BrainMeld - Bridging The Gap Between Gaming and Education

As we prepare a further experiment with gaming in education, someone announced a new resource on the NMC list today. A quick glance shows some depth and breadth, so it may have some success. And, it always helps to have a good quote on any site:

Video games aren’t for us.
They’re here to entertain the television.
-Mel Brooks

We were asked to read Dennis Trinkle’s review of DePauw University’s current technology model. I’m not going to critique the document as a whole, instead choosing to share my responses to select portions. As such, my statements are not designed to be read separate from the article. The article is available here: http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=EQM0543

Put Learning First
To begin, the title of this key factor should sum up any academic organization and is exactly where it should be at the top of the list. Reading through the single paragraph (you don’t need much more than this to state the obvious), there are a few questions about selecting technology: “What are your learning goals and outcomes? What problems are you trying to solve? What do you wish you could accomplish? What is currently frustrating you?” These are all excellent questions and the type which should be used during any Needs Assessment. My background with Instructional Design is mostly based on the Dick and Carey approach, but most ID processes include an up-front, in-depth analysis to truly identify the root goal or problem. An example often used is to identify the cause of the illness instead of prescribing medicine to dry up the sniffles.

I often like to identify the needs assessment as the step which allows you to separate reaction from response. The former often taking place without forethought and the latter being a course selected after looking at the broader context. In my life, a lack of needs assessment at some key moments have left a lot of tooth marks on my derriere. As a result (and with my derriere’s demands) I try to make time for this during all major life decisions.

More information on Needs Assessment is available here.

Technology Fluency is the New Liberal Art
My response to this section is not positive. I would not argue with the content of the statement, but I do believe this step is extremely dependent on a body of faculty willing to swap their teacher hats for learner hats on a regular basis. The current context of technology in education allows too much for the faculty to step aside so students are allowed direct access to technologists. While that form of information flow can work, it is far from a best practice. While I am able to bring a great number of tools to the student experience, I am only a content matter expert in select areas. Once outside of those areas, my ability to remain empathic with student needs begins to harvest diminishing returns.

The first recognition in the article is “As a liberal art, technology must be taught at the level of critical thinking and reasoning” with a further statement against basing technology learning opportunities on skills training and, instead, developing the learning opportunities into “higher order fluencies and habits of mind.” Under the second recognition, Trinkle says “Theory connected to practice leads to better learning.” This takes me back to my studies at UVA in which Dr. Kinzie always pushed “Know how instead of show how.” The core purpose being that, at the end of good instruction, students will truly understand the methods as well as the underlying principles instead of walking away with a recipe of how to handle a process in a single program.

Invest in People and Support
In History of Instructional Technologies, I prepared and presented a paper on best practices in the dissemination of technology into public schools. The strongest message I encountered in my research was the need to set aside a healthy 10% of any technology budget for training and support. In article after article, there was a common theme about how school systems routinely choose to spend as close to 100% as possible on visible technology. An overall concern was the need for a maximum amount of available, and visible to the taxpayers, resources. But, by resources, they often meant computers, software and projectors and rarely meant workshops, money for courses or the ability to travel for learning opportunities. This often results in a greater number of resources which also remain underused throughout their life-cycle.

But, Trinkle goes even further with a wicked (yes, I said wicked) statement, referinng to work by Jeffrey Young’s article “When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching.” Trinkle says “…that giving teachers technology without training has often done more harm than good to teachign and learning.” Harsh, to say the least. Some might even take this statement as anti-technology. But I think it is not the case. It should be a banner on the wall of every academic technologist.

To back up his statement, I learned some great rules a few years ago in a random NMC event I selected to fill the last morning of the conference. I was really selecting the lesser of all evils by registering this class, but the content was extremely enlightening and I feel it has relevance to the current topic.

Unfortunately, the NMC website doesn’t go back that far, but the gentleman who gave the presentation was very well spoken. I wish I remembered his name or the title, but it was his message which has stuck with me over the years. He argued that time is the ultimate currency for identifying the value of technology. Money and recognition are excellent secondary reasons for selecting technology, but must be carefully weighed against the value of time.

With many years in an academic technology support role, he went on to describe how, as a trendsetter in this role, he made many mistakes. His experiences had taught him a few lessons and, from them, he had a few direct ways to consider the value of time from the faculty perspective. Please understand the following are my words and probably a poor reproduction of his.

