Computers, creativity and learning

Can retire happy

From a student learning log "The sword was possibly one of the coolest things that we have done so far! Infact I think "Make a glowing sword like "Sting" from the Lord Of The Rings" is THE coolest instruction an educator has ever given me."

My shameless pandering to popular culture pays off once more...

Is 33 too early to retire?

Technology- teaching feedback loop

I have been vaguely noticing an interesting feedback loop in my first year class which is technology based, so I decided to blog about it to help me think about it more.

This year we persuaded computing services to open up the wireless network so students can use Second Life on their laptops. This helps us in lab classes if they are too full, and also lets the students who live on campus work in the evenings when the labs shut. It also has a slightly unanticipated consequence of enabling them to come into Second Life during lectures while I am also logged in and demoing on the projector. This can lead to much hilarity as students walk past to get a "mention" or come and interact with objects which I demo them. It also has interesting implications for learning which I haven't quite exploited fully. During my classes I set regular mini-problems throughout the class so students have to put into practice or link together concepts I have just introduced. For example, they might have to write the code to feed a cookie monster to practice using the listen event handler in linden script. They can either write it on paper and try it out in the labs, or they can type it into their laptop there and then if they have one. An interesting aspect of SL is emergent behaviour; sometimes the students on their laptops notice interesting side effects of their code while programming in the lecture and ask me about it. For example, if you have two cookie monsters (or any object, let's face it) both talking and listening in close enough proximity you get an infinite loop of babbling. My student noticed this on his laptop and so I was then able to point it out to everyone on the projector and get them to hypothesise about why this behaviour happens.

As an interesting follow-up to this particular incident, another student wrote about that lecture in his learning log and how he had enjoyed this part of the class. I have the logs on a feed-reader so I can keep a vague eye on what the class is up to day to day. This form of feedback is useful because it lets me stamp out problems before they get too difficult (such as students who couldn't work due to technical errors in SL) and guage the pace I should teach at in the next class. In fact, one of my students performs the (unwitting) service to me of reviewing each of my  lectures afterwards. This helps her to revise the concepts she learned but also gives me feedback on how it went from the students' point of view. In addition, the learning logs from last year gave me such in-depth insight into the students' learning that I was able to re-structure the lab exercise for this year to make the increases in difficulty between exercises easier to manage.

So there are three levels of feedback from the students to me here: at an immediate time scale, feedback in SL during classes, at a medium scale, feedback from learning logs between classes and in the longer term, feedback from learning logs reflecting on the whole module after the semester is finished. I know that the current mania for feedback in HE is usually considered to be feedback from the teacher to the learners, but this is really only half the equation. If you haven't been subject to this mania, let me quickly explain: lecturers now live and die by the National Student Survey which is convenient way for national newspapers and other people with too much time on their hands to rank Uk university "quality". One of the questions is about how much feedback the students get from us, and how promptly. As far as I can see, there are a lot of universities which do poorly on this, including my department. So there is now a drive from senior managers for us to do better with feedback. The drive mostly consists of people saying we should do it without offering practical suggestions for how you do it effectively with large class sizes and working hours which challenge the nature of the time/space continuum. But I digress.  Usually feeback is meant to be all about the student: how they could improve their performance, what their strengths and weaknesses are and so on. I'm not arguing that it is part of our job to provide that. I am, however, pointing out that teaching is as important as assessment and that if you are going to teach well you need some way of knowing how the students are coping with your classes. The three ways I mention above are handy ways to do so, although there are face to face ways which work well such as relentlessly checking off lab exercises until you know each student's progress inside out (appropriate for first years). Of course, there are various ways to cope with getting feedback to large classes which I have been experimenting with but that can be the subject for another post.

Our changing world: 21st century learning (with actual slides this time)

Download ScholarKeynoteJudyRobertsonFInal

I don't know who thought of the talk title for me for this keynote, but it is a rather broad topic to cover in 30 minutes, no? 20 seconds per year from now to the end of the century, I make it.

I suspect people usually mean 21st century learning to mean "interesting web 2.0 or games stuff which has been around since the late 90s". But since I went to CAL 09, I have ben meaning to catch up on the Beyond Current Horizons project which is really cool. So my talk is based on this, and looks at the future of learning about 30 years out. It was a nice excuse to read some of their papers and scenarios. It's mind boggling in fact. The scenarios are like near future science fiction but based on serious academic literature reviews and heavy public consultation. Well worth a read. Also, they have workshop packs for people who want to prepare their school or uni for the future. It would be fun to do one in my uni but I can't quite imagine it.

