Computers, creativity and learning

UK Students turned into goldfish by social media

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

Apparently UK students get distracted by social networking at least once an hour, goldfish that they are. This rare talent for multi-tasking (or astonishing rate of dim-wittedness depending on your point of view) is unparalleled worldwide. They're also the second most connected student body in the world after Chinese students, as uncovered in a cutting edge survey commissioned by Cisco (who couldn't possibly have brought an agenda to the research). The CEO of CISCO in the UK, Phil Smith, claims that this means that employers need to consider young people's working habits, with more options for working at home and so on. Presumably working at home is advantageous for these hyper-connected young things because their bosses can't see they are using Facebook all the time. The problem with being distracted does not lie with the young people, in Mr Smith's view. Rather “if people are getting distracted from their jobs, it's often down to bad management.” By extension, if students are being distracted by social networking in my classes, this is clearly my fault for not being entertaining enough. However, I believe I can accommodate my learners' needs by having a 2 minute social networking break every 15 minutes, as suggested for films in the recent Orange cinema advert. That should enable them to catch up on any of the really important issues they're missing by being cooped up in a lecture theatre for a whole 50 minutes at a time.

But us old folk shouldn't mock. We shouldn't laugh at the younger generation who evidently find social networking crucial to their existence. One in three students and young professional surveyed by Cisco considers the internet to be as important as air, food and shelter. If you look at it that way it seems harsh of me to give lectures which last so long. After all, I wouldn't expect anyone to go without air for 50 minutes. It wouldn't be humane.

 

The impact of console games in the classroom

[crossposted from my CACM blog]

Futurelab recently published a report on the impact of console games in Scottish classrooms ( http://www2.futurelab.org.uk/projects/console-games). It contains case study evidence from 19 schools in which pupils are involved in game based learning projects, and considers the impact from the point of view of school leaders, teachers and pupils themselves. I find these sorts of studies very interesting because they’re about the way technology gets incorporated into educational practice in the every day messy world of schools.  Most of the console games used in the classes – Guitar Hero, Nintendogs, Endless Ocean- were never intended to be educational, and certainly not in school settings.  They have been enthusiastically adopted by teachers who happen notice their educational  potential while playing them at home. Contrast this to the academic development of interactive learning environments which may be carefully designed to solve a specific educational problem but are often sufficiently obscure that they never see the light of day in a classroom. The adoption of common of the shelf games (COTS) in classrooms is characterised by evangelism. Practitioners – once converted- tend to get quite over excited by it all and joyously sing the praises of such projects. This might go some way to explaining Futurelab’s  bias in choosing to identify the educational benefits of console game based learning rather than the drawbacks or challenges.

That being said, there are some interesting findings in the report which go beyond the excitement about motivating learners.  One is that teachers became motivated by the projects because they could see what an impact it had on their classes. Initially some teachers were worried about adopting games in the classrooms  because they did not see how it would fit with the curriculum, or they were panicked about not being able to use the technology themselves, or because they were worried about parents’ perceptions of it. However, the experience of seeing their learners become enthused about and engaged with their learning convinced many of the teachers that the risks were worth it.  From the perspective of keeping teachers invested in their work and extending their professional repertoire, managing a challenging games based learning project is likely to be beneficial.

A striking aspect of the classroom projects is that the pupils typically spend very little time actually playing the game at school – perhaps five minutes, three times a week. A lot of the classroom activities are based on the game but do not directly involve playing it e.g. balancing a budget for your rock band’s forthcoming tour or writing about how best to look after about your Nintendog pet. It seems like a small amount of game playing translates to a lot of motivational “buzz”. 

Critics of game based learning in schools sometimes argue that playing games in schools tarnishes children’s enjoyment of games at home, that it takes the fun out of it. The children interviewed in these case studies commented that they liked to receive support and advice from their classmates about solving puzzles in the games, and that they liked the increased competition. They also liked being challenged in school. Some children noticed that the titles they played at home were not as good for learning as those at school – perhaps the project taught them to expect more from games?

