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[Technology 1082] Re: A new vision for online learning - a plug for UDLSilver-Pacuilla, Heidi HSilver-Pacuilla at air.orgSat Jun 16 20:32:41 EDT 2007
Hello all - I've been thinking about your post, too, David. While I'm not a gamer, I, like Tina, live with one, my son. I think there is a lot of education potential in virtual worlds such as Second Life -IF it is intentionally designed. Most of the video and online environments are designed with major assumptions about what users bring to the experience and then the rest of what you need to know in order to play is built in to the experience, as you mentioned. For our lowest literacy students and new-to-English students, however, the assumptions are largely incorrect. This is also a problem for gamers with disabilities. There are pockets of dedicated gamers with disabilities organizing themselves to create work-arounds in many online environments because the games aren't always compatible with their assistive technologies, but the numbers are quite small. The environments need to be thoughtfully and universally designed. I had the good fortune to listen to David Rose, Co Founder of CAST, <http://www.cast.org/> give a talk about universal design for learning and the GPS/mapping/OnStar system that he had experienced in rental cars. This device is universally designed for users with all kinds of preferences for voices or sounds, types of map display, level of detail, size of font and brightness of backlighting, volume of sound,..... You name it, you could customize it. He went into great detail because truly, this was a universally designed tool. The catch for him was realizing that when he was done with his rental car in Columbus OH, he knew no more about the city than when he had arrived. The device - and using it for several days - had not led him to learn anything. It was not universally designed for LEARNING. Its intention was to help you arrive at your meeting. Unless islands in Second Life - for example - are started with an intention that users could learn there, then simply playing the game will probably not help many of our students learn the fundamental skills that they have been working around for years. This is all coming straight out of my perspective grounded in learning disabilities research and teaching, you understand. My students did not learn literacy and numeracy just by being immersed. They learned with intentionally designed environments, activities, and materials. They learned a lot of other life skills by being immersed and had lots of other talents, don't get me wrong, but literacy, numeracy, and language were real puzzles for them that required intense, intentional work. I have not checked the GED island in Second Life, so I'll be curious about that. Anyone visited it yet? And what about an island where you could just stop by and practice English using Voice Over Internet? These intentional designs and uses of the online environment have real potential, I think, but as David points out, they don't have to/shouldn't be like "school". Heidi ________________________________ From: technology-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:technology-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Tina_Luffman at yc.edu Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 12:30 PM To: The Technology and Literacy Discussion List Subject: [Technology 1078] Re: A new vision for online learning Hi David and all, You are whetting my interest in the Second Life option for GED learners. Jennifer Rafferty was talking with us about it after a Massachusetts webcast training I was involved in with her program last week. This idea takes me back to when I was studying for my MA in English at Northern Arizona University. We were actually looking into the possibilities of using virtual worlds for educational purposes as well as studying the pedagogy and implications for doing so. On the positive side, these alternate realities are leveling playing fields for the disabled, the unattractive, for anyone who carries a sense of oppression or of being judged by physical appearance, race, gender, and so on. On the negative side, of course is the abuse by those who enter these realities as lurkers seeking to do harm to the participants. But looking at the positive side, I also found that the discussion board in Blackboard had a similar effect on the students in my online English classes I was teaching for the university. I had posed a few research questions to the students, and the quiet ones said that in this environment they had the opportunity to choose their words and participate in "classroom" discussions. The more verbal students also noticed that they did not say as much percentage wise as they normally do in a face-to-face class. These verbal students felt somewhat less represented than normal, but did realize the value of hearing voices of the other. Learning to listen can also be a good tool for students to develop. . . and I am including myself here. As for me, personally, I have felt more empowered in the online community. I feel that people can hear my ideas without judging them through the physical. For the unimpressive looking person, their ideas will receive more attention. Even for a person who is impressive looking, I feel that these people feel that their ideas are valued for the idea itself rather than feeling that they have to sell themselves through their persona . . . what a concept in our current era. Concerning your other point about virtual reality classrooms, yes, getting students engaged in a place where there is a continual evolution of learning higher level skills, and receiving rewards for success are also valid. My daughter and her boyfriend can spend days on end playing the latest video game, and there is something definitely addicting, my only other hold out, about this type of environment. And yet both of them find following a classroom lecture or reading a book to be difficult at best. Perhaps this is, in a lesser sense, the value of software like Skills Tutor or MHC Online where students become so engaged. They get immediate feedback from the pretest telling them what to study next. They also get feedback for each lesson telling them which questions they got right--reward--and which ones they missed--motivating them to review that lesson. The students see themselves progressing through the lessons and can actually feel themselves making