Introduction

Rather than a single mode of media production, digital storytelling can be viewed as a family of practices that integrate different forms of digital media with storytelling goals. This family encompasses a broad spectrum of output formats, from collections of images, through digital video, to interactive fiction. A particularly rich form of digital storytelling is embodied in the webcomic, the form of sequential art contained within the framework of the Web. Marrying the known power of traditional comics to the flexibility and potential for programming of the Web allows for new practices that both expand the boundaries of the medium, and give rise to new, previously unseen narrative forms. One particularly powerful new form is to be found in the “infinite canvas,” the form of sequential art that results from erasing the boundaries of the physical page, as well as in the design of the comic.

Origins

The term “infinite canvas” was first coined by Scott McCloud, within the context of developing an interactive CD-ROM version of his work Understanding Comics for Voyager. Within this context, the term referred to navigational artifacts that would have allowed the reader to expand their explorations of a particular chapter or topic. While this project did not develop further, McCloud continued to explore the concept, and developed it further in his book Reinventing Comics.

Figure 1. Scott McCloud's Zot! Online - Hearts and Minds

Before delving further into McCloud’s analysis, it will be worthwhile to look at an actual example of an infinite canvas webcomic. In a panel (Figure 1) drawn from McCloud’s Zot! Online Hearts and Minds, we can see the potential of the infinite canvas at work. The initial setup of the strip is fairly traditional, although connecting lines, known as “traces”, are used to guide the reader’s eye from panel to panel. However, after the explosion of Zot’s ship, the comic also literally “explodes” (1a) into an extremely long vertical panel depicting the fall of our heroes (1b) in a fashion that would not be possible on the printed page. When our hero regains consciousness and the power of flight, the panel “implodes” (1c) once more into a more traditional layout and narrative progression.

Figure 1a. The ship explodes…

Figure 1b. …our heroes fall…

Figure 1c. …but are saved at the last minute.

McCloud’s Analysis of the Infinite Canvas

McCloud identifies several central elements of sequential art that change going from the printed page to the infinite canvas. Of these, three stand out – if we discuss them using a musical metaphor (which works better than a cinematic metaphor here), they are:

1. Pacing: in music, the only constraint on how many beats a given musical passage might take is determined by its own internal expressive needs. On the printed page, however, the number of panels that can occupy a given space is limited by physical constraints, thus limiting the number of “beats” storytellers can use in ways that may not best suit their story. Comics authors as diverse as Bill Griffith and Berkeley Breathed have complained about the tyranny of the space constraints allocated to daily newspaper comics and the resulting limitations imposed on their narratives. In the infinite canvas, three panels can become six panels without penalty, so storytellers can add as many beats as needed to their story. An excellent example of this is given by Demian.5′s When I Am King (Figure 2), which starts out with an evenly divided horizontal space, within which the infinite canvas allows for gradual development as the king slowly wakes and formulates the desire to pick a sunflower (2a). Later, the comic develops both parallel storylines depicted in parallel horizontal strands, as well as vertical components, thus expanding its use of the medium as its picaresque tale evolves and deepens.

Figure 2. Demian.5's When I Am King

Figure 2a. The king wakes.

2. Dynamic range: musical passages can range from a pianissimo to a fortissimo; by contrast, the printed page allows a much more limited range, since when panels become too small they become illegible, and when they expand too far they overflow the bounds of the page. Infinite canvas webcomics allow for panels to become as large/loud or as small/soft as needed. An excellent illustration of this principle is provided by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s 24:Three (Figure 3). Readers can start anywhere in the comic, and navigate by following the connecting lines (designated, as we have already seen, by McCloud as “trails”) (3a), where interactive clicking directs people through the paths within the comic, and dynamic zooming allows for selective piano/forte relevance for comic elements (3b), while the dynamic, multiple point of entry layout allows for allegorical connections among branches.

Figure 3. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's 24:Three

Figure 3a. Following the narrative round a corner.

Figure 3b. Zooming on the introduction.

It is worthwhile to look at a second example of this in an infinite canvas webcomic with a more traditional storytelling approach, such as Drew Weing’s “Pup” (Figure 4) In “Pup” Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe, Weing gradually transitions from “piano” sequential panels (4a) to a progressively expanding vertical scale, which breaks out in a fortissimo out of boundaries as Pup’s mind expands to cover the entire universe (4b), which finally recompresses down to a traditional “piano” comics space, essential and complementary to the comic’s punch line (4c).