I’ll end on one of my favourite quotes from an interview with an eight year old who took part in a project based around Cooking Mama. “I burnt a cake at home and I learned that it’s just life – you have to cope with it not going right… and the topic helped us with that and keeps us from getting bad tempers”.  Coping gracefully with failure seems like a great skill to learn at school whether learned through real or virtual baked goods. 

 

High Priestess and learning zone updates

It's been a while since my last (somewhat psychotic) update on the student social area (aka crush area aka Learning Zone) and there have been some interesting developments. You might recall that the furniture was set up and that we were waiting for the screens to be installed and Goat Lady. Both are now here.

Goat Lady

Goat Lady is a reclining size 16 mannequin covered in goat hair and fibre optics. She lights up where you stroke her. She is an exhibit created by the artist Helen Storey and the real name of the exhibit is First, Last and Everything . She is currently on loan to us from our School of Textiles and Design. Originally she was designed to produce pheremones but we had to remove those as I was convinced the equipment for releasing them would be a fire hazard and we also though the pheremones had gone off after months in storage. Here is Goat Lady, with one the lecturers from Textiles and Design.

 
 When we started arranging the loan of Goat Lady, there was some disquiet about how she might offend female students. Or enflame the passions of the male students. In fact, the School of Textiles and Design refuse to display her for reasons of this kind. But you know what? It hasn't been a problem at all. In fact, people ignored her as best they could until recently. You'll see in the photo that I made a sign which says "stroke me" because people would never ever interact with her. At least not in public during the day. A few weeks back someone made another sign to put underneath mine which read "No, it's creepy". Which just about sums up how most people seem to feel about it. I personally am rather fond of Goat Lady. I like to stroke her because her fur reminds me of my big white cat. (Mr Bitey also likes to stroke her presumably because unlike the big white cat she doesn't run away.)

 In the last week events have taken an unexpected turn: people have started leaving offerings for Goat Lady! First there were coins left in front of her at night. Then origami birds. No-one knows why these offerings appeared but it is the subject of much spectulation! It has fascinated the staff in my department and is the main topic of conversation on the staff mailing list.  We hope it removes the need for tuition fees in this difficult economic climate. I have claimed the title of Goat Lady High Priestess, and it is now officially one of my admin duties in my boss's work load database.

Screens

Some of the wonderful PhD students and postdocs took on the task of finding things to display on the screens. Stefano wrote some code to visualise incoming tweets from a twitter aggregator in a pretty way.

 
Pawel is working on a slideshow app which enables users to identify inappropriate content using QR codes. The thing we are now realising about a public display is that it needs a lot of content because it's switched on for such a long time and the material cycles very quickly. We found that the screens were mysteriously being switched off - we think because people were fed up of looking at the same content. Which (predictably) irritates me. There's a message on the screens which clearly explains how to add more content. So in my view if the lack of content annoys you, you should either do everyone a favour and add more, or put up with it, but not passively agressively switch the whole display off. I spoke to some students about it and they seem annoyed by the screens and their lack of content as if their inalienable right to be entertained had been violated. So now they find themselves working on a project to produce content for the crush area. Hehe. I have another group of students working on producing an interactive application using Kinects for user input so we will see what that produces. Maybe some kind of app for GL to keep track of her devotees?

Robot army mobilised against absent students

You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna build me a robot to seek out students and bring them to classes.
Here's how. It will sit in the corner of the class and do face recognition on the students present, matching their faces to the photos in the module list. It will get the addresses of those absent from the student record system and use Google maps to go round to their homes and tell their mothers. It might need some help with this bit, but I figure a parrot AR drone navigated from my IPhone would solve this. It will also alert its creepy robot pals attached as web cams to the LCD screens throughout the department so it can pursue those actually on campus.
Having found the perps, it will employ a firm yet gentle regime of mild electric shocks to guide them to campus and into the class for the right time. In fact, maybe I need an army of them, one for each absentee. It would be their personal nemesis, assigned to torment them into turning up with their homework complete. My current favourite form of torment would be to generate infrasound (sound too low to hear) which makes people feel profoundly uneasy. Haunted, in fact.
I estimate that all this effort on developing my robot army would be worth it in the long run. Save me time on sending nagging emails after every frickin' class.
We are the student seeking robot army. Expect us.

