[6] The Pyramid of Learning

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course Digital Cultures, a semester in the University of Edinburgh's MsC. in eLearning. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

The Pyramid of Learning is a 'learning model' which has been repeated for decades, despite recent work making a convincing case for the model and the assertions made on its' strength being bunkum.

Will Thalaimer has written on the Pyramid and it's sustained existence. The Pyramid of Learning is a fusion of two ideas - a series of numbers from D. G. Treichler, an employee of Mobil Oil Company in 1967, writing in the magazine Film and Audio-Visual Communications. Fused to that was Dale's "Cone of Experience," developed in 1946 by Edgar Dale.

'You can see that Dale used no numbers with his cone. Somewhere along the way, someone unnaturally fused Dale's Cone and Treichler's dubious percentages.'

And yet, year after year, Instructional Designers and Learning Technologists use the model in their presentations.

Whatever the reason, the worlds of conspiracy theory and online learning share more than a few similarities - disaggregated, fragmented, uncanny in their dis-construction and shifting authenticity, with spare parts of other people's ideas mashed into a new narrative.

Go to Part 7.

[3] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This post is part of a 'digital essay' for the course 'Digital Cultures', part of the MsC. in eLearning from the University of Edinburgh. To go back to the start of the essay, click here.

This map tracks some key moments, locations and people involved in the evolution of what is often called 'the first modern conspiracy theory' - that is the anti-semitic literary forgery commonly known as 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. In addition to giving us a window into the mechanics by which a conspiracy theory is created, we might also pause to note that these are the same mechanics by which a digitally-mediated, post-foundational learning experience or 'narrative' are constructed - from fragmented, multi-located sources.

Click the option to view the larger map so that you can properly see the embedded content.


View Tracking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a larger map

Digital Cultures Course Lifestream Summary

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

Technologies

Where to start? I've just spent the last 40 minutes or so editing the lifestream and have been amazed at the amount of stuff that got lumped in there. There was stuff in there that I'd forgotten I'd added, which brings up perhaps my first point; that although the lifestream may be a viable way of evaluating a learner's engagement with course content, it may have some way to go to improving as an aide to a learner - a semantic, tag-based arrangement of all lifestream entries might sort that. But that doesn't solve the problem of how you'd tag them at the source.

Truth be told though, my main aid in gathering up resources was not the lifestream itself, but the Tumblr feed which I set up to post into it. Tumblr is a fantastic tool for a course like this - especially when utitlised on an iPhone. Half of the stuff in my lifestream was added via my iPhone Tumblr app - a fantastic on-the-go learning tool for someone like me who has to do a fair bit of study 'on the run' from one place to another.

Experience

But what of the experience of using the lifestream? For me, this lifestreaming was both reassuringly familiar yet novel enough to surprise me. Familiar in that I am an avid Delicious user and have been accustomed a while now to 'storing' large parts of myself online - this through my own blog. Through here I have a twitter feed, a Delicious tag cloud, university and work posts, Last.fm playlists and at one point my Flickr feed. In a sense I've kind of been wanting a 'lifestream' for a while and used Blogger as the conduit.

As to being novel, I enjoyed seeing the connections crop up as I posted, 'liked' and favourited my way around Google Reader (the other crucially useful tool for me), Youtube, Twitter and the university blogs. I enjoyed the sense of 'the pieces falling together' when you viewed the lifestream page: conversations, blogs, feeds, pictures and videos all sloshing around in a great big soup of links. In a very simple and powerful way, my Tumblr feed became more than my 'online scrapbook'; instead it was the central artery of my lifestream and course learning.

Content

As to content - well, it's a weird bag. This is a reflection of the stranger junctures of the web which I've been choosing to hang about in these last 12 weeks. There's 9/11 conspiracy theories material, analyses of UFO abductee accounts, summaries of anthropological process and theory, studies of semingly feral discussion forum teenagers, videos of rock-star cyborgs and web-star ethnographers, quotes from university professors and random twitterers, pictures of books I've tried to dip in to, clips from sci-fi movies which the readings made me think of, examples of game-based learning that sprang to mind when the literature turned to 'cyborg pedagogies' and probably a few ill-tempered remarks about my struggles to play the PC version of Modern Warfare 2.

Cyborgs and Ghosts

Looking back at it all now, I find myself giggling a bit - amused at the twists and turns of web-mediated learning, how a quote from one writer can lead to a video from another, to a podcast about conspiracy theories, to an angry conversation about online movies resulting in giving a talk at the Dublin Paranormal Conference and the excruciating experience of seeing yourself on Youtube. I can honestly say that when I started this semseter I didn't see that coming.

How wonderfully odd that a course which makes such explicit references to 'hauntology' and 'ghost-like' online presences should see me wind up speaking in a Dublin hotel full of UFO-hunting, ghost-busting, poltergeist-whispering, Yeti-chasing, paranormal activity fans, in a scene akin to something from a recession-busted Hunter S.Thompson novel.

As to 'cyborg pedagogies', looking back over the lifestream now it seems a suitable example of the re-aggregation, re-assembling and re-modelling of information and meaning-making suggested by the cyborg pedagogy literature. What initially looks like a car-crash of data, upon slightlly closer examination shows patterns of thoughts and concern, avenues of investigations, fruitless rummages down dead-ends of online madness and overall the seemingly random, manic linking between one subject area and another - the connections between disparate writers, disciplines and mediums all merging back in to one big story.

It's a great big mess, but I love it and will be continuing to use my Tumblr as I work my way to the final assignment. Put simply I can't work without it now.

