What do you use your Moodle for?

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free-roaming hens

Technology doesn’t always get used in the way that the creators originally intended. By the turn of the millennium, for example, my 486-66 tower computer was being used to prop open the office door; it was Lifehacker air conditioning. Today, it is well established in our minds that there are technologies that disrupt, and technologies that sustain. Then there are technologies that can be used to either disrupt or sustain; Moodle is one of these technologies.

Martin Dougiamus, the creator of Moodle, in an article in Moodle Docs titled Philosophy, stated his case for constructivism, constructionism, social constructivism, separate, connected, and constructed behaviour. He said, “Moodle doesn’t FORCE this style of behaviour, but this is what the designers believe that it is best at supporting”. So, from the start, he had conceived Moodle as a disruptive technology that would give students an online environment of their own, a voice, and agency. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers grabbed the platform and used it not to disrupt, but to sustain their teacher-centric practice.

Here are some teacher-centric ways you can use Moodle: Create content for the students to read; publish a list of useful links to get more reading; post a video of yourself talking in an authoritative way about your subject; create a quiz so the students can self-assess their progress; post homework exercises for students to do over the weekend. If you’re a geek teacher you can create badges and award them to those students who choose to play your game. That’s using Moodle to sustain teacher-centric practice.

Here are some learner-centric ways you can use Moodle: Set up a forum where students can ask questions, let the other students answer first, let them upvote good answers,  only intervene if you need to; set up an empty glossary and invite the students to explain concepts in their own words, solicit feedback through the comments; encourage the uploading of short video clips made by students as they reflect on their learning journey; spend some time showing the students how a wiki works and familiarising them with markup language, then encourage them to create their own revision resource; invite them to co-construct a revision quiz. That’s using Moodle to disrupt.

Here are some truly radical ways to use Moodle: Flip the online space – make all the students teachers and all the teachers students, switch roles, take teach-back to a whole new level; encourage your students to open free accounts on H5P and embed their interactives into the Moodle space; suggest each small study group creates a whole Moodle course around their project for the other students to access, don’t tell them how to do it just watch and learn from what they do. Now as a modern teacher all you have to do is follow Sugata Mitra’s Self Organised Learning Environments and make like a granny. Login to the Moodle and use the comments and forums they will have set up to appraise and support.

It was popular once to say everything becomes television. Today you could say everything becomes a network. This freer more distributed knowledge base is moving like tree roots to dislodge the pillars of the monolithic Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. In an attempt to regain control, the universities started offering MOOCs like tweed jacketed, pipe-smoking professors making lame attempts to be hip. They entirely ignored the original intention of the MOOC as it was conceived by connectivists Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier, and once again the old school hijacked a learning environment to sustain their old institution-centric practices. I never used to understand the famous Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message”, but I totally get it now.

One technology that has emerged to support the trend towards distributed and democratised knowledge is rather charmingly called, Tin Can. I recall as a child turning two empty baked bean cans and 10 metres of string into a field telephone. For people who want a more important sounding name, it is also called xAPI or the eXperience API. xAPI is SCORM turned on its head. SCORM was the aviation industry’s solution to delivering consistent pre-approved learning packages across a world campus to a guaranteed consistency and standard. Faced with compliance training of a hundred thousand baggage handlers, it was a reasonable solution. xAPI allows the learner much greater freedom and ensures them recognition for their efforts. Now, free-range learners can roam the networks, and their interactions with learning objects embedded almost anywhere in the wider online environment can trigger a log entry to a Learning Record Store (LRS). Over time, the aggregate of these interactions builds up into a useful and insightful history of the learner’s journey. It’s early days for xAPI yet, but I think we will see it linked with micro-learning, micro-accreditation, and personalised learning environments.

If we are preparing our students through project-based learning for the increasingly likely gig economy, then the employer of the future turns out to be someone remarkably disinterested in what you have done and interested only in what you can do for them now. If you’re a geeky data-informed learning designer, then you’ll be best-fitting regression lines to learner trajectory scatter plots to predict their future performance. The employer of the future is more likely to turn to a recommender system that produces a list of suitable candidates available to start now than they are to browse portfolios. Anyway, the employment agents of the future won’t be people, they’ll be an algorithm.

