Put me in, Coach! – Gaming, e-Learning, and Web 2.0

Today, as I was looking for articles on game-based learning, I started thinking about our class discussions. The idea of Web 2.0, from what we’ve explored so far, seems like it lends itself to online education in a really brilliant way. User-generated content, discourse communities, networking - so many of the foundational elements of engaging online classrooms are at the heart of Web 2.0. 

But what about gaming strategies?

Although I work closely with instructional designers, I don’t have a background in e-learning games, and I’ll admit most of it is rather foreign to me. So far, I’ve relied pretty heavily on my training in curriculum and instruction to help faculty incorporate more competition-style learning into their online classes. I often talk about using badges, resource scavenger hunts, best/most discussions, synchronous Kahoot! quizzes – those types of activities that encourage participation and completing assignments on time. Since we have multimedia specialists, I’ve never spent a lot of time thinking about using programs and apps to facilitate game-style learning, until today when I was asked some very specific questions in a meeting. 

So I did a little research. I felt like a lot of what I was finding would fall more into Web 3.0. There was a lot on adaptive and machine learning being used for educational gaming, which is really neat, but doesn’t seem to meet the criteria we use to classify Web 2.0. Most of it isn’t user-generated and it doesn’t involve authentically connecting with others. Again, though, this is not my area, so I’m curious about your experiences with the gamification of learning. 

Since we also talked about crowdsourcing this week, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to ask the audience. Do you have some examples of game-based learning that fit more into the collaborative environment of our beloved Web 2.0?

Space Oddity: Creating Identities in Physical Structures and Digital Realms

Last month, I officially made the move to work from home. I travel a decent amount with work, but the majority of the time, most of what I do is done in front of computer, with a pair of headphones and a mic on, multiple screens open – one usually to a live feed of a meeting, and my iPad propped up with 10 or 15 books open on various tabs. So when there was some shuffling of campuses, and because I had been working remotely for a few months, it was an easy transition to have me work from home. We locked in the VPN, got a soft line for my phone needs, and I was up and running in time for the 11:00 AM meeting. Barring a few Skype for Business calls dropping, it’s been smooth. I sometimes wonder if people can hear my pugs snoring when I’m on a call, but I just pretend that adds to the charm.

There’s only one thing that hasn’t been as smooth, and it, luckily, has nothing to do with work. It’s the room. I can’t seem to get the space the way I want it. My desk faces a huge window that catches the most beautiful morning light, but the other things in the room just aren’t working together. Something is off, and I can’t figure out how to fix it yet. Although it doesn’t impact my work, when I walk away, I’m constantly thinking about how to rearrange the bookshelf and the cabinet and everything else. I’m trying to create a space with a specific identity, but I don’t know exactly what kind of identity I need it to have yet.

*****

About a week ago a friend of mine posted a ridiculous, terribly written article that was nothing short of an attack on higher education. The article had an obvious political bias and blamed universities for being too sensitive to students, faulting educators for, well, pretty much everything. Somewhere in the title, and throughout the piece, the author criticized the phrase “safe spaces,” saying that this need for safe spaces is “what’s wrong with this country.”  I can listen to almost any argument and empathize, but there was no evidence and no logical support. I don’t know why I read it, but it continues to bother me. Probably because I’d argue that creating safe spaces for students to explore and make mistakes is exactly what college is about. Students, in a lot of ways, form parts of their identities when they are in college, so having a safe space is a key aspect of that growth.

In fact, just today I was working with a faculty member who teaches a class on multicultural social work, and she stated several times that she wants the students to feel safe enough to know they can say the wrong thing. She’s creating this wonderful introductory exercise that asks students to reflect on how cultures perceive disabilities, and without that “safe space,” she knows we'd be doing a great disservice to those students.

*****

Considering the physical space of my room and the created safe space for the students led me to think about our class and the way spaces and identities overlap in the physical world just as they do in the digital world. Over the past almost two weeks, we’ve all been exploring and creating digital spaces and each space, although unique, contains pieces of ourselves that transcend the various platforms. In the analytics class, one of the most powerful realizations came to me early on when we read about physical monitoring devices (like Fitbit) and how they are, essentially, our data doubles – these simulacrums of ourselves.* 

With that in mind, and considering this week’s discussion of PLNs and communities, I started thinking about how we all fit into digital spaces and how we craft identities that best conform to whatever role we hope to have. Even if we keep our actual identities anonymous, within just a few interactions, we can already see traits and characteristics forming with each tweet or blog. We don’t know each other, yet I could get pretty close to guessing who wrote which new blog based on voice, topic choice, tone… all the things that make up our identities.* And that is incredible to me.