I've immensely, immensely enjoyed this 12 weeks and find myself sad to start winding it all up. And wondering how I can ever go back to a 'mainstream' learning model again.

'What has been seen cannot be unseen'.

Fembots, Latex, Haraway and Hayles

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

References:

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25

I've been rather quiet of late - this last two weeks - partially because Modern Warfare 2 arrived (disrupting nearly everything in my life) but largely because (and I have to be honest here) I found the Harway and Hayles readings quite alienating. As I've said before on this course, I struggle badly with certain types of language used by academics in this field and have wondered if that language and those accompanying narrative structures wouldn't be worthy of a mini-ethnography itself.

Going back to Hine's assertion that the job of the virtual ethnographer is to discover how our informants create 'truth', I can't help but (somewhat snidely) observe that for many in this field 'truth' seems to be created by use of an elitist, hyper-real vocabulary. Whilst such pointedly playful language is perhaps part of the point which Harway and Hayles are trying to make, there were moments when (with Haraway in particular) some of the writing seemed like an exercise in linguistic masturabtion. Although, I'm aware that that probably says as much about me as it does Professor Haraway.

All of that said, I appreciate that such things shouldn't discourage me from course participation, but rather spur me on to try to form a greater understanding. To that end, I'll try to work my way through the five discussion questions which Sian and Jen posed to help us work through these readings.

1. What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?

The short answer: I really don't know. But some ideas did slosh around in my head whilst reading these pieces: perhaps Haraway's cyborg is a celebration of the fusion of man and machine, a position which revels in the ambiguity caused by the union of organic and artificial. By contrast, Hayles' identification of the narrative of 'the posthuman' seems to be something else - where the materiality of the human condition seems to be considered a design flaw of evolution; something which we may soon be in a position to rectify with unspecified, unknown technologies which allow human consciousness (now reduced to a mere mathematical equation for the storage of information) to be 'downloaded' and 'uploaded' into another physical host.

My first thoughts ran to Warren Ellis' Spider Jerusalem stories (the Transmetropolitan series), in which one of the stories showcases a future technology where humans download themselves into a cloud of particles - unshackling themselves from the limits of their bodies. Naturally, I also found myself thinking of James Cameron's forthcoming 'Avatar' - in which a wheelchair-bound war veteran is offered the chance to download into the engineered body of an alien (an eight-foot smurf by the looks of it) in order to... oh, who cares why? The whole thing seems an excuse to showcase some nifty new 3D technology, but the same notion of humans as 'downloadable content' seems to pervade here - as though corporeal existence is simply an irrelevance and we are destined to be reduced to nothing more than a DNA driven RSS feed.

2. Is our thinking about – and beyond – cyberculture still too structured by the kinds of binaries Haraway critiques (promise/threat, for example, or utopia/dystopia)? How does Haraway’s cyborg myth disrupt these?

Again, I just don't know. I do certainly see some of the binaries which the questions suggests in operation every day: debates around 'real' friends and 'online friends', virtual and real, actual and imaginary, corporeal and data-based information and the endless online firestorm over authentication of information as 'real' or 'false' (see Wikipedias' ever-present problems).

But, speaking with friends, family and colleagues I think that the 'utopian/dystopian' binary of the web is rather reductive. People who have serious grievances with social networks like Facebook (over issues of authenticity of interaction, stalking, bullying and privacy) are still using it - no matter how much they may profess they dislike it. If their view of such technologies and the resulting interactions were that dystopian, I don't believe they would engage as they do.

I'm not all that sure that Haraways' Cyborg does actually disrupt these binaries all that much. I know that it's hardly scientific, but I find myself looking (again) at the narratives, stereotypes and presentations of cyborgs within contemporary science-fiction and feel that not all that much has changed. Star Trek: Voyager's latex-clad, baloon-breasted 'Seven of Nine' character seemed like nothing more than a fairly routine geek-boy fantasy - all curves, doe-eyed, kittenish misunderstandings about sexuality, arched eyebrows and the ever-present threat of repressed sexual desire exploding out of its spandex jumpsuit to consume the nearest unsuspecting male crew member. Although not a cyborg per-se, the next Star Trek show (Enterprise) replicated the formula with the charecter T'Pol - a similarly Lara Croft-shaped Vulcan crew-member, whose detached, unemotional behaviour made her seem like nothing more than 'Seven of Nine 2.0'.

A more recent example might be Summer Glau's portrayal of a female Terminator in 'The Sarah Connor Chronicles' (pictured above) - a behaviourally submissive, lethally dangerous killerbot sent through time to protect the male hero, whose duties seem to involve brutally murdering people whilst looking sexually suggestive and wanton. It's not the first time Glau has done this either - her portrayal of River Tam in the fan-favourite 'Firefly' was remarkably similar in places: a precociously talented young woman, fiddled with by nefarious government scientists whose intention was to use technology to turn her into a lethal killing machine - placing a murdering automata in the body of a hot teenage girl. And let's not stop there - Joss Whedon's latest offering, The Dollhouse, sees an array of interchangeable models posing as empty-headed government assasins - their minds a series of blank slates awaiting downloading of new orders to murder assorted bods whilst looking like they're posing for the cover of Vanity Fair.

If Haraways' cyborg was an attempt to break-down standard male-authored sexual fantasies, gender narratives and older, more rigid binary constructions of sexuality, it has been, in the field of mainstream sci-fi anyway, a manifest failure.

3. Is Cartesian mind/body dualism, as Hayles argues of posthuman embodiment (p5), the ultimate opposition that structures all of our debates about subjectivity and online identity?

