Handheld Learning takes place in London from October 13th to 15th. Nintendo have sponsored the event - and early registrations will receive free Nintendo DS’!

Aside from that, the speaker list is pretty impressive too… including the likes of Stephen Heppell and John Seely Brown. Looking at the programme I see that Derek Robertson will be speaking too. Although my own work hasn’t really had much involvement with mobile technologies, I have to say that I’m tempted.

Having chatted with Derek Robertson recently, thought I would update on some Consolarium news.

Byron Report, Media coverage of games issues, and classroom use of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training and Nintendogs all below…

Derek was busy with media interviews after the Byron Report - as noted in this Futurelab interview. As noted here previously, Derek says of the media coverage of the Byron Report:

“It was focusing on the negative – what’s bad with games and not about how we can use them to good effect,” he said. “It seemed like another excuse to roll out the old chestnuts about obesity, de-sensitisation of violence, and there doesn’t seem to be any counter-balance.

In contrast, when talking to teachers about how games can become useful tools in the classroom to engage learners he notes:

“When I go to speak to teachers and the education community here in Scotland I very rarely get cynicism or resistance to working with games. Schools can’t get enough of it up here. I think the reason it’s been a success is that everything I do is packaged up for effective teaching and learning that can make sense in classrooms.”

And his work on building up case-studies continues. The previous small study on the classroom use of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training is being followed up by a larger scale study. Funding was available for equipment for 16 classrooms, and so 16 classes using Brain Training are taking part and data will also be collected from 16 matching classes without Brain Training.

Despite the evidence that this works, and despite the fact that this is just one classroom activity - not a replacement for teachers - the usual filtering effect occurs in mainstream media:

A Games Console as a Teacher? A dubious addition

The author doesn’t appear to have paid too much attention to the details of the study:

In those days, it was the inspirational power of a teacher that could make or break your educational experience. Of course, there are are good teachers and not-so-good teachers, but I’m sure they would share a common disappointment if they were to be usurped by Dr Kawashima.

The obvious error here is that Brain Training was used in the trial for the sum total of 20 minutes a day - hardly replacing the teacher. What was also missed was the result that the weakest students in arithmetic no longer trailed way behind the rest of class after the trial. And the claim is made without asking teachers whether or not they would “share a common disappointment” to have Brain Training in the classroom. We’ll know soon enough.

Another example on the Consolarium blog, on the use of Nintendogs in class, demonstrates how using console games in the class effectively in fact relies very strongly on the teacher planning and arranging a range of activities to leverage the engagement. In the Nintendogs example, the Primary 2 children wrote stories, made stop-motion animations, drew pictures, made wall displays, met a real-life dog warden, taught each other, read books about dogs, …

Novel Approaches to Promoting Student Engagement

A one-day workshop hosted at the University of Ulster’s Coleraine campus, on 30 October 2008, by the School of Computing and Information Engineering and the Higher Education Academy.

There is anecdotal evidence, throughout higher education, to suggest that it is increasingly difficult to engage students actively in their learning. This manifests in a variety of ways but ultimately contributes to poor progression and retention rates.

The workshop is concerned with undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in higher education, in all disciplines, and aims to:

• identify and examine some of the factors that impact on student engagement
• share experiences of novel attempts at promoting student engagement
• explore the potential for radically new strategies to promote student engagement

The Programme Committee invites abstracts that address the workshop theme - Novel Approaches to Promoting Student Engagement.

Areas of interest include, but are not restricted to: descriptions and evaluations of attempts to promote student engagement; educational technology and student engagement; identification and understanding of factors that promote or discourage student engagement; the relationship between engagement with non-academic activities and engagement with academic activities - positive and negative; participation and engagement in assessed and non-assessed activities; subject specific aspects of student engagement.

Preference will be given to contributions that emphasise novel approaches to understanding and addressing the issues.

Submission and publication details:

• Abstracts should be in Microsoft Word or PDF format, and no longer than one side of A4.
• Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a full paper before the workshop; this should be three-to-five sides of A4.
• All accepted papers will be presented at the workshop - either orally or as posters - and published in the workshop proceedings and on the workshop website.
• At least one author of each paper will be required to register for, and attend, the workshop.

Abstracts should be emailed to both of the Workshop Chairs on or before Monday, 30 June 2008.

• Norman Creaney — n.creaney@ulster.ac.uk

• Marie-Therese McGinnis — mcginnis-m@ulster.ac.uk

Programme Committee:

Sylvia Alexander, Michaela Black, Darryl Charles, Norman Creaney, Becka Currant, Neil Currant, Martin Eaton, Karen Fraser, Professor Jan Jedrzejewski, Professor Alex Koohang, Professor Kerri-Lee Krause, Jackie Lambe, Daniel Livingstone, Professor Gerard McAleavy, Professor Sally McClean, Marie-Therese McGinnis, Professor Paul Mc Kevitt, Martin McKinney, David McSherry, Lindsey Marshall, Professor Erik Meyer, Professor Kader Parahoo, Marc Prensky, Carol Reid, Karl Stringer, Professor Maurice Stringer, Paula Wilcox.

