leveling up students with blogs
DESCRIPTION
For the SOLsummit 2009 conference, I presented social experiment which Derek Lackaff and I conducted on while teaching our Internet courses. We essentially let students blog what they learned, and encouraged specific behaviors through the use of Amy Jo Kim's game mechanics.TRANSCRIPT
Leveling up students with blogs
Motivating Active Learning Through Game Mechanics
kevin lim // cyberculturalist // 26th feb 2009
Why I’m interested...
“Passionate Teacher / Sleeping Students”at Yale Law School entrance frieze
http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html
“Passionate Students / Indifferent Teacher”at Yale Law School entrance frieze
http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html
PUSHHow to naturalize
learning objectives.
An unofficial Facebook Guide Book
Students everywhere using FacebookHere’s a Russian clone, VKontakte.ru
PULLDiscover the hook of social web platforms.
Dynamics of Teaching
Teachable Moments Cartoon by Matthew Henry Hall (Jan 2007)http://www.insidehighered.com/views/teachable_moments/cartoon24
Printed “essays” and “response papers” used in
many classrooms traditionally promoted a
closed dialogue between the student and teacher.
In contrast, class blogging allowed for a multi-logue
among the student, his or her peers, the instructor, and the
potential public.
Does blogging promote learning?
Duffy and Bruns (2006) have explained how blogs can be seen to promote active and engaged learning, since
they afford "digital literacy" towards collaborative and (co)creative purposes, as well as for the critical
assessment and evaluation of information
You call it copying ; today's college students call it collaborating. (WSJ, May 2007)http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010061
While the ease of participation could come at the cost of quality and reliability, Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler (2006) suggest that the “Darwinian type 'survival of the fittest' content” would help ensure competition for the production of quality content.
image source: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/092506/2012.gif
Befitting of Ray Oldenburg's notion of "Third Places" (1991), blogs also situate students in a broad communication environment that reaches far beyond the sociological confines of their classroom and homes.
When Derek Lackaff and I taught our Internet
communication courses back in Spring 2007, we tried to see if blogging could support a truly
active and collaborative learning experience.
Our Story
Students create a discussion sphere that is more controllable and less threatening than the classroom.
As students blog , they create an archive of thoughts and discussion
Allows theoretical connections between course topics to manifest as hyperlinks.
Pedagogical Aspects of Blogs
Typically weekly posting or commenting requirement.
Affords minimal learning and interaction outcomes.
Student need to internalize intellectual interaction.
Problem of Motivation
Blogging situates students' work in their own public spaces
Intrinsic sense of ownership and recognition of their personal production
Likely produce higher quality work if they are motivated to engage with their lessons and colleagues in a more social fashion.
Motivating Blog Participation
All in one classroom
management solutions
might not be enough.
What makes social platforms so engaging?
To motivate student blogging communities, we tried using Amy Jo Kim's game mechanics (2006)
Visible ScoreboardVisible Scoreboard
Five Game Mechanics1. Collecting2. Earning Points3. Feedback4. Exchanges5. Customization
Using Game Mechanics
Amy Jo KimCreative DirectorShuffleBrain
“I see a game mechanics working well on sites like YouTube, Yelp, Twitter, and Flickster. [...] like points, leaderboards, level-ups, social exchanges, and customization to a strong core experience.”
Amy Jo KimCreative DirectorShuffleBrain
Using Game Mechanics
Amy Jo Kim’s idea was in the presence of a scoring mechanism.
Established a blogging leaderboard via technorati.com authority ranking algorithm.
Provide our students a basic measure of how they were doing against one another.
Students also given weekly audits of the class overall performance.
1. Earning Points
For quality blog posts, students earned weekly awards.
Variety of awards promotes diverse behaviors (e.g. Early Birdie)
Awards can be traded for extra credits or the ability to gain “immunity” from extra assignments.
2. Collecting Things
Comments and trackback allow students to understand the quality of the blog and wiki contribution.
Students are given the opportunity to improve on posts if they have not reached the assignment deadline.
Accessibility of feedback allows students to accelerate mastery in each week’s theme.
3. Feedback
Students instinctively personalized their blogs by the first week of use.
Low level: Blog templates
High level: Sidebar widgets
Social Objectspersonal photosfavorite musicbrandingchat box
4. Customization
To track the layers of interaction, we visually aggregated RSS feeds of their blogs and wikis using web services such as Netvibes.com
5. Exchanges
What are students actually doing?
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Why is blogging, tweeting, youtubing,
facebooking, blah-blah-ing,
FUN?
Individual
Emotion
Others
Feedbackself-awareness
personality
communicate
communicate
• The Third Place: Being a shared space not owned by neither faculty nor students may mean equal standing in power.
• This motivates the user by choice (self-interest), rather than coercion.
• Informality: Informal channels allow for more spontaneous interaction.
• Distinguishing motivation for using Facebook vs. Blackboard
Capturing Spontaneity
Image Source: http://mchabib.com/2006/10/05/digital-library-as-third-place/
Potential Challenges
The Digital Divide in terms of video media literacy (Stavchansky, 2006)
!
Digital Divide- Parallel Backchannels- Participatory Literacy- Polarized Performance
Open to Subversion- Private vs. Public discourse- Opposing learning objectives- Community self-moderation
Swings both ways...
Dealing with Complexity
http://maxpictures.com/weblog/2007/04/11/product-placement/
Fun mattersEnjoy or Adapt.
Thank youReach me via twitter at @brainopera