 

If you would like to connect with CORE’s LX Team, come, see what we can do.

 

Image Credit:
Free range hens, Mullaghmore:
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Kenneth Allen – geograph.org.uk/p/5280001

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Questing: a modern approach to learning design

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How might Game Artificial Intelligence (AI) inform and influence learning experience design in the future?

What learning design used to be… and, sometimes, still is

To begin to answer that far-reaching question, let us consider what learning design or instructional design was, and in many cases still is. Before the days of learner agency, when didactic dinosaurs roamed the school corridors, lesson plans would map what had to be learned, how it would be taught, what resources would be required, and what time would be allowed. And those were the good ones; half of them didn’t even have a lesson plan. Mathematics had to be acquired in three-quarters of an hour fitted in between Geography, Gym, and lunch. A bell marked the intervals between chunks of teaching. Note: I don’t say between chunks of learning, because, in my case at least, learning didn’t happen.

Formative assessment was applied in the form of exercises and repetition, and summative assessment was made at the end with an examination. Punishment and ridicule were associated with failure as motivators. Prize giving in front of the parents distributed pride and shame in equal measure.

AI in modern learning

The game designer’s mindset — a growth mindset

To a game designer, this system seems a little odd. In games, success is rewarded by levelling up to face ever bigger challenges, and failure immediately presents other opportunities to succeed. If at first you don’t succeed explore the landscape for ways to try and try again. Players are not shown how to do that. Instead, they are presented with challenges, and the fun is in finding out for themselves how to overcome all the obstacles. Games tell you what needs to be done, they don’t tell you how. This approach ensures a high level of engagement. Challenges are often presented in the form of quests, and that in itself — like Jason and his Argonauts — suggests a big journey. If you reach Game Over, this is not the end, it’s just an opportunity to eat vegetarian pizza, drink sugar-free coke, and start over.

This is growth mindset (Carol Dweck article in Education Week), not yet-ness, and there really is no end, only opportunities for the future.

The future of learning design

To see into the future of learning design, one must see learning as a landscape. Distributed with a certain granularity in that landscape are nodes. At each node, there is a puzzle. Solving the puzzle rewards the student-player with an artefact, tool, or power that will be useful in the next part of their quest. These things they collect have value, and a collection of them is a student-player’s wealth. The quest — within the scope of the landscape — is of their choosing, but is stated at the setting forth, at the start: “Together we will travel to Mordor and destroy the One Ring”. The student-players know the objective, but they do not know how to get there, nor the struggles they will have to face along the way. They must find their way and they must find ways to defeat the bad guys, traverse the deserts, and span the canyons.

I am speaking metaphorically. I am not suggesting that the future of all e-learning is reduced to a video game. I am saying that under the hood of e-learning there will be an e-learning engine very similar to a game engine. This engine will be designed and built using Game AI techniques.

The relevance of game artificial intelligence and the future of education

Game AI is subject to various interpretations: Bartle, when he uses the term AI, means mobiles or non-playing-characters, fairies in the forest that help or taunt the traveller; Buckland describes Game AI as “the illusion of intelligence”; in its simplest form Game AI involves accessing a large database of options using if-else statements. In Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Braitenberg shows how apparently complex animal and human behaviours arise out of the interaction of very simple internal structures.

Game AI also consists of several simple internal structures: databases; conditional statements; pathways, and configurable parameters. It is the putting together and the interaction between these structures that generates the underpinning intelligence commonly known as the game engine. Game engines can then support any number of modifications such as storylines, scenes, characters, graphics, music, and effects provided they remain in the genre and within the scope of the game engine. This has clear relevance to games-in-education as future teachers pour curriculum into the mixer.

Tools for the learning experience designer of the future

The learning experience designer of the future needs a tool very different to the old lesson plan. One such tool is graphing theory.