I'm not that convinced that the Cartesian duality referred to in the question is the ultimate opposition, but it is one which I see debated and enacted almost every day. The seeming paranoia which sat at the heart of James Harkins' 'Cyburbia' seemed to stem from the linking of human beings to a 'feedback loop' - in which virtual comunication becomes an exercise as addictive as the most powerful drug, leading to the illusion of 'friendship', authenticity and meaningful interaction. Social networking's detractors, it seems, suggest that there is an inherent artificiality about such interactions - that the lack of embodied discourse renders the interactions trivial, meaningless and devoid of substance. 'Friends' in Facebook, this narrative suggests, are not real friends at all. But why? Because data sent down a optic cable cannot carry the same meaning, the same nuance and same 'authenticity' as an exchage of data between two people in the same room.

4. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?

Placeholder answer: I don't know. Sorry! I appreciate that this is probably the most crucial of the five questions, and a short answer declaring my ignorance is less than ideal, but I'm being as honest as I can. I've just failed to see the obvious connection between these readings and the design of e-learning materials. And I'd very much like to know what they are.

5. Do cyborgs really resist the structure of sex/gender, as Haraway claims?

In short, no. I don't think that they do. I shan't repeat my earlier assertions about female cyborgs in current sci-fi shows except to say that it seems as though many are merely play-things for male writers - blank slates upon which rating-gathering, hyper-sexualised, yet emotionally dead female archtypes are projected. Rather than resisting, usurping or inverting structures of gender, it would seem that cyborgs perpetuate certain archetypal fantasies, and may, in fact, lead to even more stereotyped depictions of gender and sexuality - a body without a brain, a set of curves to be observed without guilt or conscience because, after all, she's 'only a machine'.

Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory

'Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnograpy of Conspiracy Theory' [A Prezi Scrapbook]

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but I'm doing a talk on Saturday 7th November at the Dublin Paracon 2009, at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8. I've wanted to try out Prezi for a while and thought this might be a good chance to muck about with it. This is a 'Prezi scrapbook' which will eventually become the basis of the talk. It also overlaps with some of my university work at the moment.

Wonderful when two previously completely un-related fields you move about it wander together. Suggest you go full screen to see it properly. Press play first.

Field Sites, UFOs and Virtual Pith Helmets

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

I've been having a ball this last few days, as our focus moves into Block 2: Communities and our working towards a 'virtual ethnography'. I haven't quite decided what community to look at just yet (I'm leaning towards a study of the community of people around the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories) but getting up to speed on the various ideas surrounding notions of 'virtual ethnography' or 'netnography' as some prefer, has allowed me to indulge in a long-held notion I've had about myself 'being an ethnographer'.

I studied Anthropology for a year at university - finally opting to focus on English and Classics for degree level - but I've always harboured fantasies about myself returning to the subject in some unspecified, undefined capacity in the future. I'm not claiming I'm there yet, but the reading lists for this block and some rummaging on the web have brought back some familar ideas and names: Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al.

But then, I thought to myself, have I actually been doing this along? Have I actually been conducting virtual ethnography the whole time? Since 2001, I've been contributing to an Irish site, www.blather.net, where 'fortean phenomena' are catalogued, ranted about and studied with a jaundiced, satirical eye. We've been doing so since 1997 and have embedded ourselves into a rather strange interweb culture of conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, Cryptozooologists and general random lunacy.

I hasten to add by the way that there our stated position is that we don't believe in UFOs and aliens. And we're not so sure that they believe in us either.

Or to put it another way, I'm not as interested in finding UFOs so much as I am in finding stories about UFOs.

An example is this 'Map of the Weird' which we put together a while back, location marking many of the stories which we've blogged about over the years.

This is a video version of the tour.



So, it's with some giddy excitement that I now find myself in the hilarious position of being able to academically justify my years and years of trawling the bowels of the internet for the detritus and wreckage of conspiracy theory, alien abductions and frog falls. Who knew?

All joking aside, there's some serious questions to be answered before I can really go any further:

• What (if anything) is my 'field site'?


• Am I a 'lurker' ethnographer or one that directly partcipates in the community?


• How do I reference, present and quote sources?


• What 'netiquette' considerations do we have be aware of?

I may not need a pith helmet so much as a tin-foil hat, but here we go...

Tales from Cyberia: Tape-decks, Pathe News and Damien Hirst's Skull

This is a cross-posted blog from my course 'E-learning and Digital Cultures', part of my masters at the University of Edinburgh

Who is going to control the internet? Can it be controlled? Do we want it to be controlled?

Hand's analysis [1] of the differing 'narratives' on cyberculture seems to reveal two central themes - two lenses through which to view cyberspace. Lenses which, at first glance anyway, would seem to sit in stark opposition to each other. First, the belief that cyberspace will be a liberating space for society, removing barriers to communication, reducing the cost of creating value to almost zero and moving us away from the rigid, top-down control of governments. The other, a narrative that seems to be in almost bipolar opposition, is that the web is providing government and big corporations opportunities to mount assaults on our privacy and space which would have been previously unthinkable. And I can see both sides.

A piece by Charlie Brooker in last week's Guardian would seem to illustrate this quite well. Drawing together strands from a story about how "artist" Damien Hirst has gone all legal-handbags with another artist (Cartrain, a 19-year old would-be Banksy) who had the temerity to use an image of Hirst's much-discussed diamond skull piece in a montage he did, and how this relates to broader issues of copyright and ownership, Brooker then turns to comment on the increasingly hysterical legislation being mooted by the British government in response to file-sharing technologies. In short, the 'three strikes and you're out' rule is back on the table after, we can assume, a ferocious round of lobbying by the music industry. Brooker then says:

''In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.'