Figure 4. Drew Weing's “Pup” Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe.

Figure 4a. Pup slips into a reverie…

Figure 4b. …which expands his consciousness to the cosmic scale…

Figure 4c. …until he is returned to Earth by his friends' arrival.

Figure 5. Michael May's Eros Inc.

3. Time: the varying duration of silences and other interludes between musical passages are essential to the development of musical narratives. By contrast, comics (where distance between panels equals time) have been largely constrained by the physical page, so that only a narrow range of spacing between panels has been used in actual practice, thus in turn constraining the medium’s capacity to represent slowing down/speeding up of time. No such limitation exists in the infinite canvas, as can be seen in Michael May’s Eros, Inc. (Figure 5) The webcomic opens with two traditional panels (5a), which then switch to vertically scrolling text-only panels with spacing given by the rhythms and pauses of the transcribed conversation (5b), but unconstrained by the boundaries of the traditional printed page. This process has also allowed the text to become more fully decoupled from the rest of the panel, and assume more fully image-like aspects onto itself.

Figure 5a. A traditional opening sets the stage…

Figure 5b. …for a very nontraditional development of a conversation.

A second approach to spacing and time is presented by John Barber’s Vicious Souvenirs (Figure 6), which creates a third dimension for an infinite canvas that is revealed via successive overlays (6a). Some argument exists as to whether this last example is an infinite canvas, since not all panels exist at the same time; however, this objection can be deflected by pointing out that the process of revealing the successive overlays is analogous to turning the page in traditional comic books, albeit with a perceptual continuity not available in the latter.

Figure 6. John Barber's Vicious Souvenirs

Figure 6a. Two successive states of Vicious Souvenirs.

Potential Applications in Digital Storytelling:

If the infinite canvas were just a rather exotic side branch of webcomics, it would not merit much attention beyond that accorded a curiosity. However, there are at least two reasons why the approach merits further attention in the academic sphere:

• First, digital storytelling should not be viewed in just its best-known form (i.e., moving image projects assembled from digital stills plus a narrator’s voice), but rather as a range of practices, each incorporating multiple options and possibilities (Figure 7). As we progress through the multiple forms of digital storytelling, we invoke a progressively broadening spectrum of narrative options and possibilities – at the cost of increasing complexity in learning both the language and tools of that particular digital storytelling mode. In that context, the infinite canvas promises a way to “cheat” this tradeoff, with an excellent difficulty/benefits ratio, since it affords many of the narrative possibilities to be found in the moving image domain, as well as some of those provided by traditional interactive media, while remaining within the easier to teach, learn, and share domain of sequential art.

Figure 7. Digital storytelling across media.

• Second, as pointed out by Edward Tufte, we face some non-trivial problems in communication created by the overuse and misuse of PowerPoint-type tools. In typical use, PowerPoint oversimplifies content, imposes boundaries on the presentation space that in turn constrains in detrimental fashion the presentation of data and its analysis, and overall imposes a certain framework via its defaults that limits and stultifies thinking. Infinite-canvas tools like Prezi (see below) effectively work around PowerPoint’s limitations (e.g., zooming gets around issues determined by the fixed screen resolution of PowerPoint by allowing for focus while preserving detail; changes in size and distance can emphasize more clearly the relative relevance of key points than PowerPoint’s “one size fits all” approach), while not requiring users to completely abandon practices that have served them to a certain degree in PowerPoint.

The Infinite Canvas Toolkit

While multiple tools have been developed to create infinite canvas comics, at this point in time only two tools are powerful enough and stable enough to be recommended:

• The Tarquin Engine (Figure 8): developed by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, the Tarquin Engine allows for the full range of effects seen in his webcomic 24:Three. It is based upon easily-modifiable and augmentable Flash templates; however, users need to have some basic knowledge of Flash, and access to the Flash authoring environment.