Let’s begin with: always be honest about time commitments with new technologies. Failing to tell a faculty member how much time they will need to invest into a new technology is often reviewed the same as lying about the requirements. Be up front with the faculty so they can better judge their options. If you waste their time, they will be less likely to trust you in future endeavors. As such, never try to fast-talk faculty into embracing a technology without giving them all the facts. No, it doesn’t matter how cool and trendy and sexy that new technology seems at the time. If you take time away from faculty, it takes time away from prepping for classes, grading and time spent working directly with students.

Good metrics for identifying the value of technology include and are pretty much limited to the following:
- Technology should save time, if not in the short term, than in the long term. It is acceptable that a technology may take more time to master if the payoff truly reflects a time-saving incentive in the future.
- You may break the proceeding rule if the technology truly enhances understanding of content. I always think of maps as a great example of this. They must take a huge amount of time to create (and I have spent quite a bit of time making a few basic maps for alternate realities, though not a map of an existing place) but, without them, could you really visualize the layout of Europe or the streets of Washington D.C.?
- Technology can decrease the stress level during the learning process and should never increase the stress level during the learning process. Though I believe our current technological Dark-Ages (years from now we’ll all be telling our kids horror stories about running cables to devices) often do the opposite and increase the stress level for everyone involved. There are some great aspects of technology, but we should all try to be a little more honest about the limitations.

Good Enough is Good Enough
One of my peers used to say “80% on time and 100% late” was the motto of the military. I think you can broaden that to most of humanity. There may be some individuals who suffer from OCD (and the random messiah) who hits 100% all the time, but the rest of us have to accept our limitations. Less than 80 % is failure and more than 80% often limits the breadth of your spectrum in favor of depth. Medicine and other life-saving professions benefit from greater depth than breadth, but for the rest of us, we have to settle for “Good.” That’s okay.

Trinkle says “many institutions have failed to progress or achieve impact because they fall victim to analysis paralysis or the quest for perfection.” This immediately took me back to an article on Kaizen (http://www.lifehacker.com/software/kaizen/practice-your-personal-kaizen-207029.php) which I found interesting. I’m still thinking on this, so you’ll have to wait while my neurons chug away…

Actively Involve Students
In the article, they refer to DePauw’s ITAP program. The closest I think we come to this is our Technolgy Learning Center, which is a wonderful opportunity. While in grad school, I also spent one year working at UVA’s Digital Media Lab. The first semester was tough. In Dr. Bull’s class, I was learning the basic capabilities of Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Cold Fusion. Meanwhile, in the DML, I was learning the entire Mac OS, PageMaker, Flash, Final Cut Pro, firewire connectivity, etc… The spectrum of information I was trying to assimilate was massive. But, I survived and maintained good grades (I should note I was also working part time for my father). And, when I look back on that time, from an educational standpoint, it might be my proudest moment. I don’t believe there is another time in my life where I had to learn so much at any one time (though I’m certain my infancy dwarfs it). Pulling through that much work without crumbling is a great accomplishment and a true example of the resiliency of man and what true perseverance is capable of delivering. All students should have those types of opportunities. It helps identify who you are and what you are capable of.

Collaboration is Essential
This is a serious issue, not just in higher education, but in “techy” cultures. Increased time to master/use technology has had a detrimental effect on our abilty to carve out time for the small group brainstorming which groups like Google use to create such brilliant and effective tools. I, though being a pretty major extrovert, really view staring at a screen as “work.” But, being in a group, discussing and working on projects is both invigorating and rewarding. I tend to look at that more as “playing” well with others. Okay, not all group meetings are like this. Some do such the life out of you, but I’m not talking about those meetings.

Wrapping it up
If you work in academia, read the article. It is rather brief and worth the time. Much of it is common sense, but also the type of rules we should follow yet often are set aside due to time, money or energy requirements. If nothing else, the article will sit in the back of you mind and give your conscious something to quote from when you need that extra bit of motivation.

Practice your personal Kaizen - Lifehacker

Kaizen = improvement. I really enjoyed this article. It does a great job of summing up the heart of my work philosophy. I don’t always follow it perfectly, sometimes I fail and try to just keep going to get the job off of my plate. But, I think this is the best overall method for handling improvement over time.