In a way, all of these spaces are connected and revolve around this idea of creating identities. Whether we are trying to figure out why a bookcase seems out of place, why a friend posted an article, or why a student wouldn’t feel comfortable answering a question, there is something very personal and very deliberate about our spaces, and that doesn’t seem to change if they are for our eyes or the eyes of everyone in our network. 

Inspired by:

*Dennen, V. P. (2009). Constructing academic alter-egos: Identity issues in a blog-based community. Identity in the Information Society, 2 (1), 23-38. doi: 10.1007/s12394-009-0020-8 

*Ruckenstein, M. (2014). Visualized and interacted life: Personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. Societies, 4, 68-84. doi:10.3390/soc4010068

and

David Bowie’s "Space Oddity," which can be made loosely appropriate for most situations. 

Beyond the Confines of Space: Reflecting on Week 1

Week 1 is coming to a close and for those of us residing in U.S., we're gearing up for a few weekdays off for the 4th of July holiday. As I typed that sentence, I got a Google notification that my mom, who lives about six hours away from me, just +1'd my last blog post. (Thanks, Mom!) And I feel like that sums up this Week 1 experience. There can be so much positivity, and growth, and education surrounding Web 2.0 when the tools are used correctly.

Yes, I'm irritatingly optimistic most of the time, but seriously, what a week! In just a few days, I've thought about networking and learning in ways that I had never even considered. I've spent time in a Twitter Chat about learning, I've read an incredible book that I probably wouldn't have picked up before, and I've engaged with my classmates from all over the world. What is remarkable is that we have this opportunity to experience this together, and for the very first time, I see that online learning can be even more connected that f2f classes.

Although I spend a great deal of my time thinking about ways to improve online teaching, I, deep down, never believed that students could connect with each other in the online environment in the same way they could in a classroom. Now, I'll argue with the best of them that learning is just as valuable and effective, but I've always backed down a bit when it came to the ability to truly share classroom experiences in the online world.

But in just a week, this class has shown me that it can actually be better, more sincere. Maybe it's because not only are we going through this process together, but we have also been given the opportunity to explore options and find what is most appealing to us on a personal level. There's an instant connection that is formed when you realize a person you've never met shares your same interests and concerns.

It's been an insightful week in #eme6414, and I look forward to the next five!

"The new technologies allow people to meet each other beyond the confines of space and of their own culture, creating in this way an entirely new work of potential friendships."

Pope Benedict XVI, as cited in Networked: The New Social Operating System (p. 127)

Green Post-its and Red Pills

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon here in Orlando, and I find myself out of Post-its. I’ve spent the last few days with a book and can’t seem to stop tabbing sentences that I know I’ll want to revisit. Within 24 hours, I’ve posted about it on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I text a friend who does a lot of work in the social sciences, and I sent a photo of a passage to my partner because I couldn’t wait for her to get home to read it. The authors bring up so many relevant points, and I want to share them with, appropriately enough, everyone in my network.

 

The book is Rainie and Wellman’s Networked: The New Social Operating System, and networking about Networked makes me feel like I’m in some sort of meta-reality. I’m about 100 pages in, and I’m overwhelmed with the thoughtful use of social commentary and research. There’s so much in the text that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to talk about, so I let the final green Post-it decide: Chapter 4, “The Mobile Revolution,” it is. 

In this chapter, the authors discuss connected presence, absent presence, and present absence and the blurring of public and private spaces (pp. 101-105). A lot of points are made in these few pages, but the one that stood out to me was their reference to Keith Hampton’s sociological study that found that some people use their mobile devices as “visible barriers to interaction” while they are in public spaces. I’ve often thought about this because, well, I’m one of those people.

In general, I’m a smiley, warm person, so I tend to engage with a lot of people whenever I’m out in public. But like everyone else, there are times when I want to go to my favorite coffee shop, have my espresso and cupcake, and take in everything that’s going on around me, without actually having to talk to anyone. So I’ve started bringing my tablet with me, opening it to a PDF or spreadsheet, and positioning it in a way that it looks like it’s in my direct line of vision. Totally normal behavior, right?

The part that I find so fascinating about this quirk takes me back to that meta-reality I joked about earlier. It is as though we are aware of the absent presence and are using it to our advantage to avoid connected presence. I’m not actually absent. It’s quite the contrary; I’m very aware of the physical spaces and beings around me.  But because we are so accustomed to people sectioning themselves off with technology, like the people in the park (figure 4.5 on page 106), we observe these unstated rules (most of the time) and avoid invading those manufactured private spaces. With our now ever-present devices, we’ve created social constructs that are based on shared assumptions, but not necessarily reality. 

Hmm, I feel like I should quote Habermas here - or maybe The Matrix - red pill, anyone?

