Virtual Learning Worlds

After successfully defending my dissertation on May 5th, it is now official: I graduated on August 15th, 2009 with a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Workforce Education and Development from the College of Education, the Pennsylvania State University.

With the new degree in hand, I’m in the midst of a job search. I re-organized the site a bit, adding information to the Presentations page, creating a Publications page with a few articles and other materials I’ve authored, and finally a CV page that contains a link to my curriculum vitae. I have a couple more pages in mind that might show up soon, but this covers it for now. I’m applying for jobs all over the map, from industry jobs with Blizzard Entertainment, to administrator positions at universities and lastly tenure-track positions at teaching-oriented universities.

If anyone in the virtual world/game blogosphere is reading and has a vacancy, feel free to drop me a message so we can discuss further!
bartonpursel[at]gmail.com

As the PhD is rapidly coming to a close (fingers crossed), I’ve been thinking a lot about my future direction. Teaching is still at the top of the priority list. Each semester I tend to change a large percent of my materials to try new things, see if they work and constantly evolve what I’m doing. This semester I stumbled onto a duality of sorts.

For example, I had all the IST 110 students create ePortfolios. On one hand, I tried to teach them the elements that make a good ePortfolio. Good writing samples, reflection on past educational experiences, professionalism, etc. In the process, the students also learned how to create and manipulate web pages. Most of my assignments had this form of duality. I spent some time talking about designing user interfaces, then had the students create their own using Photoshop (or other image editing software).

I thought it would be a good idea to start tracking some numbers, and this is the best place for me to do that.

In spring 2009 I taught two classes: IST 110 and IST 440w. Overall, I had the opportunity to interact with over 200 students ranging the entire spectrum of academic standing, from freshman to senior. Also, IST 110 was a general education section so I interacted with MANY students outside of IST. The breakdown:

• Students created 1,050 blog posts
• Students created 120 ePortfolios
• Students created 120 user interface comps
• Students created 24 Public Service Announcement videos
• Students created 11 prototypes in the context of new business ventures
• Students created 60 podcasts

Total: 1,385 artifacts created this semester. I feel pretty dam good about that. Once the summer opens up and I have more time to write, I’ll try and illustrate the reasoning behind all this creation.

This semester was my first experience teaching 100+ students in a large lecture hall. The course, IST 110, is a basic introduction to the College of Information Sciences and Technology at PSU. Overall I’ve learned a LOT regarding how to transition my old version of IST 110 to a much larger course setting. I used a lot of different technology tools, broke the class down a few weeks to run workshops and ended up asking them to do quite a few things online, including podcasts, video, eportfolio creation, blogging and evaluating social networking services.

Marc Prensky was an early influence to the direction I’ve taken my instructional design philosophies, both around gaming and around generational differences (the digital natives vs. digital immigrants). Marc doesn’t necessarily write about social networking (it was a bit too early for that when he wrote his paper almost 10 years ago), but MANY people have picked up the torch and claim that this concept also holds true for social networking, and in many cases, technology in general.

After this semester, I don’t buy the hype.

Most students don’t know how to make a website. The idea of creating a web page or a site is very foreign to them (even though they do this everyday via Facebook or MySpace). Podcasts? Yeah right, just give me more music please. Creating video? A SMALL fraction of students do this, which in turn means only a small fraction of students can even get footage off a digital camera to a computer. Twitter? Delicious? Brite Kite? I get very confused looks when I bring these things up with students.

…and I’m teaching a course with TECHNOLOGY in the title, so normally students have some sort of interest to enroll in this class (it is a general education course so many students take it outside the major).

The few students that use twitter use it to follow celebrities, TV shows or athletes. I’ve found a total of ONE student (out of 210 this semester) that is using Twitter as a means of collaboration and community support around his professional life (and the student is non-traditional).

Now they do use MySpace and Facebook, but they use it very differently than we do (and many times they want us to stay out of this space). We often use these sites for professional reasons (build our networks, share our ideas and so on) while they use it almost exclusively to virtually hang out with friends.

This Saturday was the TLT Symposium here on campus, and I was able to get away from the EGC Demonstration Room to listen to dana boyd talk about her field work on social media with teens. I was ecstatic to hear her echo these thoughts, and even stress the fact that she finds this assumption (”digital natives just know how to use all this stuff, ya know?”) extremely frustrating.

On one hand I still see value in looking at these tools and illustrating how they can be used professionally or to improve organizational productivity, but the whole idea of “I need to integrate these into the flow of my course because students use this stuff and understand it” is something we all need to question.