accomplishments. By the way, does anyone have experience with AZTEC software? I am interested in it as well for the workforce development value. Have a nice weekend. Tina Tina Luffman Coordinator, Developmental Education Verde Valley Campus 928-634-6544 tina_luffman at yc.edu Tina Luffman Coordinator, Developmental Education Verde Valley Campus 928-634-6544 tina_luffman at yc.edu -----technology-bounces at nifl.gov wrote: ----- To: The Technology and Literacy Discussion List <technology at nifl.gov> From: "David J. Rosen" <djrosen at comcast.net> Sent by: technology-bounces at nifl.gov Date: 06/16/2007 04:40AM Subject: [Technology 1076] A new vision for online learning Hello Nancy, Heidi, and others, I have previously mentioned on this discussion list the book by James Gee, _What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy_. Gee invites us to look at what we can learn from the most successful, and brilliantly designed, computer games about how to create classroom learning experiences. I would like us to look at what video games have to teach us about _online_ learning for adults. [Caution: this message contains vision.] 1. When you begin to play a video game you know it will be challenging, but it always begins at the easiest level and gradually, level by level, gets more difficult. Is this always true of online learning for adults? 2. Video games (Gee points out) usually have no written instruction manuals. You are expected to learn how they work from playing them. They are designed that way. You _can_ learn how they work from playing them. Can students learn how an online course works just from taking it? 3. In a video game you can take as little or as much time as you need to go through any level. You can replay a level any time you want -- to strengthen your skills for the difficult challenges that you know lie ahead, or for fun. In an online course, even an asynchronous one, you usually have to complete the assignment within the week. 4. In a video game you are rewarded each time you learn something, and at the end of each level. Although Gee lists more principles I think you get the idea. Gee learned these principles from studying video games. He describes them in detail throughout the book and conveniently lists them in the appendix. Examining typical classroom activities in light of these learning design principles, you realize that many students are disengaged with K-12 classes and drop out because the classes are so poorly designed as learning environments, whereas video games engage them. Most classes just cannot compete with video games, or many other engaging life learning experiences. As Mark Twain put it, "My whole life was an education, except of course for my years in school". Of course, this kind of thinking may lead us back to the drawing board, to reconsider whether we should be offering online "classes" at all. The answer to the National Institute of Literacy's question about how much literacy is needed for online learning might be "only very basic literacy skills" or even "no literacy skills are required" to participate in online learning if reading and writing could be learned entirely through playing an online video game. Some of you are chuckling at the very notion. Consider however Second Life, the online environment where those with low-level reading skills can even now learn how to do many things without reading. Suppose users could have Second Life signs, notices, billboards, letters, e-mail and other written documents -- or parts of these -- read out loud if they wished, for example when they got stuck on a word. Suppose they could attend completely asynchronous reading improvement groups when and if they wanted to in an online learning center, reading groups which took advantage of computerized assessment features. In a large-scale, online reading group environment, people could be assigned to a reading group with those who had their interests, and same reading level. There could, of course, be scheduled real-time discussions for those who wanted them. I learned recently that some people with physical disabilities (who describe themselves as "differently abled") are active in Second Life. Like everyone else there, they can choose who they want to be, can pick or design their own avatar (a mobile, animated icon that is "who you are" in Second Life) but also -- for the first time -- they can walk, run, even fly. One physically disabled user said that this mobility is liberating. Could Second Life be "liberating" for low- literate adults? Where am I going with this vision? The National Institute for Literacy, and/or other public and private funders should invest in creating an online environment -- perhaps build a learning center island on Second Life -- where adults, including young adults, -- can improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills in an interactive, online environment. This would be a bold step. There is nothing like this now -- although I understand a new GED center has just opened on Second Life and there is a massive center being built there for post-secondary education. Suppose participants learned to improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills as they were doing other things, and that the "scaffolding" was there to support literacy improvement. Perhaps the U.S. and Canada could co-invest in a Second Life adult learning environment where adults could go to pursue some compelling learning goals, and could -- at the same time -- get the assists they needed to improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills, not necessarily through online classes, but as they learned construction skills, learned to maintain a computer, improved their bowling skills, learned to fully use the features of a new mobile phone, or some other personal goal or objective. Such an environment, originally designed for English users or English language learners, might be adapted for learning other languages as well. It might become a world literacy learning environment. David J. Rosen djrosen at comcast.net ---------------------------------------------------- National Institute for Literacy Technology and Literacy mailing list Technology at nifl.gov To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/technology Email delivered to tina_luffman at yc.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/technology/attachments/20070616/1317c282/attachment.html
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