emerging technologies for teaching and learning: into fall 2008
TRANSCRIPT
Plan of the talk1. Pieces of
Web 2.02. Gaming
the world3. Mobility
(Vermont trees and sky, winter 2008)
One odd metaphorWeb 2.0 and education is like gaming
and education: awareness is challenging
• Huge, financially and quantitatively successful worlds
• Global and rapidly developing scope• Bad anxieties, policies, and media
coverage• Perceived lack of seriousness
(Second Life screenshot, 2006)
Five responsesWeb 2.0 and education is like gaming and
education: intersections are happening
• Take advantage of preexisting projects and services
• Mod/warp/hack • DIY• Literacy: new media• Influence
(World of Warcraft)
“Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.”
(David Sifry,April 2007)
Microcontent, rather than sites or large documents
(NITLE blog Liberal Education Today, http://b2e.nitle.org)
O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is a platform for development
• Open APIs• Access to data• Virtue of the lazyweb
(http://www.hurricanearchive.org/, Center for History and New Media,George Mason University)
• Programming staff• Perceived recognition
Web 2.0 components, movements• collaborative writing platforms: the
blogosphere
(Radio Open Source blog/podcast)
State of the blogosphere, more• Diversity: diaries, public intellectuals,
carnivals, knitters, moblogs, warblogs home and abroad…
• 12 people million using three platforms, including LiveJournal: majority women (Anil Dash, MeshForum 2006)
NIH guidelines, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.section.61024
What’s happened since “podcasting” in 2004? Neologisms:
• godcasting• nanocasting• podfading• podsafe• podspamming• podvertising• porncasting
(Missing Link podcast, Southwestern University)
Social object: the person
• FaceBook• MySpace• LinkedIn• ZoomInfo• CyWorld…
“Less than four years after its launch, 15 million
people, or almost a third of the country's population,
are members.” (BusinessWeek, September 2005)
Social objects of all sorts
(Kenyan crisis-Google Maps mashup, Ushahidi http://www.ushahidi.com/ 2008)
Social organization of information, new forms: folksonomy
• Search• Retrieval• Self-
awareness
http://del.icio.us/for DoctorNemo
Extrapolating principles: Ton Zylstra on the social object:
“In general you could say that both Flickr and del.icio.us work in a triangle: person, picture/ bookmark, and tag(s). Or more abstract a person, an object of sociality, and some descriptor...”
(Zylstra in Second Life, 2007)
“…In every triangle there always needs to be a person and an object of sociality. The third point of the triangle is free to define[,] as it were.”
-http://www.zylstra.org, 2006(emphases added)
(“Online Communities”, XKCD, April 2007 )
Already out of date
For academia, this can seem a bit overwhelming
Flickr and storytelling
• Tell a story in 5 frames group
“Gender Miscommunication”, Nightingai1e, 2006
Social photo storiesOr remix social media into narratives
Example: "Farm to Food", Eli the Bearded (2008)
• Library of Congress collections
Social photo storiesFlickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group (
http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/)
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo storiesPedagogies:• Remix• Archive work• Social
presentation• Visual
literacy
(http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157603786255599/;http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ )
Social workshopping
In the Tell a story in 5 frames group, 'Alone With The Sand' , moliere1331 (2005)
Pedagogies and publicationsTeaching with Web 2.0: it’s not all new - Web 1.0, internet pedagogies• Hypertext• Web audience• Discussion fora • Collaborative document authoring• Groupware
Teaching with Web 2.0: principles
http://smarthistory.blogspot.com/
Distributed conversation
Collaborative writing
Object-oriented discussion
Connectivism (G. Siemens, 2004)
Teaching with Web 2.0: “net.gen”:“Fully half of all teens and 57 percent of
teens who use the Internet could be considered Content Creators, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.”
http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/PIP_Teens_1105.pdf
“[S]tudents… write words on paper, yes— but… also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards—and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.
Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing.”
Kathleen Blake Yancey, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC 56.2 (2004):297-328.Emphasis added.
