLEM BASED LEARNING METHODOLOGY IN ENGINEERING

Move to La Condesa West

• DO FACULTY-STUDENT COLLABORATIONS AFFECT ACHIEVEMENT IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNICAL FIELDS? A LARGE-SCALE ANALYSIS

Text in Videogames – Kevin Harris TOT session

Input Systems

No Player Input

• Writing on the wall in L4D
• Training in World of Goo
• Ambiance

Player Selection

Often a player is able to choose an option and the system responds. These choices are prexisting and the player has little creativity involved. There are a few ways for the player to interface:

• A multiple choice
• A mini-game like oblivian’s bribe system
• In game actions with no conversation mode (Adom)

Direct Input

When it works, it gives the player a sense of creativity. The problem is that it often doesn’t parse correctly.

Templates

“You hit the X and Y wounded him”

This format of text is created by having the player select the x and y. The obvious advantage it that is gives more control to the player that a multiple choice interaction, but is much easier for the system to parse than direct text input.

Output Systems

Scripted

Completely predefined text that plays out like a cut-scene.

Templated

“You hit the X and Y wounded him”

Gives a fair amount of objects. Not good for multiple language support. Limited use.

Generated

Facade and the Postmodern text generator

Puzzles in Games – Jan Cheetham

“Puzzles are fun and have a right answer” Kim

“Puzzles are games that are not fun to replay” – Shell

Like Games:

• Systems in which players engage in conflict
• Defined by rules
• Quantifiable outcome
• Have a goal of finding the dominant strategy

Unlike Games:

• Don’t respond?
• Stop being fun once you know the dominant stratigy

Puzzle games contain puzzles embedded into the environment of the game

Good Examples: Tetris, Zelda, etc.

Bad Example: 7th Guest. No real connection between the puzzle and the environment

Whats good about puzzles in games?

• They force the player to stop and think
• They force the player to make conceptual shifts
• They serve as accessible tools for figuring out strategies

Principles of Designing good Puzzles

1. Make the goal easily understandible
2. Make it easy to get started (Kim: Build a new Toy that is fun to play with)
   1. Does it act like something they have seen before?
3. Give a sense of progress (not like solving a riddle)
   1. What does it mean to make progress?
   2. Is there enough progress? Could you add more progression?
   3. Is all progress visible?
   4. Give a sense of solvability (rubrik’s cube comes solved)
   5. Increase difficulty gradually
4. Parallelism lets the player rest (Give many challenges in parallel so they can work on something else if they get stuck)
   1. Are there bottlenecks in the design where players could get stuck?
   2. Are the parallel challenges different enough?
   3. Are parallel challenges interrelated?
5. Pyramid structure extends interest (low level puzzles provide clues to higher level puzzles)
   1. Can all pieces of the puzzle fit together into a single challenge at the end
   2. Do the challenges increase in difficulty
   3. IS the challenge at the top interesting?
6. Hints extend interest (renew hope and curiosity)
7. Give the Answer
8. Perceptual shifts are a double-edged sword