Should students buy an iPad or a year's supply of Post Noodles?

[cross posted from my ACM blog]

As the leaves turn brown and the weather becomes crisper, the students are returning to their studies full of resolve and new purpose. When I was a lass, we used to celebrate the new academic year with a new pencil case or perhaps a new set of ring binder folders. Nowadays, the young 'uns like to invest in some shiny new tech. The question is: what to buy? A little netbook (now you can tinker with the linux kernel from where ever you happen to be)? Or an iPad (bound to impress the ladies)? I am a big fan of the iPad, I am the first to admit. But I am not convinced it actually makes sense as a student purchase unless you have a kindly uncle who is bankrolling your university career. Let's assume that you are an average student at my university in Scotland. According to the helpful budgeting guide published by our student support office, you need to budget £6978 for living expenses for an academic year. The current UK price for the iPad is £500, so you would be spending about 7% of your budget on it. A few comparisons help to bring it into perspective. Suppose you gave up washing clothes for a year, or relied on your mum to do it for you. According to the budgeting guide this would save £222, just about half of the iPad. You could go with dirty clothes for your first two years and buy an iPad for third year, I guess. How about food? The budget reckons £1295 for a year. Sheer extravagance! Two Pot Noodles a day would cost under half that at £547.50. Throw in some vitamin supplements at £1.69 and what more could you need? That saving alone would get you an iPad.

If you resisted the iPad in favour of eating or washing, what would you be losing? There has been much dewey-eyed hype about the use of iPads in education. Some universities have given free iPads to their students presumably in the belief that it will either help them to learn or at least convince them to study at their institution in the first place. iPads will transform education, apparently. “It occupies a new space in technology, one which is still undefined to some extent, yet which is likely to be significant over time”, according to an iPad education blog. The new space referred to is the technology niche between the smart phone and the laptop: extreme light weight portability combined with readable screen size and the potential for educational applications. No longer do you need to be stuck in computer labs to work on your essay. You can even stray away from power points because of the excellent battery life of the iPad. No more waiting for the computer to boot up – press one switch and the iPad springs to life, eager to serve your every learning need. Want to share an article you are reading in a tutorial with the others in your discussion group? The screen will automatically switch orientation as it is moved. The App Store can provide free or low cost applications to help you study: anatomy flash cards for medical students or a beautifully animated version of the periodic table for chemists. You can seamlessly listen to or watch podcasts of your lectures or view lecture notes in Keynote. All this on the alluring multi-touch screen, with a sleek sexy interface in the style only Apple seem to be able to pull off.

But hang on. If you didn't have an iPad, you wouldn't actually lose many of these capabilities. Working on a netbook or other laptop might be a less joyful user experience, I grant you. But it is still entirely possible to work on it with others, to listen to podcasts, read lectures notes or take advantage of the millions of educational applications which are available online. Furthermore, if you happened to need to use a page with Flash content, you would be able to view it. In fact, in my five months of using my iPad, I have come to realise its limitations for productivity tasks. I can easily imagine it becoming an excuse for my students to not do tasks in class. “I can't log into the VLE on my iPad”. “I can't edit that file in my iPad with this version of Pages”. “Joe can't transfer his notes to my iPad because we're not on the network and there is no slot to plug in my memory stick”. “Wait a bit.. it's taking me ages to cut and paste between applications on my iPad so I can't keep up”. Kind of like primary school kids make excuses to go to the toilet when they are bored, except the limitations of the iPad could give the students genuine reasons to become distracted from the key concepts of the class. Would there be any particular benefit of using an iPad to Computer Science students? Certainly developing for iPads (or iPhones) is popular with students, and can make for interesting projects for advanced students who want to learn a new programming language and environment. It is also an excellent case study for interaction design modules. For these purposes I would be inclined to say that the university should provide the hardware, rather than requiring students to get their own.