BBC Education reports on a Commons Committee findings, with the headline “Tests ‘damaging’ to schools system“.

Much the same old story… MPs investigate an issue and find that an overemphasis on the results of tests leads to a narrowing of the curriculum as teachers ‘teach to the test’, with students learning enough to pass tests but without necessarily developing wider skills and deeper understanding that might be achieved otherwise. And a proposed new testing regime is no better in the eyes of the MPs:

warns that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

Meanwhile the government appears as entrenched as ever:

Schools Minister Jim Knight defended the use of national tests as part of the process of assessing progress for pupils, schools and the education system.

“Along with teachers’ own judgements and Ofsted reports, tests are a tool which help pupils and their parents to understand how well they are doing, help parents and teachers to understand how well their school is doing, and help the public to scrutinise the performance of the schools system.

The issue is that with tests being used for all of the above, teachers are put in a position where concentrating on the tests above all else may result in the school appearing to be better than if a broader curriculum or more measured teaching regime were applied. Result: potentially worse for the children, artificially inflated position for school in national league tables. As quoted in the BBC article:

“The original purpose of examinations, to assess students’ progress, has become confused with school accountability and the performance management of teachers,” said Dr Dunford.

I’m not the only one disconcerted by the extent to which childrens’ virtual worlds appear to be training grounds for tomorrow’s unthinking consumers. Via recent discussion at RezEd:

At Shaping Youth, the question is asked: Virtual Worlds Are Still Unwritten: Can We Move Beyond Consumption?

This is a good discursive post - and draws on a wide range of writing, reports and commentators to illustrate why marketers are stampeding towards the creation of virtual worlds for children - and why we need to be concerned.

At Feeding Change, Liam O’Donnel has similar concerns (some crossposting between the two), and Liam has gone so far as to create a second blog to host his studies into Club Penguin - to look at how Virtual Worlds are redefining literacy for children. Considering, for example, the literacy of status which seems to be a major force in the design/success of Club Penguin.

From all of which common themes emerge - children are engaging with new literacies of status and with messages that reinforce the idea that ‘you are what you own’. Something that educators and parents really should be more aware of.

While Facebook started off as a social networking platform for students only, it never really had much of a focus on supporting learning - and has had relatively limited take up as a collaborative learning tool (which may even be tailing off as more adverts and controversies over privacy and IP ownership occur).

Courtesy of Shona Mullen of McGraw-Hill I had a peek at ‘Grade Guru‘ yesterday - a new social networking app focussed on note sharing and collaborative learning.

The idea is that students can submit their own notes of classes for other students taking the same/similar classes to use. Notes can be rated by readers, and points are awarded to the highest rating notes. Then (the incentive part here) points can be traded in for a fair variety of rewards… including paypal credit.

The community is very small at the moment, but it will be interesting to see if it grows and takes off. Will the rewards attract high quality notes? I think there are some software issues to resolve in the short term, and the system is clearly undergoing a lot of development at the moment.

Lest people worry about this becoming another major source of plagiarism, Shona was keen to emphasise note sharing… not assignment sharing - and pointed out that content is submitted to plagiarism detection services precisely for this reason.

Alexandra Matthews has been busy collecting and collating stories related to games based learning from around the blogosphere, and from her ‘Heated debate on Game-Based Learning‘ post, I followed the link through to the article on NetworkWorld: ‘Most kids want educational video games in school, survey shows. … So?’

The original article by Paul McNamara is a fairly balanced report on the Project Tommorow finding, but the comments contain a fair bit of heated debate - some heavily biased against games, some comments going a little far the other way:

education shouldn’t be seperated from entertainment

I respectfully disagreed. Not that education can’t be entertaining or fun at least some of the time, but education shouldn’t focus overmuch on entertaining. My full reply:

Re: Misunderstanding

There is a LOT more to education than facts found on Wikipedia. Skills, experience, and understanding are not to be found by skimming Wikipedia for 5 minutes after a couple of hours bloody gameplay on God of War.

I definately agree that games are educational but not always in the ways intended, nor is the education necessarily valuable.

What lessons the younger cousin is picking up from playing God of War about ancient Greek society and myths from the game I don’t know - he may also have picked up a number of deep misconceptions from the game. How would you assess this?

And of course, God of War is rated Mature (17+) in the US and 18 in the UK - for its combination of extremely violent gameplay and sexual content. What is your young (10 year old) cousin learning from this? What is he learning from you encouraging him that this is a suitable activity for him?