Please take a moment to admire the futuristic slides backdrop which I got from the Office community site. Well seeing I was "too busy" to attend my uni corporate branding seminar yesterday. :-)

 

Update on windows onto learning

It occurred to me that I haven't updated you on Windows onto Learning for a while. That was the idea I had about a year ago to have a way of sharing and celebrating student work on screens around the department.  Two exciting things have happened since then:

1. My very clever student Pawel developed a prototype peice of software to support it called WonderWOL, developed using a user centred design methodology. You can find out more here: http://windowsontolearning.wetpaint.com/photo/1891769/WonderWOL+logo+1.2.
2. We got a research infrastructure grant to kit out our student coffee area with lots of sensors and plasma screens. This means we have something to display WonderWOL on, plus some money to refurbish the manky old room (addressing the student wishlist we gathered last semester.) We may even have goldfish (yes, I know I am obsessed) although one of my students told me she is scared of fish the other day. (Who knew there are fish phobics? Mind you, I have long been tormented by a nightmare in which my first goldfish leaps from the jar when I clean his tank and lands gasping on the floor. Panic!)

This just goes to show the good things come to those who... wait. And also those with colleagues who are good at writing proposals and those with good students.

'Our changing world - 21st century learning'

Suppose, and this is purely hypothetical of course, that you had been asked to give a talk at a conference for teachers at the last minute with the title 'Our changing world - 21st century learning'. What would you say?
(Apart from "arggh" of course.)
On the plus side... people have been producing such talks since at least 1999, so Google will help. :-)

Note to self: Analyse your data before giving talks

I am wading through the analysis of learning logs from my Second Life module. There is a lot of it. 138 students writing a couple of times a week for 12 weeks generate a lot of text.
It is an absolute goldmine, and what is becoming obvious to me now is that there was a whole lot of peer support going on in the blog comments. And I gave a talk a few months ago where I seem to recall down playing this or possibly denying that the students comment on each others' blogs. I hope my audience have shorter memories. The moral of which is: finish analysing your data before you give talks.
I reckon I am about 2 days away from coming up with a glorious consolidation of what all my analysis may mean for metacognition and peer support. This stage of analysis is always fun!

Pride and Prejudice (in which young man changes his mind)

Gentle reader, let me tell you a story. Stories have their place in education after all. Not as data in a scientific sense, but if you consider teaching as an art, then stories about students make up the fabric of what goes in a classroom. We all have stories about the student who found it too difficult, but managed to pass with some extra help, or the student who handed something in at the last moment but got an A, or the student who was doing well but inexplicably vanished. These sorts of stories make up your experience of teaching a particular class, and often are the impetus for replanning your teaching for next time. Unless you have the time to gather proper data and do the analysis, which I will do at a future point. For now, I will tell you this story about how one student changed his mind about Second Life.

Our story begins with a hardworking, clever first year student on my Interactive Systems module. He emailed me to ask if an entry on his learning log was acceptable. It was an article against Second Life in which he wrote about how he thought it was for people with problems, and that he was ethically opposed to it in the same way as he would be opposed to being made to work in a cigarette factory. He also wrote some fairly damning technical comments, which had some truth to them. Now, our student is not native to the UK and wasn't sure whether he was "allowed" to criticise a module in this way so he wanted to check with me first. "Sure", I said, "express your opinion, but make sure your argument is well constructed". I identified a couple of flaws in his argument and he corrected them.

During the module our student came to lab classes, lectures and made sure he kept up with the work. Sometimes he would go home to work at lab times because he got tired of the lag on the island when so many people were working on it. He turned out to be a good programmer. At some point during this period, maybe gradually, his initial prejudice against Second Life changed into a pride in his work.I met him on the island the other night, and he showed me his starfish pet. It was an amazingly imaginative and technically well constructed piece of work which took some lecture material as a starting off point for exploring emergent behaviour. The star fish wanders about the island looking for people to talk to. It also tries to find water to swim in. You can feed it burgers, and it digests them(!). You can play noughts and crosses with it (he has implemented simple game playing AI). It also shows you a movie with little star fish characters, and generates text as Second Life prims. In doing this, the student has discovered some limits of SL and bugs in Linden Script, and written so much error handling code that he has exceeded the max file size in SL.  He told me yesterday that he has enjoyed working on the pet and he thinks he has learned a lot from it. Today he won a class prize for his achievements.