Okay, it is 4:50 on my phone display. 10 minutes to the weekend, and a fine weekend it looks to be. But, let’s check in on this crazy get-off-my-butt idea I had.

We’ll start with the aches. I have a few. I would estimate I swapped around 20 hours of sitting for the same number standing. It is to be expected as bones, tendons, ligaments and muscles are suddenly wondering if the brain is short-circuiting. The week started with the feet, back and hips aching and is ending with sore shoulders (especially the right shoulder) and ankles and a few sharp pains on the inside of my knees. But, I also have to think about the four hours of advanced sword drills (for those who don’t know, I seem to enjoy having people punch, kick and swing objects at me in my free time but I hide it under the guise of martial arts and pretend its functional) this week and that will certainly have caused some of this. Next week will include less practice time, so it might be a better indicator of how this works overall.

For my energy, it continues to move up. I really like it. My poor office neighbor has had to listen as I broke into song along with whatever song comes up on my iPod. I’m trying to keep it to a minimum, but I have a big amplifier mouth. But I think it shows how energizing it is. Standing certain returns much more energy than it takes. I’m forming the opinion humans really were meant to stand rather than sit. It makes too much evolutionary sense.

Productivity: Ah, here is the crucial metric. Was I less/equally/more productive during a week of standing? Well, I think more and less. Some long-term focus items suffered. Standing for a long time, focused on one item wasn’t easy. But, I think that will improve in time. Short-term focus items were much easier. Bouncing from one to the next was like a dance. Instead of constantly bending from the waist to reach everything, I moved across the room. It really added something to the day. Made going to work more enjoyable and the day seemed shorter.

Impact on others: Well, including my aforementioned forays into softshoe and humming, I picked up a propensity for both singing and air-guitar. I’m not enirely certain which of those is more embarrasing. I do believe it is a good sign of both freedom of movement and excess energy, which are both positive.

Stay tuned next Friday for week 2.

Just kicking off a little late. People can’t find parking on UR campus. Boy, that is a surprise.

- CS2 has been updated for publishing to mobile devices (not truly new, but one of the mentions)
- Adobe Bridge designed to be a complete image browser/manager but not editor.
- Something called Version Q, which is installed into the system preferences, keeps track of versions of your images. It will, actively, maintain copies of each version of the file as you edit over time. Only located in Adobe Bridge in CS2.
- Batch rename function allows you to rename image files. Start at a specific number and set the number of digits used for each (1 vs 01 vw 001 for example).

Humor: Presenter ran into issues. Explained she did not ask the blessings of the Demo-god. Promised to sacrifice a chicken during the break if things don’t get better. Must remember to ask Kevin if there is room in the budget for chickens as I get closer to the big workshop I am to present.

- Photoshop: Filter > Vanishing point - Allows you to devine planes in your image. From here, she made a selection of a window on one wal. The selection follows the plane. Copy and drag the selection along the plane. this also causes the selection to increase/decrease as it movos toward/from the horizon point. She then shifts the other plane, which is placed on another wall, and the selection reverses and follows the plane to resize appropriately and create a 2nd window.

- Another Vanishing Point demo - Image of stone bench, copies in some text to a different layer. Defines the plane herself rather than use the created plane. Resize the grids if you wish. Grid covers top of bench. She pulls on one side and the grid draws down along the side of the bench (kind of like water pouring over). Adds text layer adn draws onto bench top. Text fits to grid with closer letters slightly larger. Puls text off side and the image draws down along side of bench. Very nice.

Well, over 12 hours standing at work now. Not bad. Interesting ways it changes your routine. Here are are a few:

- Different energy level: I can’t give into the mid-afternoon “droop.” We all know this one. Lunch finally settles, as does your energy level. When standing, you barely notice it.

- Focus: I just realized that when I make a phone call or read something, I pull over my chair and sit down. My computer suddenly vanishes along with any distractions which it contains. For example, I just called and left a message. Normally, during the “Blah, blah, out of office, blah, blah, at the beep…..BEEEEEEP!” I will start clicking through my email and multitasking. In this case, I didn’t and may have left the most coherent voice mail message of the year.