Figure 8. The Tarquin Engine

• Prezi (Figure 9): this is the recommended infinite canvas tool for users who lack Flash authoring experience. Prezi is currently being marketed as a presentation tool, but it is at its core a tool for authoring infinite canvas narratives. Prezi starts from a set of templates, which govern font styles, backgrounds, and colors, allowing for experimentation, but at the same time putting some boundaries on projects to keep them from becoming formless. Tools like frames and paths act like panel boundaries and traces in infinite canvas comics, grouping elements together, and guiding the reader from one element to the next. Zooming occurs automatically as the reader progresses from element to element, and can be controlled by suitable use of frames, both visible and invisible. Audio, video, and high-resolution PDFs can all be embedded within Prezi, and form part of the narrative. The combination of all of these elements effectively addresses Tufte’s concerns, while the tool itself remains easy to learn and accessible to a broad audience.

Figure 9. Prezi

Rounding Out the Theory – Avenues for Further Exploration

It is clear that the infinite canvas holds great promise as a venue for digital storytelling. However, pushing beyond what has already been accomplished, and, indeed, avoiding some of the “PowerPoint traps” outlined by Tufte, will require a deeper theoretical background. In constructing this background for the practice of the infinite canvas by authors who are not already experienced as sequential artists, several elements will prove particularly useful:

1. A classification scheme for panel-to-panel transitions (Scott McCloud): panel-to-panel transitions (Figure 10) become particularly important in infinite canvas webcomics, since they can take on new dimensions in the new medium. Thus, zooming in the infinite canvas can evoke transitions of either the moment-to-moment type (appealing to the reader’s direct familiarity with the traditional medium) or the aspect-to-aspect type (appealing to concepts derived from cinema of zooming bringing attention focus to different aspects of a scene). Looking at the webcomic examples we have already considered, we can see new options for each of the possibilities: witness the same long panel that contains both moment-to-moment (the development of the fall) and action-to-action (explosion to fall to flying) transitions in Zot! Online, or the multiple transition types evoked by the combination of zooming along trails with panel content in 24:Three.

Figure 10. McCloud's panel-to-panel transitions.

2. A narrative/composition classification matrix (Benoît Peeters): infinite canvas webcomics invoke visual composition and layout in new ways, and make possible narrative that was not possible before. However, this in turn means that relationships between narrative and composition become particularly crucial in this new domain. Hence, this matrix (Figure 11), derived from the work of Peeters, becomes particularly important in the context of the infinite canvas. It is important to realize here that narrative does not refer just to the text on the page, but rather to all elements – visual and textual – that contribute to tell a story, while composition refers primarily to the layout and construction of the page and panels. The four possible combinations given by the relative dominance and interactions of these two components can best be understood by reference to four examples drawn from traditional comics works (Figure 12). The infinite canvas webcomics we’ve looked at can clearly be further – and better – understood in terms of these categories. Thus, When I Am King is closest to conventional use, while Zot! Online exemplifies rhetorical use, and Vicious Souvenirs’ use of overlays points out new directions for productive use.

Figure 11. Peeters' narrative/composition classification matrix.

Figure 12. Illustrating Peeters. Clockwise from top left: Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese: Tango; Burne Hogarth's Tarzan de la Selva; Fred's Philemon: Simbabbad de Batbad; Jacques Tardi's Le Démon des Glaces.

3. Concepts derived from cartography (Alan MacEachren): when sequential art extends its boundaries beyond a page-based concept to what is now effectively a terrain, it enters the domain of cartography. In determining best practices for the domain – particularly where replacing Powerpoint is concerned – it is important to bring cartographic knowledge into play. As one example, the analysis of the effectiveness of different visual elements in communicating cartographic concepts, derived from the work of Jacques Bertin and Alan MacEachren (Figure 13) is directly relevant to the use that can be made today of the medium. Different visual variables that can be invoked on the page (e.g., color hue, texture) are assessed in terms of their effectiveness at communicating distinctions within certain categories of concepts (e.g., the relative size of two quantities being depicted). This and other concepts drawn from the cartographic domain can add focus, clarity, and power to analytical narratives constructed atop an infinite canvas.

Figure 13. Cartographic visual variables and their use.

Final Thoughts

The infinite canvas is ready for use today, both as a replacement for Powerpoint-type narrative, as well as in its role as a fully autonomous medium for digital storytelling. For those authors who wish to push the boundaries of the medium beyond current practice, a direction for exploration is suggested by thoughts on the boundaries of the form. In a remark on his online presentation of the infinite canvas, McCloud notes that critics have attacked the infinite canvas precisely because of the limitations it removes: sequential art, they claimed, has developed and evolved precisely because of these constraints. While it is true that the infinite canvas removes many constraints, it would be absurd to claim that it removes all constraints, or, indeed, that it does not create new constraints of its own. Understanding these constraints, however, will require both the creation of multiple new infinite canvas projects, as well as the systematic exploration of the domain.