“That’s the key - education shouldn’t be seperated from entertainment” - I soooo disagree with you here. I’d recommend Neil Postman’s book “Amusing ourselves to Death”, but the game of it hasn’t come out yet…

There is a lot of good work being done round the work at finding ways to effectively support education using games - but this does not make every game educationally valuable, not does it mean that all education should be (or can be) delivered through the medium of playing computer games.

I’m unlikely to manage Canada in November, but this looks very promising:

The Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Games and Intelligent Toys Based Education (DIGITEL 200

November 17-19, 2008, Banff, Canada
http://www.ask4research.info/digitel/2008/

Sponsored by IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technology

The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

Submissions due: 30th May

There is a rapidly growing interest in exploring design and technology of digital games and intelligent toys for learning. While digital games, especially online games, exploit advanced multimedia and Internet technology, intelligent toys embedded with chips and sensors utilize wireless, mobile, and ubiquitous computing technologies. Digital games and intelligent toys are potential new genres of advanced learning technology.

The gaming strategies and toy design that incorporate both individual and social activities will offer a significant opportunity for researchers to investigate the long-running research issues of technology enhanced learning such as attention, motivation, and emotion. It will not be a surprise that in the distant future when this emerging research is proved to be fruitful, most technology enhanced learning will incorporate some elements of digital games. Despite the surging interest in this emerging research, there are plenty challenging research issues to be investigated. For example, can one really learn meaningfully and deeply from games? Will there be new theories that explain phenomena of learning with fun? What constitute game pedagogies? How this genre of technology enhanced learning can be adopted to formal and informal learning settings? What are the possible dark sides of game and toyed education and how to prevent them? The Second IEEE International
Conference on Digital Games and Intelligent Toys Based Education (DIGITEL 200 provides a forum for researchers various disciplines and practitioners to share and exchange of this emerging research area.

We invite submission of papers reporting original academic or industrial research on the issues related to digital games and toyes based education. Complete papers will be required for review process; only abstracts will not be sufficient.

All authors of accepted submissions will be required to complete IEEE Copyright Form. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions for a Special Issue of a reputed journal.

It’s not often that I get to say “I hope to see you in Milton Keynes in November”, but this is one of those rare times…

Researching Learning in Virtual Environments - ReLIVE08

20th and 21st November 2008.

Keynote speakers: Edward Castranova and Roo Reynolds.

The conference has four broad themes, listed below. Papers, workshops, symposiums, posters and inworld events submitted to these themes should draw on existing research or planned programmes of inquiry. The conference organisers are keen to construct a programme that features diverse and innovative research approaches to learning and teaching in virtual worlds. Given the emerging practice associated with virtual worlds, the conference committee are also keen to receive papers reporting on the experience of learning and teaching using virtual worlds that relate practice and outcomes to literature and research in this area. We anticipate that submissions will reflect a range of research methods and will examine issues such as rigour, methods of sampling, relationships between researchers and researched, and the ethics and politics of the research process.

The themes listed are intended to be broad and papers etc are likely to cross over two or more themes. In any proposal please ensure that you indicate clearly how you are addressing key points in the following:

• Crossing boundaries and making connections
• Opportunities and challenges of virtual worlds for learning and teaching
• Approaches to research
• Implementing and sustaining innovation

More here: http://www.open.ac.uk/relive08/

In this month’s IGDA Culture Clash column, ‘A modest proposal‘, Matt Sakey writes about the use of games-based learning - but goes somewhat overboard, and basically proposes replacing everything with games:

Experts say that games can’t completely replace other forms of pedagogy. Maybe not, if you simply take games and try to stuff them up the current model for education, a model based mostly on rote memorization through lecture, and less on interpretation and application. You’re told that Animal Farm is a commentary on Socialism, told where Bhutan is. Games don’t work that way; they are experiential. Players draw their own conclusions from the context, which is why games couldn’t totally replace the system as it exists today. Redesign the model to focus on experiential learning, though, and games would be a perfect fit. Of course, the games would have to be very well-designed.

So, there we have it - re-work all of education into experiential education, then make games of it all. This is all rather extreme and very idealistic - although not ideals that I subscribe to myself. It’s a shame as there are a number of points that Matt makes that I would agree with. There is, for example, some evidence to support the assertion that:

So teachers simply help their students memorize what they know will appear on the standardized tests. The result: a generation that can take the crap out of a test but has no idea what anything means.

And then Matt says:

People learn when they think about things, and that’s really what games make you do.

In fact, numerous reports on game based learning (several I’ve mentioned before on this blog, apologies for not linking to them just now - I may return and add the links later) emphasize the need for teachers to facilitate reflection when games are used in class. Why? Because in most cases playing the game alone is not enough to make students think things through.