- Body adaptation: In addition to “more energy” comes the fact that I’m moving a bit more. My body seems to like the idea. So far, only my feet and a few postural muscles are sore. I felt better moving around the house yesterday, getting things done. In fact, my body felt better standing and I was less likely to go “Uhhhh” when I stood up.

- Got my groove back: Well, maybe not in Stella’s sense, but in the Saturday Night Fever sense. When sitting, with my iPod playing, I had a tendency to bounce a bit, the way you do when driving and a good tune comes on. But, while standing, I’ve got the head bob, the foot tapping, probably a little boogie and a serious case of white-boy two step on occasion. Just to clarify, since I know someone will ask the same question my wife did, I will NOT be putting in a webcam to humor the free world.

I’ll check in again at week’s end…

Well, I stand (pun intended) today, on the cusp of great change. A body experiment? If so, at least my own. Our office space has never been ideal. There are too many issues to list about the failings of my office layout and design, and all of the liaison group suffers from this on some level. Over time, my desk arrangement has led to a few physical issues. Mostly my right shoulder, but there are some other hot spots I suspect are the result of poor posture at work.

As a result, I started looking at options. There is a lot of information about how humans hip structures were not designed to sit on with the thigh bone at a 90 degree angle from the spine. Options? One I had read about is the ability to stand at work, in place of sitting. So, on Friday at 4, I realized I had a bit of time and, since a new typing table (a very used 2nd, but in better shape than the one I was using at the time) was sent over, I needed to make the swap and get the old one out of the way. On a whim, I made the switch and, using some cobbled together bits and pieces, have managed to set up a standing work station which feels very good for my shoulder. So far.

I’ve only been at the station for about 20 minutes now, between rearranging some other areas, and it really does have a different feel. One of my concerns was how well I could focus. In fact, as I write this entry, I find no difference in my ability to focus. In the background is both my iPod playing and a conversation down the hall. No problems so far. But, I’ll try to post at the end of this week a bit of reflection on how it is working so far. I’ll try to follow that up each Friday with a brief entry on the good/bad/ugly of this decision. Time will tell.

Had some fun this morning. I have a meeting (in a short 45 minutes) with a faculty member and student to discuss and possibly give a brief tutorial on developing 3D shapes. Haven’t used 3DS Max for awhile. Maybe 8-9 months. And then it was version 6, I only installed 7 on my PC yesterday.

But, I surprised myself. Remember more than I thought. And was able to find helpful tips online and in the tutorials book for Max 6, which worked fine. Had about an hour to play catch up, and catch up I did. See the attached image for the little scene I built.

Thanks to BindyEye for the helpful, and free, materials from which I grabbed the water material. (http://www.3dkingdom.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=695)

Oh, and the kicker is, I did this remoting from my Mac to my PC. Gotta love it.

Well, the survey results will tell, but it wasn’t one of my more energetic outings. That said, I do think the instruction went well and was received well. Also, it was the first session I’ve instructed which included such a wide range of departments. I had a faculty member, a few administrative assistants, someone from facilities and someone from the dining hall. That is pretty significant.

Learned a few new bits. You can format paint anything. Wasn’t aware that feature had such wide applications. Also, I was reminded of an issue with zip codes starting with the number 0. Certainly something to add to my mail merge classes. So, we’ll call that 1.5 new things since one was something I had forgot from years past.

The funny thing I will add about the class was how it flowed together for me. I had a plan, but didn’t really follow it once we got into the meat of things. I started realizing bits and pieces and there were questions which built a better flow than I had on paper. Ah, sometimes good things do happen. Who knows, if 999 more good things happen I might have to stop being a cynic.

Signing off and going home…

Another week, another workshop. Awesome. Always something to look forward to. And, if you read my earlier post, you will notice I ‘m a bit under the weather. Well, today is certainly my comfort zone. Teaching Excel is always fun and always pulls out some new bits I didn’t know about since there is usually at least one attendee who uses the program more or has used the program for longer than I.

I think everything is prepped and I certainly don’t have any nervous energy today. In face, quite the opposite. I’m rather drained. It will be an effort, but teaching is one of my strengths and I always seem to find it in me to put on the show.

It dawns on me, as I write this and still have my earlier post buzzing in the back of my mind, that this is why I’m here today. I feel horrible, but give up the chance to teach something? No, way.

Time to set up the laptops. Will report on the session when the opportunity appears.