I’m still not sure the title of this entry reflects the content of the post…but it’s the first thing that came to mind. A few colleagues and many others are taking part in an event called “Hacking Education” going on right now. I don’t have a lot of time to put thoughts around all the great things I’ve read already coming out of the conference, but I come across a great post by Jeff Jarvis (thanks April!) that illustrated some of the thinking behind this.

Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one’s own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a class.

With my PhD nearly complete, I do have dreams of teaching at a teaching-centered university, fully intent on breaking old traditions and leading by example in new ways to reach students (and students reach me, for that matter). In addition to following these types of conversations online, I picked up a copy of Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. After reading the introduction, I felt similar to when I read the above quote: I couldn’t agree more! Our educational system is in such a rut, how will we ever recover? Then I realized that this book was published in 1971, and everything cited during the intro STILL holds true today.

Our system is (and has been for a LONG time) screwed up all the way to the core.

In Don Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things he alludes to two types of knowledge:
1. Knowledge in the world
2. Knowledge in your head
Taking this out of Norman’s design context, I think this is a HUGE part of why everything is screwed up. We are testing students at all levels in the educational system for knowledge in the world. That is, knowledge that is easily found by simple searches, often times within seconds of a question being asked. Why do we test students on this type of knowledge? It only ever becomes knowledge in the head for a short time period, then it is gone. The ‘knowledge in the head’ should be things like scientific discourse, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity…these are THE skills individuals MUST know to be successful.

end rant

Just wanted to post something quick before the craziness starts. I’ll be teaching two courses this semester, one that I’ve never taught before, consisting of ~200 students. I’m also trying to defend my dissertation by the end of April. Also, the EGC Lab will be opening this semester, so I’ll be working with the crew to continue to grow that initiative. Toss in a few funded projects in virtual worlds for our Institute partners and…well…I probably won’t have a lot of time to write many blog posts.

I have noticed over the last few semesters that I tend to hit twitter more during teaching semesters vs. blog posts. I suppose it’s a combination of not having ample time to put together blog posts and the ability to quickly twitter interesting things taking place in and around the classroom.

Here’s to a good semester, and hopefully the emergence of Dr. Pursel by the summer!

Brian pointed this out today via Twitter: David Wiley of Brigham Young University is structuring his course similar to a role playing game, where students take on the role of an artisan, a bard, a merchant, or a monk (typical character classes in RPGs). If he follows the conventional RPG model, these students will form teams, each consisting of a combination of specific character classes. Professor Wiley succinctly points out why this is a worthy experiment:

Although he’s using a game metaphor, Mr. Wiley says that dividing students up into teams and asking them to work on group projects are time-tested teaching techniques — ones that the best video games happen to make use of. “If you reverse-engineer a popular multiplayer game, they’ve somehow encoded all these things about what good learning ought to look like,” he argues. “Instead of just learning how to kill orcs, we can use these really effective techniques for honest-to-goodness educational content.”

Expanding off my last post, as well as Cole’s op-ed piece, I stumbled across a study Karl wrote about this week regarding the use of social networking tools by 9-17 yr olds. From the article:

we all might need to reevaluate our assumptions: It turns out kids are actually using the Internet for educational purposes… The percentage of children specifically discussing schoolwork online outpaces the percentage that spend time downloading music.

They have a fairly broad definition of “education-related topics”, which consists of “college or college planning; learning outside of school; news; careers or jobs; politics, ideas, religion, or morals; and schoolwork.” So are they talking about specific course content? Probably not 50% of the time, but all of the above items are definitely education-related and important topics. The article also goes on to discuss Internet usage (image from the original article):

The study goes on to illustrate that many school policy makers and parents see value in these tools for education, but most schools ‘outlaw’ the use of many social networking sites and tools during school hours. “Thoughtful policies” need to be put in place to open these up during school ours, the article states.

The interesting piece for me is that most of the activities that are education-related appear to be coming from an informal learning perspective; the students are not using the tools for education based on a teacher’s prompt. Some of my students, particularly freshman, would rather “us old folks” stay out of their Facebook space. Based on the results of the study as well as my classroom experience, the questions I continue asking myself before each term:

• What social tools should I use for formal learning?
• How can I spark informal learning through the use and/or discussion of social tools?
• How do you assess/grade student’s performance when using social tools like blogs and wikis?

The informal learning piece continues to develop in my thinking around education and how I approach my courses. I’m trying to find some sort of middle ground between informal and formal learning, something that I can spark or somehow facilitate at the beginning, then hand over the discussion or idea to the students to build upon. So far, it’s hard to find any evidence whether my attempts are succeeding or not.

I had the opportunity last year to talk with a potential student about the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. His father, a renowned researcher from Singapore, was visiting for the day and had his son in the states to look at universities. After talking about interests, he sheepishly asked

“Do you know if admissions offices look at social networking sites when making decisions?”