And it was. I know this because I was one of those kids.

Old school

Did I know that I was breaking the law? No. I was completely unaware of issues of copyright and ownership. I was six for God's sakes. All I knew was that there was a machine in my living room which enabled me to record songs off the radio so that I could listen to them again when I chose to. Not when or where the record company said I should, but where and when I chose.

In terms of simple affordances , the only difference between BBC's Radio 1 Sunday Chart show combined with my Dad's tape-deck and modern peer-to-peer file-sharing softwares, is the fact that the latter is happening in corporation's faces. In public. Recording a track off of Radio 1 in 1985, a music executive had no way of knowing that such illegal activity was hapenning. Or even if he had known, he had no earthly way of doing anything about it.

It would seem that at the same time as new technologies have enabled people to share media and enabled data to be 'set free', the same technologies have enabled corporations to gain a window into a social habit which has gone on for decades. And to try to do something about it. You might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the solution would be for them to go where the kids are and, you know, start working on online services that deliver quality, value-for-money products in a manner in keeping with the times, but no, you'd be mistaken. Law-suits, apparently, are the way to go.

Time for a little bit of history.

Older school

My father (80 years young this year) recently told me stories of how during the early 1950's he and his friends would gather at each other's houses to play vinyl records and share music. Was this 'filesharing'? Did it constitute illegal activity? Were they breaking the law?

Similarly, my father also told me a tale (just this weekend gone) which caught my attention: during the Second World War, Ireland (my home) was officially 'neutral', meaning it had no strategic allegiance with either Allied or Axis powers. This led to some fairly weird behaviour from the Irish state. One of their more peculiar notions was to place a ban on the broadcast and showing of all war footage - so those wonderful old Pathe New reels which British audiences crowded into cinemas to watch, were not shown in the Republic of Ireland.

But, my father told me conspiratorially, the word on the street was that should you know the right person in Dublin, access could be got to small, select private screenings of war footage which were held on the quiet in backstreet Dublin cinemas. Due to the bootleg nature of the footage, it was not the sanitised, 'good war' morale-boosting footage which London audiences saw. Instead it was raw, hideously violent rushes shot on European battlefields which showed the true carnage of battle.

So, did the censorship rules implemented by the Irish government (to stop 'filesharing' of contraband materials) actually facilitate a small number of Irish citizens actually being better informed about the realities of what combat troops were facing than the folks over in London? Perhaps.

I couldn't help but think that, occasionally, the invasion of corporatism into technologies often results in unforseen consequences - cultural and social changes that can't be predicted. And can't be controlled. That the battle for control of new technologies and the frequently absurd squabble over increasingly complicated copyright issues can lead to cracks in the spaces betewen the desires of end users and the corporations trying to protect their wares. I'm thinking this could be an interesting theme to track.

Note: it's interesting perhaps that the British Pathe News reels site which I linked to above plays a vast archive of fantastic footage, but doesn't allow for embedding. They're not still worried about reproduction rights are they?

References

[1] Hand, M (2008) 'Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat', chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Back to Uni

I'll be starting a new semester of my Masters in e-learning next week, so there should be more activity on here than of late. Blogging will be a hefty feature of the course, so I'll be cross-posting here.

Large sections of this course will be done 'in the open' and can be followed and viewed by folks who are curious. You can view more about the course here, at the Wordpress portal, - which by the way, I'm thrilled about. I've been meaning to spend some time learning about Wordpress (most of my blogging is done using Movable Type or Blogger) and am looking forward to it. I'm already quite impressed by how far Wordpress has come since I last looked at it about two years ago.

So. Brace yourselves. Digital culture, here I come.

Intellectual Augmentation

(image by twenty questions)

I've started back at University this week and now find myself doing a semester of my MsC. in e-learning entitled 'How people learn in an online environment'. This is some 'thinking out loud' about a position paper written by my tutor which touches on a number of issues to do with cognition and learning...

I'm fascinated by the issue of "Intellectual Augmentation". As some of you will have heard me mention, I work for the Police Forces of the UK. It's arguable that 21st century policing will be about information management - which is more than just learning about the job. It's about learning how to manage information about the job.

Recently I was half-way through reading a blog on something related to work and stopped to just tag it in Delicious. I don't know why, but for once I asked myself what the actual likelihood of me going back to read this was? Minimal, I decided. And if that were so, then why am I doing this? Why not keep reading? Why stop?

Is delicious making me dumber? Is it making me lazier? Or do I actually have to hold every exact reference, citation and date in my head?

Why can't delicious just hold that information for me, freeing up valuable 'RAM' in my head to concentrate on the bigger picture? Whatever that is.

It's an interesting set of questions and one which relates back to the Task-Artefact question - observing how social bookmarking facilities change our relationship with the information that we manage and acquire, perhaps driving us towards a relationship with learning which is now mediated by machine (the semantic tagging behind delicious and diigo etc.) and which assumes that we have a different, more surface-like relationship with a field of learning and it's constituent parts which we no longer hold in our own memories but only have a loose connection with via an external database of content and semantically linked objects.

Doesn't this raise some very fundamental questions about how we define learning? Does this change how we need to examine and assess people? Does it change what we mean by mastery of a subject? Is mastery no longer the ability to recite wholesale facts and figures but rather the abiliity to categorise that subject's constituent parts - and to assimilate new objects into that field?