A netbook might be old fashioned and clunky in design terms but at least it will run the standard productivity software which lecturers tend to assume students have access to. They're also roughly half the price of iPads, thus requiring fewer sacrifices of nutrition or hygiene. So on the grounds of avoiding rumbling stomachs and malodorous students in my classes, I wouldn't recommend an iPad purchase on purely educational grounds.

Laptops in the classroom

(Cross posted from CACM)

Do you ever find yourself checking your email during a boring meeting? Do you drift off on a wave of rss feeds when you should be listening to your colleagues? Do you pretend to be taking studious notes during seminars while actually reading slashdot? In fact, should' t your full attention be somewhere else right now?

I find it increasingly tempting to do lots of things at once, or at least take micro breaks from activities to check mail or news. I do think it's rude during meetings so I try to stop myself. My students don't tend to have such scruples. They use their laptops openly in class, and they're not all conscientiously following along with my slides, I suspect. In fact, in a recent study published in AJET (http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet26/lauricella.html), 70% of students spent half their time sending email during class (instant messaging, or playing games or other non academic activities were also popular). They did also take notes and other learning tasks, but they weren't exactly dedicated to staying on task. If you're interested in surveying your own class to find out what they really do behind their screens, the authors provide a reliable validated questionnaire tool about laptop usage in education.

Of course, there have always been distractions during class- as the margins of my Maths 101 notes demonstrate with their elaborate doodles. It's just that laptops make it so easy and seductive to drop your attention out of the lecture while still feeling that you are achieving something. ("I simply must update Facebook now. Otherwise people will not know I am in a boring lecture".)

Unsurprisingly, laptop usage in class has been associated with poorer learning outcomes, poorer self perception of learning and students report feeling distracted by their own screen as well as their neighbours' (Fried 200810.1016/j.compedu.2006.09.006 ). Many educators get frustrated by this ( see h http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1151030.1151049 in CACM for example) and there is debate about whether laptops should be banned, or whether the lecturer should have a big red button to switch off wireless (or electrocute all students) when they can't stand it anymore.

Bear in mind,though,the studies I mention above were conducted in lecture style classes and the students were not given guidance on how to effectively use their laptops to help them learn rather than arrange their social lives. It is possible to design active classes around laptop use ( if you can make sure that students who don't own a laptop can borrow one) thereby making the technology work in your favour. For example, my students learn to do literature searches in class, or try out code snippets or critique the design of web pages. And yes, some of them still get distracted from these activities and wander off to Farmville. But at least I have given them the opportunity to integrate their technology with their learning in a meaningful way. They are adult learners after all. It's their decision how best to spend their brain cells in my class and my job to give them a compelling reason to spend them on computer science rather than solitaire.

   







   







Encouraging girls to study geeky subjects (part 1); emotionally intelligent tutoring systems

[Cross posted from CACM blog]

How can we encourage girls to enjoy maths and science subjects? Is there some way that we can tempt girls across the great geek divide to the point where they consider STEM careers? There are of course lots of possible answers to this. One which I came across recently in an interesting press release (http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/101058.php) is to develop intelligent tutoring systems tailored to improve maths scores among girls. Woolf and her colleagues at UMass Amherst were interested in providing extra support for girls, and decided to include an emotionally sensitive component to the tutoring system which would give encouragement and help based on the students’ detected affective state. As far as I can tell from the press release, the research results from their field studies are not yet available.

 

The tutoring system is personified with an optional animated agent who offers emotional support and other advice tuned around the users’ emotional state. It turns out that the boys more often turn off the agent than the girls, which is consistent with some of my own previous work where older boys (12 years) were more likely than girls or younger boys (10-11years) to prefer a tutoring system without an animated agent (see Robertson et al. 2004 if you care). Maybe boys don’t want emotional support. Or maybe they do but they don’t want it conveyed through an animated character. Users of the wretched Microsoft Clippy might sympathise with that view point. (“I see you are feeling upset. Would you like me to a) contort myself into a disturbing hug shape b) administer an electrical shock to see if it helps you focus or c) give you an easier maths problem?)