Who knew a chapter about mobile devices could spark so many thoughts? I think that’s why I’m so involved with this book right now. Technology is changing so much more than the way we work or connect – it’s changing the way we behave, and the authors are able to capture and present those behaviors in a powerfully eloquent way. I've put the book away for tonight, but I flipped ahead a few pages and can't wait to see where the next green Post-it will go. 

Blurred Lines: Microsoft Teams

Yesterday we had a team meeting about Microsoft Teams. We use Office 365 at work, and as a part of Academic Innovation, it makes sense that we are the early adopters of some of the tools. Under the the larger Innovation umbrella, I am part of a group that focuses on faculty development, and since we are a small group of four, we often try out new products before we talk about them with the whole crew.

We use a lot of what 365 offers, OneDrive, Tasks, Planner, Mail, and of course all the standard Word, Powerpoint, and Excel products. But we've gone back and forth with Teams. I don't think any of us are completely sold on it yet, but we're giving it a little more time. With my group, because I work remotely, we are always on Skype or Polycom and using OneDrive's share system to work collaboratively on live documents - a method that works really well for us. For detailed project management we use Smartsheet, and for just sharing our overall project plans, we tend to use Tasks. We use a lot of tools, and that's intentional. If we are going to tout the functionality of something, it stands to reason that we test it out first.

With all of these tools, we are still so undecided about Teams, which, at this point, we have yet to really see the value in. Most of the functions are easily managed using the other apps, so why add one more? Sure, we could argue that it's because it keeps our projects well organized, but we'd probably just link our Smartsheets. Maybe it's because it can house all the files we're working on? Ehhh, OneDrive does that and makes editing and updating easier. So what is it?

There is one feature of Teams, though,  that none of those others have, and perhaps it's why we're so determined to find a use for this somewhat clunky tool. In a lot of ways, it's like social media. It has a newsfeed, we can tag each other, share gifs, even upload videos. And when I was trying to see what all Teams offered, I came across the promotional video and was struck by this line: "What if people from different cultures and generations could come together in a more purposeful way?" Honestly, the advertisement is nothing short of moving. At its heart it's a business tool, but the experience Microsoft is selling is rooted solidly in collaborative social networking.

Because we are all in education technology, we know the value of social media and learning. And we often place open collaboration and communication at the core of what we do. But I think there's more to it than that. I think there's an organic desire to connect on a more personal level. Being able to see each other's posts, to watch real-time updates, and to comment on links and "like" our conversations -  even if they are all about work - are things that feel very natural to the people on our team. They make us feel more connected, less isolated as we are working from different zip codes - the same things we've said about social media all along.

The lines between productivity tools and social media are blurring, and it seems like a lot of good can come from this. For now, we're trying to get used to Teams to see what kind of functionality it can offer and how to use it in the most efficient way, but even if it isn't this magical tool, there's something about it that seems to be creating a stronger sense of community. And that's something I'll always support.

For anyone who hasn't used Teams, consider watching the promo video.

A New Blog for All Things Web 2.0

Over the years, on more occasions than I can recall, I have suggested to professors that blogs are the way to go. I have always believed that reflection is one of the most important parts of learning, so I was naturally drawn to blogging as an educational tool. It's been a few years since I've been in the classroom, so I had inadvertently become one of those people who preached the importance of a process that I had never really seen through from beginning to end. I had been using journals in classrooms since I first created a syllabus, but blogging...

For better or worse, I've kept personal blogs on and off for the last ten years. And while I'm glad some of them have disappeared into the dark depths of cyberspace (Thank goodness MySpace deleted everyone's blogs!), I've tried to maintain my most recent online writing adventure since 2014. I don't post often, but what I do post is sincere. Yet there's always been something missing from that blog, and tonight I realized what it was. It's the marriage of two of my favorite worlds: education and writing! Although I have written about my professional experiences on my blog, I've never used a blog to focus on all the incredible things that are happening in higher education, especially higher ed and technology, which is where I find myself so comfortably situated these days. 

Enter EME 6414: Web 2.0

Something rather serendipitous happened earlier this summer - I found myself back at FSU, after almost 20 years, to complete a grad certificate in instructional design. My first class was on data analytics, which is an area I'm incredibly interested in, and as could be expected, I loved it. In addition to the base of knowledge, the class gave me some clarity into my next educational journey - something that I had been searching for for a long time. 

This week started EME 6414: Web 2.0, another course that I'm excited to be a part of. I read over the syllabus, and as luck would have it, guess what is required - a blog! After all these years of not seeing exactly how a blog works in a class, and after all of these years of not starting the educational blog that I wanted, I have been given the opportunity to do both!  

And I have a feeling this is the beginning of something I've needed for a long time.