Is 'learning' becoming a question of ability to manage information and categorise it for later access from an external aid? And if so, where do we draw the line in what we hold inside and outside of ourselves?

A Google Earth Game?

In 2007 I was asked, as part of an assignment for my MsC. in e-Learning to create a 'game' using Google Earth. This is what I wrote afterwards...

How would a Google Earth game work?. The strength of a Google Earth (GE) game lays in GE's superb ability to give dramatic, location-based hyperlinking. Exportable .kmz files (also know as 'Placemarkers') can be saved, extracted and embedded into blog posts, e-mailed to gamers and used as a device to send learners to specific locations. The problem, however, rests with what they do when they get there.

Assuming that you have successfully landed at a GE location, the question remains as to what to do. Are you there to identify a place? That isn't that challenging - GE layers for roads, historical monuments and other locations of note will allow a gamer to gather his location pretty quickly. Not to mention the fact that you fly there.

Beyond using each location as a means to help identify this person, GE seems almost redundant. Which is a shame. Such a powerful linking function could have done much more. For example, why not send gamers to obscure locations across the earth, embed clues nearby (using tags) which lead the gamer to search other forms of media for clues - not just the blog and GE?

For example, Flickr.com, (despite the best efforts of Yahoo to screw it up) remains one of the quintessential social media services. In addition to the great networking and RSS capabilities, Flickr also presents users with a fiendishly clever (and simple) means of interaction: notes.

Notes are, as the name suggests, small packets of information placed on top of an image with text files. Click on the image above for an example (from my account) of some notes that I left on some photos of the Geffrye Museum, London. As you can see from the notes I left on the image, in addition to text you can also leave hyperlinks to other locations: images, blogs, wikis, Google Earth placemarkers, Youtube videos.

You can export a Flickr image to a blog as I've done here, but, dissapointingly, you can't export the notes with it. Which is a damned shame.

What makes them powerful for a gaming application, is that the notes can be placed over specific places in photos - this means that a visual clue (something in the image) can be associated with a piece of text for a far more meaningful prompt to participate in a game than a simple question asked on a blog page.

Using Blogs as a 'launch pad' is good, but constantly directing the gamer back to the blog could be slightly repetitive. Rather than that, why not send them to a Flickr page? Which has a note? That note can require you to search a wikipedia entry for an answer with the connected area of the original Flickr image as a clue? That Wikipedia entry could lead to a Youtube video, which leads to a Twitter page, which leads to another blog, which leads to another Flickr page, which leads to...

Well, you get the idea. Rather than focusing on just two media streams (Blogs and GE) a proper linking game ('cos that's what it should be!) should drag you around the web, connectingseemingly disparate ideas, images and locations - allowing users to explore a range of media and enabling different learning styles and information acquisition styles to flourish. Furthermore, the simple sense of adventure (of being slightly lost) would be far more tangible. Running 'home' to a blog at each turn feels somewhat tedious and un-inventive for me.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Games, Learning Objectives and 'Telescoping'

If you should find yourself doing a course on game design, it's likely that you'll be asked to read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). It's a brilliant book, but, perhaps not that easy a way into the subject.

But, for a good introduction to some of the themes involved in applying computer games to learning you could do no worse than to take a look at the Steven Johnson book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You' . It's possible that Johnson does an even better job of explaining Gee's theories than perhaps Gee does himself. However, in addition to nicely summarising Gee, he also draws your attention to an aspect of modern video games which has immediately obvious educational applications - what Johnson calls 'Telescoping'.

This is when a gamer is forced to hold multiple objectives in his or her head in order to achieve a final objective. I immediately thought of 'Terminal' and 'Enabling' learning objectives, which are a staple of the Instructional Design Framework which NCALT e-learning staff work to. What's crucial here is the manner in which these objectives are 'nested' inside one and other, encouraging gamers and learners to cultivate the mental skills required to keep short-term goals in sight whilst never losing sight of 'the bigger picture'.

From 'Everything Bad Is Good For You':

"I call the mental labour of managing all these simoultaneous objectives 'telescoping' because of the way that the objectives nest inside each other like a collapsed telescope. I like the term aswell because part of this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems whilsy maintaining a long-distance view. You can't progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across: you have to co-ordinate them with the ultimte objectives on the horizon. Talented gamers have mastered the ability to kep all these varied objectives alive in their head."

Grim Fandango

As part of the game design course I recently took, I asked to do a study of the classic Lucas Arts game 'Grim Fandango' (pictured above) recently which gave me some classic examples.

Designed in 1998 by Lucasarts and widely held as the best 'adventure game' of all time, Fandango was a critical success but commercial flop. It still carries a large, cult following and has be held up as an exemplar of the genre of games.

Set in a universe inspired by Mexican day of the Dead mythology, the game is a tricky adventure game with a plot every bit as intricate as a Philip Marlowe novel. The clever story is complimented by an Art Deco look and feel, bonkers Bandito/Bee-Bop/Jazz score and excellent voice talent. Oh and it's very funny.

The game was the brainchild of Tim Schafer, previously responsible for the celebrated Monkey Island and Full Throttle. From Wikipedia:

'The story unfolds in four episodes, each set a year apart on the Day of the Dead. It is from this festival that much of the game's imagery is drawn — most of the game's characters look like skeletal calaca figures (based on the work of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada). Various flowers are also used as tools of murder, in the form of a substance known as "Sproutella", which reacts with bone, destroying it by causing flowers to grow in it extremely rapidly. Characters refer to this manner of death as "sprouting". There is also unique fauna scattered throughout the game, such as bone-eating fire beavers and gigantic race cats.