Good question. I told him that a university the size of Penn State probably does not, but I bet other, smaller schools do. Sure enough, some do to a small degree (one out of every 10 schools surveyed answered yes). I spend a good chunk of time in my IST 110 class talking about social networking, web 2.0 and identity. We’ve had several students NOT get internships, and in one case a job, due to Facebook or other pieces of content a student put online. I urge all IST students to carefully look at Facebook’s privacy features (must be logged in to Facebook), and use them accordingly. I actually looked up all 50 of my students on Facebook last semester, and nearly 75% had open profiles. I was tempted to put together a presentation using some of the more…colorful photos of my students, but decided against it at the last minute.

Of interest to me is what the admissions offices who answered “yes” reported:

• 25% reported finding positive information about the student applicant
• 38% reported finding negative information about the student applicant

Some of my students argue “this is OUR space, for me and my friends. You old folks need to get out!” Well my friend, welcome to reality. With the proliferation of net-capable cell phones with embedded cameras, it’s easy to upload that picture of Joe Smith passed out and duck-taped to a stop sign 5 seconds after it is taken. What’s even scarier is that Joe Smith did not upload the photo, one of his friends did and tagged him in it. If Joe is smart, he’ll login and remove the tag of himself in the photo, then promptly take his buddy’s phone and delete the picture (or drop the phone in the toilet, that works too).

It’s always interesting what you find when you Google yourself every few months, or search for yourself on different social networking sites.

Another two sections of IST 110 are in the books. Teaching every day, from 11-2, for 6 weeks is definitely a challenging experience. I’ll have more to reflect on later, but for the time being I want to share some results from my post-course survey. I posted results from my Fall 08 IST 110 post survey in the past. I changed the course up a bit this semester (syllabus here), and wanted to point out what I found to be very interesting.

The two primary modules dealt with social networking and games/virtual worlds. It was very interesting for me to see the numbers above regarding the learning vs. fun angle for the modules. It’s almost an exact reversal when comparing what students liked vs. what they learned the most. Also interesting to note is the number of students who plan to continue using an RSS reader. Only 3 students had active readers at the start of the course. My Fall08 students reported they were much less likely to continue using RSS readers after my course…I wonder why this class is much more likely to continue use?

The podcasting assignment was the big winner from my Fall 08 course, but this semester a new assignment edged out the podcasting assignment by 1 vote: the Game User Interface & design document assignment.

I used a 5-point Likert scale for several questions, including a string of inquiries about what they learned in my course and if they feel it is applicable to the rest of their education. Beating out both the social networking and virtual world modules, the students felt that working in teams for the entire semester was the biggest learning experience they could take away from my course and apply in other areas of their college careers.

Overall, I was very happy with how the course turned out. I’ll be teaching a section of 150 students in the Spring for IST 110, as well as a capstone section of IST 440W. Should be an interesting semester.

If anyone is interested in seeing the entire data set from the post survey, let me know.

PS - I think the blog is fixed now. No more flags for dangerous content on my site. Upgrading to the new WordPress install and deleting all trackbacks must have done the trick!

I’m really starting to find my groove in the classroom. I was given the opportunity to teach Pennsylvania Governor’s School students about 5 yrs ago here at IST and have taken every opportunity since then to get back into the classroom. The PhD is coming along nicely and will hopefully be complete by the end of Spring and I’m beginning to think longterm: where do I go from here? The one aspect of my job I definitely want to continue is teaching.

But why? I do not have a teaching degree (like most university faculty). My degrees are in Mass Communication and Instructional Technology. I suppose the itch began in graduate school, working with various instructional design models. We used a wide variety of models in grad school, then we created some of our own models in the Solutions Institute to guide our online learning projects. I finally made a connection this weekend between my itch to teach and past education:

Evaluation

It struck me when reading a post by Stubb’s:

Things can change a lot in 8 years and to be honest, its nice to reconnect - to be back in the classroom watching, listening, and realizing how in touch, or totally out of touch I really am, even if only for a few hours. No disrespect to any of the tools, metrics, or surveys we use to guide our efforts here at ETS - they are all top notch. But they are no substitute for taking it to the street, at least not for me.

Nearly every design model ends with an “E”, which usually stands for Evaluation. In IST we did track basic usage data for our online courses, but we rarely delved any deeper aside from informal feedback from students. Faculty provided some insights on how they perceived the students’ engagement with the online materials. But everyone has his or her own filter if you will. How one faculty member perceived a reaction by students could be very different than how I would perceive the same reaction.

So here I am, taking it to the streets. Once again, I plan on my own post-course survey this week to find out more about the course structure and layout, from the perspective of 50 18-yr olds. The final “E” of all those models needs addressed.