Yearly Archives: 2011

Assessing learner analytics

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Learner analytics use the experiences of a community [network?] of learners to help individual learners in that community to identify more effectively learning content from a potentially overwhelming set of choices.

Analytics and recommendations have generative power. The object recommended many not yet exist – it may be something that the learner must construct or that is constructed from the recommendation.

Analytics can be assessed from numerous perspectives, including: accuracy, adaptivity,  behaviour,  confidence, coverage,  coverage,  diversity,  drop-out rate,  effectiveness of learning,  efficiency of learning,  learner improvement,  novelty,  precision (comparing resources selected by user with those selected by algorithm),  prediction accuracy,  privacy,  reaction of learners,  recall (ratio of relevant results to those presented by algorithm) results,  risk,  robustness,  satisfaction, scalability,  serendipity,  trust, user preference,  utility.

(MUPPLE seminar – Hendrik Drachsler)

Personal environments for learning

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Philippe distinguishes between a personal information environment and a personal learning environment. [I know that in this case a personal learning environment isn’t just everything around me when I’m learning, but is a personalised form of a VLE. In that case, what is a personal information environment? Is it all the sources from which I gain information? In which case it seems to me the same as my learning network.]

Personal information environment = learning network?

Twitter supports a read/write loop. It shows us what we have done and what we can do next. The function of a re-tweet is to spread information to another community. When we retweet, are we spreading the information or are we aiming at reducing the information gap in our own community? [I’m not sure what an information gap is. Also, I think this view assumes a particular type of Twitter user, who has selected and weeded both the people they follow and their followers. Other Twitter users have different models – they follow everyone who follows them, or they try to collect as many followers as possible. One function of a retweet is to spread the information, another is to establish yourself as a good source of information, another is to open up the possibility of new ties between your readers and the writer you are retweeting).

(MUPPLE seminar – Philippe Dessus, Grenoble)

Augmented history

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The Civil War app changes in real time and plays out over four and a half years, producing a daily casualty count. This has been criticised as being too immersive – uncomfortable for many people.

The Iraq War Memorial app superimposes a war memorial on a real scence

http://gamesalfresco.com/2011/02/21/augmented-reality-u-s-iraq-war-memorial/

The war memorial app, brings a virtual representation into the physical world. Street Museum brings the past of the physical world into the present by syuperimposing pictures of London’s past over London’s present. For example, it shows pictures of London during the Blitz.

Suchtweetsorrow.com presents a modern retelling and reworking of the story of Romeo and Juliet

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyhayes/5778206030/ looks at the building blocks of experiential media – including the physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual experiential building blocks. The spiritual level involves the experience prompting those involved to change their belief system.

(Notes from Creating Second Lives in Bangor 2011)

Learning in context

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Learning occurs in contexts – it also creates contexts.

Context is not fixed – it is an emergent property of interaction.

The challenge is to go beyond modeling human activity in context, in order to augment it.

(Take-away from Liz FitzGerald technology coffee morning, 19 October)

Now time is personal

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Mobile devices allow us to shift and personalise time. They allow us to visit places before we arrive and to remain in places after we have left. We renegotiate our time on the fly, and schedule soft meetings with flexible boundaries.

They allow us to fill what would previously have been dead time.

We dignify an occasion by switching off our mobile devices to devote our time to the present.

(Take-away from John Traxler seminar on mobile learning, 13 October)

Designing for Immersive Mixed Reality Learning Environments

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Different partners are likely to be part of different activity systems, with different objectives, different motivations and different tools.

Shared situational objects can be a turning point in negotiations between such partners – reflecting their different perspectives on the same themes. These shared objects sit between the activity systems and offer the potential to bring them together.

Space can act as one of these shared objects, if partners share the same space and have to negotiate its division.

(Notes from the 2011 ReLive conference)

Intelligent games

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Picking up the theme of gaming, Marian Petre found teenagers using readily available Internet resources to engage in playful navigation and reuse of the information space. Examples:

  • Pseudo-Friend – create a person in Facebook and see how many friends they can attract
  • Brimstone Rhetoric – justify any position of argument using biblical quotes
  • Degrees of Separation – How many links it takes to get from one concept or another
  • Way Finding – Navigate to a designated destination using only the most-zoomed view on Google Maps
  • Tower of Babel – Use online translators in order to hold conversations in a language you don’t know.

Such games are creative inventive or imaginative. They require, or help develop critical thinking, problem solving or some computational nous. They tend to be mischievous, mildly rebellious or satirical.

Can we bring mischief to the aid of education? Part of intelligent play is that it crossed boundaries and breaks a few rules. Is there a way to bring this into education and still make it compelling?

Petre, M. (2011) Intelligent games. ACM Inroads, (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), 2 (2).  ISSN 2153-2184.

Digital literacies

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Literacy is ‘The ability to understand information however it is presented’ (Lanham 1995 in The Electronic Word)

Lankshear and Knobel (2003) proposed that it has three dimensions:

  1. Operational – skills and techniques
  2. Cultural – development of shared meanings
  3. Critical – all literacies are socially constructed and selective, reflecting certain values, rules and perspectives, so individuals need to develop a critical stance

Reading on screen is profoundly different to reading print. We need to understand how meaning is constructed in different modes and which elements are most salient in different modes. A key part of gaming literacy, for example, is being able to anticipate what will appear on the screen next.

We teach literacy because it is the information medium. The need to read and write and compose texts remains very important,

(Notes from the OU Workshop on Digital Literacies – 20 May 2011)

Gaming and learning

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Games are important when building communities. They help to develop trust and an understanding of each other’s skills and personalities.

In terms of language, wordplay helps us to establish register – to work out what we mean and double mean when we use language. Can we create online community without the use of word games?

Note to self – this begins to pull together work on humour within Schome Park and the work on cohesive ties and register in the same setting. Humour is a way of testing out meanings, and of establishing shared reference points.