The game combines this mythical underworld with 1930s Art Deco design motifs and a dark plot reminiscent of the film noir genre.[1] The design and early plot are reminiscent of films such as Chinatown and Glengarry Glen Ross.[2] Manny, whose job combines the roles of Grim Reaper and travel agent, turns detective when he discovers that deserving souls are being denied their rightful post-mortem reward of direct travel to Mictlan on the Number Nine train, bypassing the four-year trip that other souls must take. Manny's investigations draw him into a tangled web of corruption, deceit, and murder.'

Telescoping

The first sequence of 'Grim' involves Manny (the hero) attempts to get to the scene of a mass poisoning in the 'Land of the Living', so that he can reap a premium soul.

In order to get to the Land of the Living, you have to complete the following objectives:

To get to the Land of the Living, you need a car and a driver ('Terminal' objective)
To get a car and driver you have to go to the garage.
To get to the garage you have to find the lift down.
To get a driver you have to convince Glotiss to drive for you.
To convince Glotis to drive you have to have a signed form.
To get a signed form you have to go up to the boss's office.
To get into the Boss's office you have to climb the drainpipe and switch his PC's auto-prompt to tell his secretary to 'sign it' herself.
To get her to sign it you have to...

And so on. This dizzyingly complex set of objectives represents only half of the first level of the game - which overall comprises about 20 'Terminal' objectives.

The next step is to find an example from police work of obvious telescoping and see how the nested objectives could be broken down into a logical learning and activity path.

What next?

So, how could we use 'telescoping' in e-learning? Are there any obvious applications that spring to mind?

[Virtual Worlds] IBM, Virtual Battles and Roy Keane's Mountain Bike Madness

Note: This a blog entry from my MsC in e-learning 'Introduction to Game Design' module.

Reading over the IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, 'Virtual World, Virtual Leaders' I was struck - not by the gee-whizz factoids and structural study of what good leadership entails (the Sloan model of Leadership, apparently) but rather how virtual worlds (and their games) provide opportunities for gamers not normally associated with roles of leadership to have a crack at leading in a safe guided environment:

'Using massively multiplayer online games as a template, it can be argued that leadership is as much a by-product of environment as it is intrinsic. Leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, often undertaken by otherwise reserved players, who surprise even themselves with their capabilities'.

Now, normally speaking, I would launch into my usual banter about obvious applications in the world of Policing and enabling officers to make critical command decisions in a safe, guided environment, but instead I instantly found myself thinking about one Roy Maurice Keane.

Keane's meteoric rise as a football manager (taking Sunderland from the bottom of the Championship to the Premiership in just 8 months) has seen him become the darling of the British red-tops. With Jose Mourinho now off pouting on a beach somewhere, the press have turned to Keane as their rent-a-quote supplier. His down-to-earth manner, self-deprecating wit and willingness to fashion an articulate statement when all around him are awash in a sea of egomania and mobile phone advert contracts, ensures that Keane's every word gets parroted by the media. He has, as one friend of mine observed, a certain undeniable mystique.

But what has all this got to do with virtual worlds? Well, without knowing it, Roy Keane has become an unwitting spokesman for the efficacy of 'Virtual Worlds' and their opportunities for providing just the kind of leadership opportunities which the IBM report cited above describes.

Last season, several newspapers ran the story that Keane had taken to sending his players up the side of mountains, white-water rafting and cross-country biking in what most reported as a simple example of Roy the 'hard man' sorting the men from the boys in increasingly macho team events. What most journos failed to notice was that Keane, through the creation of 'games' ("split into four groups of ten and race up the top of that mountain and back down again") was providing the circumstances for otherwise quiet players to exercise their nascent leadership skills in a (relatively) safe, guided environment.

From a Guardian article of April 19th 2007:

'I gave the lads a challenge yesterday and it was a very difficult challenge - four hours on a mountain bike is not easy," the Irishman said. "We were in four teams of 10 and every team wanted to win."

Rather more importantly, Keane was able to assess how individuals adjusted to being removed from cosily familiar habitats. "I find out who the leaders are, who likes to be in control, who the real winners are," he said. "We've done a lot of this stuff over the last seven months and you find out a lot about your players through different challenges. The lads are comfortable with a football at their feet but throw them on a mountain bike or into a white-water raft and you see another side of them, some good, some maybe not so good. We like to keep them guessing and give them surprises. Yesterday, for instance, they only knew we were going to Swaledale two minutes before we left.

"You'd be surprised who comes to the fore, there were one or two I thought wouldn't enjoy it but did. And it means they look forward to getting
back training here and getting a feel for the ball again."'

So, if a Premiership manager can do it...

Battlefield 2: A Policing Game?

Note: this entry was originally submitted to the MsC in E-learning 'Game Design' Module in November 2007 to Hamish MacCleod (tutor) as a mid-term paper.

This review will examine the game 'Battlefield 2' with a view towards an educational adaptation for Police training - an adaptation which seeks to create what J. P. Gee calls 'distributed authentic professionalism'.

BF2's strengths lie in its collaborative real-time gaming. Players enter one of twelve maps, choose a 32-member team to play on (usually USA or Middle Eastern Coalition- MEC), join a six-member squad and pick one of six standard 'classes'. These classes are: Special Forces, Assault, Sniper, Engineer, Medic and Anti-tank. Players can also create custom squads, invite other players to that squad, and act as a conduit for communications between squad members and the commander.