 

But how on earth do you reliably infer a user’s mood from their behaviour when using the system? This is a fascinating research topic in its own right, quite apart from the issue of how the tutoring system then responds sensibly to this information. In the UMass research, they use a combination of sensors and cameras with which “the computer can recognize when students are happy or stressed, fidgeting, frustrated or feeling confident”. They also use cues such as “the time taken to answer questions; number of hints requested and grip on the mouse.”  As you might imagine, there are huge problems in working out which items in this potentially massive volume of data are most indicative of the users’ emotional state. There is also a reliability problem; Woolf and colleagues report 70 – 80% accuracy when using the camera. Is this reliable enough to base a tutoring system action on? What are the repercussions when it gets it wrong? These are interesting open questions.

 

I recently heard a talk by Madeline Balaam (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile124388.html) which had some intriguing thoughts about how teachers might respond to learners’ emotional states (Balaam et al in press). She made the point that researchers have hereto assumed that human teachers know how to respond to their pupils’ feelings assuming they have the information to diagnose them. This turns out to be not necessarily true. In Madeline’s research, she designed Subtle Stones which are tangible devices which high school students can use to convey their emotional state by squeezing the stone to change its colour. The colour/emotion mappings are private to the student (blue might mean happy for me but bored for you) but the teacher has a special display which translates the individual emotion mappings to a standard display, meaning that she can get an overview of the emotional state of every class member in real time. In contrast to Woolf’s system, the users self-report their emotional states rather than having the system infer them from behavioural cues.

I have to admit that I would find it challenging to know what to do if I had access to such a rich source of information about the feelings of my students (beyond the obvious few who fall asleep on the desks). Are they unhappy because they split up with their girlfriend or because I bore them to tears? Is it OK for a learner to feel frustrated for a time if they eventually indicate that they are feeling proud because their work has paid off? I can imagine a first year programming lab class where everyone spends most of the class frustrated and then there are little bursts of pride as people finally get their compiler errors sorted out. What do I do if half the class is happy but the other half is bored? (This is presumably not a problem for an ITS which is dealing with one student at a time.)

 

To conclude: Woolf’s project is a great example of research which tries to solve a real world problem by tackling extremely challenging research issues. As this particular real world problem has an impact on girls’ attainment and interest in maths and sciences, various people in the ACM community will be watching with interest.

 

 

Balaam, M., Luckin, R., Good, J. (In press). Alsmeyer, M., Luckin, R., Good, J. Jump Starting Affective Communication in the Classroom with the Subtle Stone. International Journal of Learning Technologies.

 

Robertson, J., Cross, B., MacLeod, H., and Wiemer-Hastings, P. ( 2004) Children's interactions with animated agents in an Intelligent Tutoring System. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. 14.335-357.

100 top tools for learning

[cross posted from CACM]

If you're an educator and like messing around with new software tools for your classes, have a look at this list of top 100 tools for learning compiled by Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies.

I was relieved to have heard of the most of the entries. Perhaps I am not as old as I thought. Usually I am far behind on the latest fads.

The winner was twitter. I personally don't tweet. I gave it up when I realised that Ghengis my Geranium had a larger following than me. What, one wonders, are the educational benefits of it? Teaching the art of brevity? Shorter to mark essays of 140 characters I suppose. Or do teachers find it useful as a tool to contact other teachers?

There were multiple examples of a number of classes of software such as a range of slide-sharing, screen capturing, blogging, social networking and mind-mapping tools. The majority are free-ware.  And let's also note that if Google didn't exist, there would be far fewer entries in the list! 

If you're an educational technology PhD student looking for a research topic, there's a whole vista of research questions in this list waiting to be studied. To what extent do such tools benefit students? In what ways? What sort of learning approaches are most effective with each? Or is it all just new-fangled nonsense? Bring back chalk, I say. :-)

Virtual Worlds book chapter

I forgot to mention that Flexible Learning Pal and me have had our book chapter on Second Life group work published. In the off chance that you can't afford £67to buy the book, here is a copy of an earlier draft Download VirtualWorldsChapter.  