More social object pedagogies• Annotate details• Remix (“Make it mine”) Edugadgethttp://www.edugadget.com/2005/05/07/flickr-creative-commons
Wiki pedagogies• Collective
research• Group writing• Document
editing• Information
literacy• Discussion• Knowledge
accretion(Romantic Audiences project
Bowdoin College, 2005-present
• Discussion• Knowledge accretion
Podcasts and teaching: profcasting
• Bryn Mawr College: Michelle Francl, chemistry
• Duke: “Classroom recording”
• Learning objects: Gardner Campbell, University of Richmond
• Duke: “Course content dissemination”
• Information literacy
Student program podcasting on campus
• War News Radio (Swarthmore College)
•PEPI courses (University of British Columbia, department of Land and Food Resources)
Podcasts and research• Public intellectual
– Out of the Past– Engines of Our
Ingenuity – In Our Time– University Channel– The Missing Link
Academic open archives for social media
Freesound archive
•DIY copyright•Social networking values•University of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
(http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/)
New forms of scholarly communication
CommentPress implementation, Institute for the Future of the BooksMcKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College
Combining Web 2.0 forms• Podcasting• Blogging• Digital storytelling• Web-based photography• YouTube• Video mashups
Middlebury College, Jason Mittell and Barbara Ganley
• Blend teaching with research
• BG now involved in rural community media
II. GamingLong history of
gaming• Predigital
– Chess, go, Senet, mancala, backgammon, dice, cards
– Kriegspiel– Cold War games
Digital• Spacewar• Zork to IF
boom (1980s)• 1990s rebirth
Gaming in 2008Physical platforms• Console• Cell phone• PSP• Extended forms
(DDR)• New forms: Wii
PC• CD, DVD• Browser• Downloadable
…And these can be combined
• Size: huge – (WoW: 10
million subscribers, January 2008)
• Player range: genders, classes, nations
• Interface, device driver
Eve Online, from site
Growing content diversity
• Current events (Kumawar)
• Political argument (September 12th, FoodForce)
• Religious gaming (Left Behind: Eternal Forces, 2006)
• Literary gaming (Kafkamesto, 2006)
(BBC Climate Challenge; Ayiti:
both 2007-present)
Genres
• First-person shooter
• Puzzle • Platform jumper• Strategy• “Adventure”• Sports • Minigame (Koster
fractals)
New forms• Katamari• Portal• Augmented reality
games
Economics of gamesWho creates games?• Businesses• Governments• Nonprofits• Amateurs
Scales• Large games
– $millions– EA, Microsoft
• Modding– Back to Doom,
hacking, View Source
– Neverwinter Nights• Casual games
Other economics• Gambling• Gold farming• Currency trading
Offshoot:machinima
• Tools– Counterstrike, Halo– Second Life– The Movies
• Art movement– Machinima Academy of Arts and
Sciences (http://www.machinima.org/)
(Koulamata, “The French Democracy”, 2006)
Virtual worldsAntecedents, early digital: science
fiction1984: William Gibson, Neuromancer1992: Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash“’Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system…”
-Neuromancer
Antecedents, predigital: Theater of Memory
(from Philippe Codognet, http://webia.lip6.fr/~codognet/)
Avatar spaces-Activeworlds-Atmospheres-There
(Activeworlds, 1995-present; image via www.virtualworldlets.net)
Augmented Reality
“Human Pacman,” Adrian David Cheok, circa 2005
-mobile devicesgame playersgeneral use tools
-science fiction explores (Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End)
Interactive FictionSpeaking of text
adventures:• 1980s boom:
Infocom• Ongoing art form• Nick Montfort,
Twisty Little Passages
(“Dead Cities”, from Lovecraft Commonplace Book project 2007http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/lovecraft/)
Interactive FictionSpeaking of
text adventures:
• Inform 7, free IF editor
(Richard Liston, Ursinus College, classroom example 2008)
NarrativeWhere is storytelling in
a game?• Sequence of activities• Cut-scene or
cinematic• Writerly player• Encyclopedia world
(Murray, Manovich)• Ludology vs.
narratology
Linearity?• Game on rails• Branching
outcomes• Multilinear• Open-ended
Alternate reality games• Permeability of
game boundary (space and time)
• Focus on distributed, collaborative cognition
• Increased ephemerality
(Perplex City, 2003-2006)
Gaming and education
“Video games… situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in the modern world.”
21-century boom
• James Paul Gee (author of preceding quote)
• Marc Presnsky• Henry Jenkins
• John Seely Brown
• Mia Consalvo• Constance
Steinkuehler• Kurt Squire
James Paul Gee’s argument• Semiotic domains; tranference• Embodied action and feedback• Projective identity• Edging the regime of competence
(Vygotsky)• Probe-reprobe cycle• Social learning (roles; consumption-
production)
Multimedia literacies
• Gee: multimodal principle• Selfe et al: multimodal literacy• Bogost: procedural rhetoric
Dean for American game (2004)
Archived at http://www.deanforamericagame.com/play.html
Multimedia literacies“…within games, there are in fact multitudes
of literacy practices – games are full of text, she asserted, to say nothing of the entirely text-based fandom communities online that take place in forums, blogs and social networks.”
Constance Steinkuehler,FuturePlay 2007, Toronto
Quoted in http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16264
Which educational theory?• Ian Bogost: behaviorist versus constructivist
Issues summoned up:– Media effect
(violence)– Transfer across
domains, platforms– “Simulation gap”– Subjectivity and
assessmentImage from Scot Osterweil, presentation to Learning from Video Games:
Designing Digital Curriculums (NERCOMP SIG , 2007)
Pedagogical functions
Jason Mittell, Middlebury college:• Skills • Simulations• Politics (criticism, activism)• Media studies (psych, cultural
studies, media)– NITLE brownbag, January 2008
Pedagogy: virtual worlds
Ancient Spaces project, University of British Columbia
Machu Picchu, Arts Metaverse,Open Croquet
Pedagogy: virtual worlds
Second Life, Bryan Zelmanov
Pedagogy: social software
“Emotional bandwidth” (Linden Labs)
• Social presence• Self-expression
Game studies
• Serious Games• Conferences• Scholarly articles and books (MIT
Press)• Games Learning Society conference,
http://www.glsconference.org/2008/index.html
Game studiesLiberal arts
instances• Aaron Delwiche,
Trinity (image)• Christian
Spielvogel, Hope• Harry Brown,
Depauw
III. Mobile
All of Web 2.0, just more so• Ambient• Accelerating • Annotating
http://www.phonebashing.com/
Pedagogical elements
• Information on demand
• Time usage changes• Class/world barrier
reduction• Mobile, multimedia,
social research
• Personal intimacy with units
• Spatial mapping • Swarming
Challenges• Platform profusion• Walled gardens• Network limitations• Student privacy• Faculty/staff privacy• Copyright poaching
(Blackbelt Jones,November 2007;
Open Handset Alliance)
National Institute for Technology and Liberal
Education(NITLE) http://nitle.org
Liberal Education Today blog http://b2e.nitle.org