Depending on the rank you have achieved, with promotions and weapon-unlocks given based on your performance, you can apply to be commander of the whole team. It's these last two functionalities of command and communication, in addition to the novel usage of vehicles for collaborative transport and combat, that lend themselves most readily to an educational adaptation of BF2.

A brief look at the functional options for squad members, squad leaders and commanders respectively, allows us to discuss potential adaptation to a Policing scenario.Taking a quick look at some standard BF2 gameplay might help visualise some of these ideas. You can do so by watching this video. (Please note that the banging techno was not my choice).



Player classes have a range of weapons and kit - easily accessed either by using the keyboard's 1-5 buttons or the scroll-wheel on the mouse. The basic 'Assault class' soldier, for example, has a knife (1), side-arm (2), machine-gun (3), and grenade launcher (4). The medic or engineer has further options with a medical kit (5) and shock paddles (6) or, in the case of the engineer, a wrench to fix damaged vehicles and artillery guns or radar stations. These could be replaced with the four or five pieces of standard kit which a Police Officer carries - notebook, handcuffs, torch, Airwaves radio set etc. Each one could be activated in the same way as a weapon or piece of kit in BF2.

Such selection could enable simulations of arrest scenarios, interview and statement taking procedures, surveillance operations and radio communications -using VoIP which the BF2 engine exploits wonderfully. Since Police Officers are required to report their movements and to be accountable for their actions (constantly carrying out dynamic risk assessments), VoIP communication provides a rich means to practice communication protocols.

Additionally, as noted by Manninen and Kujappaa, the Battlefield game allows for additional 'perceivable and holistic manifestations of interaction that enable players to fully collaborate and cooperate in networked game settings'.

So, what would a policing-based adaptation of the BF2 engine look and feel like? The game would begin with a clear statement about the value systems of the game, encouraging gamers to behave, think and communicate like a Police Officer. It would offer a fish-tank and sand-box; emphasise the impact of decisions; allow for customisation of kit; elaborate on your role; provide well-ordered problems; be pleasantly frustrating; give cycles of expertise which challenge gamers' evolving skills, within the regime of the gamers' competence; give just-in-time information; and ties sets of skills together into larger contexts of activity. All done within legislative and procedural guidance.

The 'downtown Baghdad' location (perhaps based on the 'Strike at Karkand' map) is replaced with a 'downtown Newcastle' setting and the simulation replicates a busy Saturday night. The map could have three or four pubs, nightspots, take-away food locations (known flash-points for public disorder) and transport systems, such as bus depots and taxi-ranks, which need to be vigilantly policed.

A commander can receive real-time intelligence from his IBO centre (Integrated Borough Operations) on incidents that are breaking out. A challenging, but realistic, game might involve a commander receiving intelligence on two or three incidents of public disorder, a traffic collision, a domestic violence incident, a stolen vehicle, perhaps involved in joy-riding, or a missing persons report.

The commander then dispatches vehicles containing squads of six to each location, with specific orders. At the scene, the squad leaders are required to communicate with the commander - reporting on the scene, requesting resources and back-up - with individual officers expected to interact with avatars at the scene. The avatars themselves (which could be programmed bots, or better still real players acting as inebriates, violent spouses or whatever) allow for real-time, on the scene policing simulations with officers making dynamic decisions - reported via VoIP.

In BF2, squad members access a series of communication short-cuts by pressing the Q key and using the mouse to choose from a menu. Standard requests include 'Need ammo', 'Need medic' and 'Need backup'. In addition, a central menu interface gives an 'Enemy spotted' option which, with a right-click, allows you to specify the threat e.g. 'Enemy tank spotted'. These could be adapted to code-specific Police communications and the 'enemy spotted' option changed to communicate specific incidents such as 'traffic collision', 'domestic violence incident' etc.

Squad leaders gain access to a higher level of functionality in the game's standard map (accessed by pressing the M key) where they are able to request a range of services from the commander. Specifically they can request artillery strikes, vehicle drops, supply drops, reinforcements and unmanned aerial vehicles to act as radar for spotting mobile enemy. The adaptations for a policing scenario are obvious enough: the UAV request easily translates to a request for helicopter assistance, the back-up request to a ambulance or medical services support, and the requests for artillery and supplies to intelligence requests such as a standard Police National Computer (PNC) check.

Commanders receive access to a third level of functionality (from the Caps Lock key) which enables them to meet the requests of squad leaders e.g. 'artillery strike on this location'. Crucially, commanders have the ability to issue specific orders at specific locations on the map. There is the standard 'attack/defend this position' order, but you can also order demolition or repairs at a location. This ability allows a commander to tackle multiple tasks at the same time. This readily maps to the range of choices which a BCU (Basic Command Unit) Commander faces when dealing with a busy Saturday night in a town or village.

BF2 has an array of vehicle options including quad bikes, hummers, tanks, APVs, fighter jets, helicopters and boats. Their value lies in the gamers' ability to enter vehicles with team mates. Each vehicle allows up to eight players to driven to a location. Given that the commander can issue location and situation specific orders, e.g. 'place demolitions at this co-ordinate', a Policing simulation could enable commanders to order mobile response units to proceed to a location and deal with an incident there. In-vehicle time could be used to send field-briefings to officers as well as for officers to speak to and learn from each other.

Given the continued threat of terrorism, and the need for robust police training in dealing with that threat, a similar design solution could simulate management of assets and resources during a terrorist incident, enabling differing ranks of players to learn counter-terrorist, critical incident and emergency procedures collaboratively.