Robertson, J. and Kipar, N. (2009) Learning Together and Alone in Virtual Worlds. In Sheehy, K., Ferguson, R., and Clough, G. Virtual Worlds: Controversies at the Frontier of Education # Publisher: Nova Science Publishers Inc (1 Jan 2010) # Language English # ISBN-10: 1608762610 # ISBN-13: 978-1608762613

Tweets, Second Life, visualisation: student ingenuity will never cease

[cross posted from CACM blog]

One of my favourite things about teaching is that students supply and endless stream of surprises. I have just finished marking my first year university students’ portfolios for their Second Life and Linden Script module, having spent a happy few days interacting with flying pigs, self generating slices of pie and grumpy wolves.

Using Second Life as a teaching platform has various motivational advantages, although it can also be a giant pain in the posterior.  Various students have commented on features of the environment that they like. One advantage is that they can see results of their programming visually and instantly: “It was a lot different than what I thought it was going to be and I had a lot of fun with it. Lindenscript took me a while to learn properly but I think I'm getting a hang of it now. Unlike [Java programming], it was exciting to see more visual results of my labor.“ or “I'm quite enjoying this type of programming due to the results that we can actually see which is a lot more rewarding than a lot of programming that I have done in the past.” Another favourite feature is seeing what the other students in the class have been building and using this as a source of ideas and help:  "It's great to see so many people’s pets looking better and better every week, a lot of people are pretty skilled at prim manipulation! I'll have to ask them for a lesson sometime.” One student summed up my own view of the Second Life quite neatly: “On the whole though I enjoyed the module.  Although I was sceptical at the beginning about  Second Life (and still view the platform as a little bit pointless in the grand scheme of things) I have come to appreciate that it makes for a really good teaching tool.”

I wanted to share a particular example of a student project which illustrates the “stretchiness” of Second Life. It can stretch to challenge even the brightest students if you give them enough leeway in their assignments. Of course, the bright students also need to be motivated and imaginative enough to think of ambitious ideas. A good case study is Michael Shannon’s glow flies. Michael decided early on in semester that he was interested in AI swarms and data visualisation and so he decided to make the virtual pet for his assignment a swarm of Second Life glow flies which represent something from the real world.  And he managed this, on a first year module by himself, in about twelve weeks during which time he had to teach himself how to work with swarm algorithms, the twitter API, and Second Life integration with a database using PhP.

This is a summary from Michael’s learning log for those who are curious to know how he did it: 

“The various elements of the project are laid out below 

1. Every minute, the server runs TwitterCall.php – this searches Twitter for posts in English from around Edinburgh, and retrieves the last 100 results.
2. These results are then processed to try and generate mood values based on a dictionary analysis of the individual tweets.
3. Successfully analysed tweets are saved to a database (skipping out those with no emotive content).
4. In Second Life, the swarm is managed by a hive, which is responsible for creating new fireflies, and getting mood values from the server. Every 1.5 seconds, a new firefly is born; each time this happens, the hive opens slCall.php, and requests one of the most recent tweet’s mood value.
5. That newly born firefly is given this mood value at 'birth' and then runs through a collection of functions to determine its appearance and behaviour, based on the mood value it was born with (there is no communication at any point between any of the fireflies and the hive, or any of the fireflies and the server – the hive passes the mood to the firefly as it creates it). The mood value determines the colour of the firefly, as well as the way it moves, and the way it interacts with other fireflies in the swarm.
6. That firefly has a lifespan of 5 minutes, after which it dies.
7. As the hive is creating a new firefly every 1.5 seconds, and each firefly lives for 300 seconds, the stable population of the swarm at any given time is 200, with each firefly representing a different tweet from the database.

This is now stable and continuously running, meaning that there is swarm of animated multi-coloured fireflies in Second Life that is visually representing the mood of Edinburgh at any given time, as per Twitter.”

I believe it is part of our role as educators to help the brightest students challenge themselves to the full extent of their abilities. Second Life is not the only platform which enables this, but it is certainly a good choice for imaginative open ended projects. And let’s face it, aren’t those ones much more fun to mark?