Virtual culture training for soldiers
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Games, Virtual Worlds
Thanks to a link from ACM TechNews, I’ve been reading that folks at the University of Texas have been doing some research into the use of virtual worlds for training soldiers (click for the article). The focus of the training is dealing with cultural situations. I’m not a particularly well-travelled person myself, but I can imagine that even the slightest differences in cultural interpretation of verbal and non-verbal cues can become major issues in a conflict scenario.
Learning Through Play
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Games
Through my work and research in the university and on the SLOODLE project, I’ve encountered plenty of mention of constructivism in relation to education. However, considering my wonderful neice (who will be 2 in January), and my practically newborn nephew, I was quite interested by a recent Newswise article about constructivist play for young children.
The principle is that simpler toys encourage greater use of imagination and development of cognitive skills for very young children, but slightly older ones will benefit from more directly educational toys, such as board games and chemistry sets. The article quotes a great example from R. Keith Sawyer:
“For example, if you bought your child the toy cowboy from the movie “Toy Story,” the child will probably already be familiar with the movie, with the character and how the character talks and acts. That narrows the range of pretend play options or scenarios the child will engage in. However, if you get your child a generic cowboy toy, the child might act out scenes from “Toy Story,” but might also do something completely different.”
Watching my niece play with absolutely anything and everything she can get her hands on, from placemates to cuddly toys, certainly bears this out. I cannot suggest what she sees in the toys when she plays, as she’s too young to express much verbally (although for a not-yet 2 year old, she’s doing remarkably well with language… or maybe that’s just my proud uncle-ness talking!). At any rate, she manages to play equally well (if not better) with abstract objects as she does with realstic items.
I see very similar things with a couple of slightly older children at my church: one is about 2 and a half, and the other (who started school this year) is nearly 5. They certainly love acting out superhero scenes from series they watch on TV or DVD, but after church this past Sunday, they seemed to be having a lot more fun pretending an upturned toy table was a boat. It doesn’t look like a boat, nor is it in anyway seaworthy, and the carpet certainly doesn’t look (or feel) like the ocean, but those things didn’t matter to them… it was just a bit of fun. (Perhaps more significantly, they happily involved a bit of superhero stuff in the boat scene, but not the other way round.)
The slightly older kids (particularly the 4 year old) were capable of constructing more complex scenes than my little niece, but it all seems to be part of the same process. It leads me to wonder what learning is actually going on in these cases. Certainly getting the imagination active is great, and learning the difference between fantasy and reality is very important. Perhaps also through doing these things, they are experimenting with relationships, learning social skills. They are also using language to express themselves in their make-believe personae. Most importantly, I think, they are maybe learning to see things from another perspective — i.e. from the point-of-view of their character, rather than themselves.
I’m not a developmental psychologist though, so I’m probably just waffling. One wee thing I will mention though is that similar situations exist in video games for kids and adults of all ages — in bygone days, I remember having lots of fun racing a line around a bunch of dots on an old Spectrum. The hyper-realism of today’s games is great, but not necessary for fun, and can in many ways perhaps impede it.
(Not Quite) Virtual Teachers
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Virtual Worlds
The BBC carries a video report about teachers making videos (’vodcasts’) to help pupils revise material. While I somewhat challenge the claims of ‘virtual’ and ‘interactive’ made in the report, I do believe this is a positive use of technology… to a certain extent.
I have learned a lot of interesting stuff by watching some educational videos on YouTube and elsewhere on the web (check out the awesome Periodic Table of Videos, for example), but I think it’s crucially important that pupils aren’t lulled into a sense of it being OK to rely too much on ‘after-the-fact’ learning resources. Learning is a process by which information is absorbed and retained. In the same way that mobile phone address books have destroyed people’s ability to remember important phone numbers, these kinds of quick-fix education hits run the risk of reducing pupils’ retention of the material if they are over-used or over-emphasised.
I am still positive about it though. Carry on, but tread carefully!
Language Perfect
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Games, Software
A new educational game, “Language Perfect“, is making a stir in some New Zealand news (also see the text article).
Screenshot of the Language Perfect system
The news articles mention the enthusiastic response of students, but they don’t really do the software justice (in my opinion); the demo video, on the other hand, makes for some very interesting watching. It doesn’t look like there is anything inherently groundbreaking about what is actually being done, but rather how it’s all put together. It looks like a system than is well-planned, designed to engage students in a modern context, and most importantly, it is complete.
I’ve tried a few language learning software packages over the years, and so many of them are lacklustre and boring. They are little more than digital flashcard systems, maybe with fairly weak excuses for games or quizzes. “Language Perfect” certainly looks different (although I haven’t been able to actually use it myself). The interface looks clean, slick and responsive (which is very important for engaging today’s youth), the automated feedback seems more interesting and useful than just “right/wrong”, and the system as a whole apparently motivates students with a competitive edge, using points and online scoring systems.
That said, this is the first flurry of activity we are seeing. As this dies away, will we see it having a steady presence in education? Will it maybe even spread to other parts of the world? I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it to find out.
Massively Multi Learner Workshop 2008
Posted by Peter | Filed under Education, Virtual Worlds
I attended the Massively Multi Learner Workshop with my boss this year. It was hosted by Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge (England), and was certainly an interesting insight into some of the research that’s happening just now in education with MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments).
My boss (Daniel Livingstone) made appropriate mention of Sloodle in his session, as well as running a couple of practical sessions on using Sloodle. Seemed to have a fair few folks interested, which is great.
The session of particular interest for me was “Learning on the MUVE: Islands in the Sun?”, by Maggi Savin-Baden. It was the only majorly pedagogical presentation, and I think I wouldn’t have followed it nearly so well if I hadn’t read a paper all about Problem Based Learning (PBL) in Second Life (SL/PBL) on the plane on the way there. Those combined were my first taste of real pedagogical theory, and although some of it went a tad over my head, I felt I could definitely maintain a research interest in this field.