References

Manninen T. and Kujanpää T. The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942 [accessed November 11, 2007]

Gee, J. P. What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?. Innovate 1 (6). [accessed November 11, 2007]

Gee, J. P. (2004). Learning by design: Games as learning machines. Interactive Educational Multimedia, 8, 15 - 23. [pdf - accessed November 11, 2007]

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

This is an updated version of a blog post which I originally submitted as part of my MsC. in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh, in Spring 2007.

Unavoidable

Anyone who attends e-learning conferences (or keeps up with the chatter on the blogs) will have found it difficult to avoid references to 'digital natives'. There are other terms which are popular (like 'Gamers', or 'Gen Y') but the term 'digital native' is perhaps the most commonly used term to describe the people currently entering the workforce.

But what are they and where does the term come from?

The term was coined by the author Marc Prensky (pictured above) who used it to distinguish between people who have grown up using interactive multimedia and those who are having to 'learn' how to interact with and use services like Youtube, Google Reader and the dizzying array of social web services like Facebook, Orkut and Myspace.

From Prensky:

'Today's students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.'

Suspicions

My reading of Prensky's article on digital 'immigrants' and 'natives' was thought-provoking in two ways: firstly in that it seemed to confirm some long-held suspicions about current educational models and secondly because it proposed a new division of learners which I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with.

Prensky's arguments that 'digital natives' are not being well served by traditional pedagogies is one part of a larger argument which has been bubbling up within the zeitgeist for some time now. Any of us working in educational fields will be long-familiar with constant claims that school-children are more disengaged than ever before, with teachers complaining that learners are switched-off, suffering from attention-deficit disorder and that they lack the basic ability to concentrate in class. This isn't new - Plato uttered similar complaints in the 6th century BCE.

What's notable now is that such complaints have become so vociferous in recent years that increasingly there are more and more people suggesting that rather than there being issues with the learners, there is in fact a fundamental problem with the system which is trying to educate them.

Underground History

Some time back I stumbled across the work of John Taylor Gatto, who in his groundbreaking book 'The Underground History Of American Education' suggested that the American educational system is designed as nothing more than a complex factory line for producing hordes of compliant individuals, whose sole purpose in life is to willingly submit themselves to processing by multi-national corporations in menial physical labour.

The exact details of how this project came to be are complex, but if we accept Gatto's arguments for a moment, a large problem makes itself very clear. The Anglo-Prussian model upon which the US system was based was designed during a time of Industrial manufacturing. That age is now gone - with today's school-leavers thrust into a global 'knowledge economy' which they are ill-prepared to compete in.

This notion has been surfacing in several places - from blogs, to academic journals - to mainstream media where we saw in an episode from the seventh season of the TV show 'The West Wing', Democratic candidate Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) railing against the US educational system because it was based on the agrarian calendar.

As dead as Gagne

I have no difficulty in accepting that some older pedagogical models may have had their day in the sun, but I'm concerned that such a rush to embrace the future may marginalise those of us who do not necessarily fit comfortably into one of Prensky's two categories. For example, Donald Clark (former CEO of the Epic e-learning company - where I worked for a year) posted a blog in February of 2007, where he stated that the increase in usage of the web in education is 'killing Gagne dead'. The Gagne that he refers to is Robert Gagne and his 'Nine events of learning'. This is probably the most often used ID model for producing 'chapters' of digital e-learning content.

Clark argues that the increased accessibility of content via the web (notably video content) is knocking such 'guided' models out of the water entirely. To an extent I agree with him - I believe that many digital learning solutions are designed not with the learner in mind but rather the tutor - accommodating perhaps the tutor's preferred learning styles rather than the learners.

However, a white paper from Epic (which Donald, as you can see from the comments below the blog post in question, is at pains to point out he did not write) makes a good case for different usage of ID models for different audiences. Specifically, it suggests that 'entry-level' audiences would benefit from the more guided models (of which Gagne is an excellent example) and that more free-form models of self-guided learning (such as are facilitated by the web) work better for more senior and experienced learners - who crucially have the time and the technical skills to enable such learning to occur.

Pedagogy or not?

My own experiences would seem to back this up: I work in creating digital learning solutions for a range of audiences - all of them in the Police services of the UK. Unbelievably, entry level learners to the police force have no protected learning time - rendering any offer for learners to learn in their 'own way' redundant. This, coupled with the fact that the learners we design for are acquiring sensitive, challenging and highly legislation-sensitive materials, behoves us to provide a clearer line of guidance in any learning materials provided. I would prefer it that we lived in a world that allowed trainee Police officers the opportunity to have exploratory, free-form learning experiences but the time constraints, legislation compliance and complexity of information negates this from happening - at least for entry level learners. Digital natives or not, pedagogy (of some form) is required for audiences such as this.

I can't help but feel that Prensky's narrow division of learners into 'natives' and 'immigrants' is reductive, binary and perhaps unhelpful. For certain a 12 year-old will have different wiring (as a result of the neuro-plasticity which Steven Johnson alludes to in his book 'Everything Bad Is Good For You') than a 32 year-old as myself, but I'm not entirely ignorant of new technologies and in some rare instances still have the ability to wow my teenage nephews with what seems to them like arcane knowledge of the web and it's myriad services. On the flip side, put them up against me in a PS2 shoot-em-up and they'll annihilate me. I'd like to think that myself and my nephew fit somewhere in-between 'native' and 'immigrant' and that neither of us would be pigeon-holed into one educational model based on our age and hours put in on an Xbox.

Read

Prensky's article on 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants' (pdf)

Watch

'Did you know?' - explaining the 'digital native'.