Buckman (Programming Game AI by Example) writes: “When developing the AI for games, one of the most common uses for graphs is to represent a network of paths an agent can use to navigate around its environment.” Each node has value, and each node is connected by one or more edges that have a cost. The value of the nodes along a narrative arc must eventually exceed the cost of the edges, or motivation will be lost. As the agentic student-player leaves a node, that fact is recorded in a learning record store (LRS). They solved a puzzle here, so the system knows they learned something. They proceeded along one of the edges to the next node, and they picked up embedded artefacts along the way.

Those embedded artefacts are what the didactic dinosaurs of the past used to call content. Games designers probably think more in terms of clues, tools, and powers for how to solve the next puzzle or overcome the next micro-challenge. The system records every incremental step along the way, forever. The system knows for example, that the student-player has acquired a certain tool and used it to solve a certain type of puzzle. Correctly analysed, interpreted, and presented, this data tells us a lot about the development and current state of the student-player. The system and its associated LRS is both omniscient and pervasive.

The immutable laws of nature don’t change. But the language we use to describe them, and the way in which we approach them do. The lesson plan of the past, the template, is a simplistic thing seen against a game engine. But the complexity is handled by a computer, and once built, the game engine is just a given thing. Now, the subject matter experts and the learning designers feed challenges, puzzles, and artefacts into the engine and crank her up. Employers no longer admire a candidate’s certificates, they go and look at the dashboard of the LRS and they see what strategies for effective gameplay that person has developed, and contemplate how they might apply them to new contexts of design, manufacture, distribution, retail, service, policy making, or administration.

The times are a changing — fast

The challenge for learning designers, in fact, for all educators, is to keep up with the pace of change. Noting the copyright dates of the suggested reading list (below) points up the true nature of this challenge, that time is ticking. Games-in-education conversations tend to be focused on educational value, or the lack of it, and fears around excessive screen time and isolation. The conversations learning designers need to be having are probably around theoretical underpinnings, and how they can be put into practice to create virtual world engines, incremental accreditation, and student-player profiles.

 

Suggested reading:

Bartle, R. (2004) Designing Virtual Worlds New Riders.

Braitenberg, V. (1984) Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. A Bradford Book.

Buckland, M. (2005) Programming Game AI By Example (Wordware Game Developers Library). Wordware.

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Places in memory

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Samsung vr headsetIt is mooted that the only reason we have a brain is so we can find our way around, and remember where to go. Back in the day before cars, it helped us strike the essential balance of energy: we could find food before we ran out of steam to keep looking. It was about survival. So, the way the argument goes, memory is inextricably linked to our sense of place and the paths we follow to get there.

There’s a fair bit of evidence to support this, for example, the findings of brain researcher Eleanor Maguire (Foy, p.34). Focusing her attention on the place cells that remember landmarks and the grid cells that remember margins and pathways, her work demonstrates our allocentric and egocentric ways of viewing the world. Allocentric is when we know where we are in the landscape, can identify a place where we want to go, and in which direction to move to get there. These are our abilities (or in some people a lack of them) to read a map; to navigate. Egocentric is when we know where we are by recognising a view, and by remembering that, if we turn right when we get to the river and follow along its course, we will come to another view we remember and can picture in our mind’s eye. This is the way the ancients got along down song lines and along burial paths, handing down the waypoints orally. Many sea shanties, too, listed headlands, rocks, and safe harbours remembered in the verses of songs that were sung repeatedly.

Do some exercises in your mind’s eye to cement these ideas.

Shut your eyes and sniff an open jar of Vegemite. Does that take you back to a place and time? Can you see the people who were there? Can you remember their names?

Going back to the place where you were born, do your eyes quickly scan for familiar landmarks? Do you notice small changes? Do you know that feeling of well-being like all your molecules just fell into place?

Walk through the Christchurch CBD. Did you know the city before the earthquake? Have you experienced the deeply disturbing feeling when landmarks you knew are gone? In my own hometown of Timaru, historic buildings were demolished to make way for a Mitre 10, completely changing the cityscape. Senior citizens especially felt real stress.