So what does this story mean? You could take many meanings from it, but here are some observations. My sense is that when the student gained mastery over the technical environment, he began to look at SL in a different way. Instead of an instrument of social evil, it became a programming environment which, like others of its kind, has various limitations which need to be overcome. In fact, if you stand back for a bit from the everyday annoyances of working in SL, and consider the ambitiousness of what Linden Labs are trying to do, you can see it as an interesting set of technical challenges and evaluate their solutions in a more objective way.

Perhaps you saw the Guardian article about Second Life yesterday. It was a bit fluffy (like I can talk :-) ) but it did say "While students reacted positively to the experience [of taking a module in SL], getting them into the virtual world can prove difficult, she [Gilly Salmon] says. A recent Jisc/Mori report indicated that Second Life remained the least popular technological pursuit among students." Indeed, only 38% of my students who completed an online survey said they liked Second Life. On the other hand, their rating for the module itself and lab classes were exceptionally good. (More of that in another post). This isn't necessarily what you might expect from reading the literature. You might expect it to be a more stongly motivating environment. I suspect there is a feeling among students that Second Life is sad. They may feel self concious about using it, or worry that they are wasting their time. In fact, after just quickly casting my eye over the module feedback forms there are some comments that the students don't see how it helps them for employment. They may be prejudiced against it. But if they make the effort to engage with it, then they can change their opinions and really benefit. In short, there is not a straightforward effect for motivation here, and I look forward to picking it apart with some heavy duty data analysis. First the story, then the research.

StoryStation

Someone asked me for a copy of StoryStation the other day, so I have blown the cobwebs off it and put it here for download. StoryStation was my first post-doc research project and was what got me interested in user centred design. It's an intelligent tutoring system which helps children with story writing.The animated characters were designed by the child members of my design team. Oh, how much I loved those heady days of Spatula Boy (pictured top right) and friends...
 

Students today

An interesting article and link to a video on what students think of their education. http://www.openeducation.net/2008/10/28/a-vision-of-students-today-some-additional-thoughts-from-michael-wesch/ Personally I think Michael Wesch is getting too depressed too easily. I bet teachers have sadly been wishing their students would enjoy/engage in their classes more for decades. Could it be that a feature of being in education is that you only appreciate it when you've left uni? Kind of like marathon running is great (when it stops).

If you are one of  my students, have you considered making a video to represent your view point? It might be a good activity for the student society.

Stuff I learned today (a lecturer's first day of semester)

Here's some stuff I found out today which would have been useful to know at 10.15 this morning. Yes, dear reader, I did have a bad day.

• Second Life checks IP addresses when you create an account. You can only create 8 accounts from the same IP address, and then it tells you too many people in your household have signed up. This confuses students no end because from their point of view, this is the first time they have tried to do it. Get a grip, Linden Labs! If you're flogging your virtual land to educators, think through educational use cases.
• Windows Vista was going to install 20 (20! Count them!) updates and configure them at length first thing this morning, right in front of my class, thus delaying it for 15 minutes or so.
• 118 students is a lot.
• Slides which include e-voting slides need to be run from Turning Point rather than Powerpoint if you want them to work.
• Students apparently don't know how to distribute handouts in the class. "Take one and pass it on" doesn't seem to work. Go figure.
• Students seem to like e-voting systems. So much so, in fact, that 5 handsets are now missing. Do they want to play with them at home? What use are they outside classes, one wonders? (Don't worry, Nicole, you shall have a full set returned to you)
• This one is potentially very useful: 75% of our first and second years have a laptop they can bring to class.
• If you offer free coffee and biccies to first years on a Wednesday afternoon, on the same day as football trials, they will not turn up to drink it.
• Linden Labs take 15 working days to process orders for the outrageous money grubbing scam which is the Second Life Teen Grid, followed by another 10 days of background checks for instructors.
• On a brighter note: the Large Hadron Collider has not yet destroyed the earth. Nor is it likely to.