We are blessed, or cursed depending on how you see it, with a brain that can do so much more than just act as a navigation system. We can do abstract things, like appreciate music and encode it on paper, like explain phenomena using mathematical models. We might have lost some of our navigational powers compared, say, to homing pigeons, but essentially our brain remains, at least in part, a built-in Tom-Tom.

The latest craze is VR. Virtual reality struggled for years with bizarre helmets, visual lag, and low resolutions. Then two things changed all that: Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard. In Maguire’s terms, VR plays on an egocentric view of the world. It gives us landmarks and pathways we have not actually experienced, but, which we can experience vicariously in a computer-generated environment. Five years ago, Ayumu, a 7-year old chimpanzee was getting to grips with a touch screen and surpassing human capability, and parents were struggling with the concept that their children needed an iPad just to do their regular schoolwork. Now, VR, Google Cardboard, Google Expeditions, and Samsung Gear are being heralded as the new essentials for the modern learning experience.

OK, I have set the scene. Now it’s time to get to the guts of the matter. Is learning about memory? Is it about recall?

I think it is, but then I admit to being old school. I, like you, maybe, learned my times tables, and have found mental arithmetic a really useful life skill. I do not need to reach for my calculator to work out journey times or the likely cost of the fuel. I have enough French to travel independently in Africa. I have domain knowledge and skills that I can draw on in an instant: in the rain, in the dark, when I’m feeling ill. These are things I would say I have learnt; that I have internalised.

I believe the younger generations — not to discount the value of Wikipedia and Google — need this too. Some knowledge really has to be learnt if we are to use it to think with. There are extrinsic motivators too: for many professions closed-book examinations are not going away any time soon; you can’t jam if you don’t know your chord progressions; you can’t present convincingly unless you really know your stuff and can speak from the heart. An expression you hear used less these days: knowing it by heart.

The memory palace will be a technique known to many. Think of a house you know. In your mind’s eye, put the things you need to remember in the rooms. Picture yourself walking through the house retrieving the things. Do you see how memory is linked to place?

My challenge to educators is to use VR to give students places where they can put memories, and to give them pathways along which they go. By all means use the Wow factor to grab their initial attention, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that that is enough. Instead, aim to engage them at a much deeper level. Use it to deliver rich learning narratives, and attach those stories to vivid imagery, and an immersive sense of location.

Don’t let us allow this exciting new technology, VR, to get hijacked by the big players for edutainment. As educators, let’s get creative to use it as a tool to embed powerful learning in the minds of our students. Oh, and let’s have heaps of fun doing it!

References

Foy, G.M. (2016) Finding North: How navigation makes us human. Kindle Edition.

Image source:

Nan Palmero from San Antonio, TX, USA, from Wikipemedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

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Space invaders is not a video game

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A simple fundamental shift in approach can have a huge impact on the accessibility, inclusiveness, and efficacy of e-learning. That’s my opinion, born of personal experience, and the premise of this article.

The shift that I am proposing is from page (or screen) to space (or environment). If the e-learning designer will stop thinking in terms of a page, and start thinking in terms of a virtual space, then many beneficial things will start to fall into place automagically.

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Can e-learning be better learning?

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Photo: John Scott under CC

Every now and again something comes along that really excites you. For me that’s usually the discovery of a new connection. It’s like life is a jigsaw puzzle, and you push the pieces around on the table, and then, suddenly, about seven pieces go together all at once. That’s what happened for me this week.

You know, e-learning has its own design protocols: keep it short and to the point; make it work well on mobile devices; hook it into social media; be sure to tell a story; and, always create links to further reading. There are more, depending who you talk to.

But there are higher-level questions I always ask up front:

  • Why are we doing this?
  • Is this about better access to learning?
  • Or, is this about better learning?
  • Or, are we going to attempt both?

Almost by default, e-learning creates better access to learning. Assuming the learner has a smartphone (by 2018, New Zealand will have 90% smartphone ownership, Frost & Sullivan) then you are putting the learning materials into the learner’s hand; whether they are sitting in the classroom, riding on the bus, or lying on their bed bored on a wet Sunday.

The added value comes when you can also make it better learning.

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