One avenue for such exploration that looks likely to prove fruitful is based upon the work of the OuBaPo (Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle – “Workshop for Potential Comics”), which models its projects upon the work of the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – “Workshop for Potential Literature”), which sought to better understand what could be done in writing by creating novels, poems, and stories written under deliberate artificial constraints. Some of these constraints are mechanical (e.g., Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is a “machine” for generating billions of sonnets, based upon rules for recombining the lines from a set of 10 original sonnets), while others combine thematic rules with other constraints (e.g., Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, where each component “novelette” within the overall novel includes certain objects and references, and follows an order given by a complex set of rules), and others retell the same scenario using multiple stylistic approaches (e.g. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style, which recounts a simple story of a chance encounter on a bus and at the train station in 99 different literary styles).

OuBaPo has constructed equivalent explorations for comics: in addition to experiments that parallel those of the OuLiPo exactly – for instance, Matt Madden’s 99 Ways To Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, which parallels Queneau’s Exercises de Style (Figure 14) – the group has also created explorations that deal with specific features of the space of comics (e.g., Bill Griffith’s The Plot Thickens, in which each horizontal row of the comic contains exactly one more panel than the one that preceded it). Thus far, OuBaPo projects have not dealt with the arena of infinite comics, but promise rich potential, understanding, and discoveries if they were thus directed.

Figure 14. Three pages from Matt Madden's 99 Ways To Tell a Story: Exercises in Style

References

Barber, John. (2004). Vicious Souvenirs. Online at http://www.moderntales.com/comics/vs.php

Demian.5 (2001). When I Am King. Online at http://www.demian5.com/king/wiak.htm

Fred. (1974). Philemon: Simbabbad de Batbad. Paris: Dargaud.

Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. (2005). 24:Three. Online at http://e-merl.com/24three.htm

Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. (2005). Icarus Tangents. Online at http://e-merl.com/tangent.htm

Griffith, Bill. (1980). The Plot Thickens. Published in Raw #2. New York: Raw Books.

Hogarth, Burne. (1976). Tarzan de la Selva. Madrid: Montena.

MacEachren, Alan. (1995). How Maps Work. New York: Guilford Press.

Madden, Matt. (2005). 99 Ways To Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. New York: Chamberlain Bros. Online at http://www.exercisesinstyle.com/

May, Michael. (2009) Eros Inc. Online at http://www.commonnamefilms.com/erosinc/

McCloud, Scott. (1993). Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins.

McCloud, Scott. (2000). Reinventing Comics. New York: HarperCollins.

McCloud, Scott. (2000). Zot! Online – Hearts and Minds. Online at http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/zot/index.html

McCloud, Scott. (2009). The “Infinite Canvas”. Online at http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/index.html

Peeters, Benoît. (1998). Case, Planche, Récit: Lire la Bande Dessinée. Tournai,Belgium: Casterman.

Perec, Georges. (1978). La Vie mode d’emploi. Paris: Hachette.

Pratt, Hugo. (2000). Corto Maltese: Tango. Tournai,Belgium: Casterman.

Puentedura, Ruben R. (2008). “Digital Storytelling: An Alternative Instructional Approach”. NMC Summer Conference Proceedings. Online at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Puentedura.pdf

Queneau, Raymond. (1961). Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Paris: Gallimard.

Queneau, Raymond. (1947). Exercises de Style. Paris: Gallimard.

Tardi, Jacques. (2001). Le Démon des Glaces. Tournai,Belgium: Casterman.

Tufte, Edward R. (2006). The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, 2nd Ed. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Weing, Drew. (2006) “Pup” Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe. Online at http://www.drewweing.com/pup/13pup.html

Biography

Dr. Ruben Puentedura is the Founder and President of Hippasus, a consulting firm focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education. He has implemented these approaches for over twenty years at a range of institutions, including Bennington College, Harvard University, and the Maine State Department of Education, as well as other schools, colleges and universities, hospitals and arts organizations. His research includes the design of models for selecting, using, and evaluating technology in education, as well as new directions in Educational Gaming and Digital Storytelling, focusing on applications in areas where they have not been traditionally employed. He can be reached at rubenrp@hippasus.com.

Introduction

Diana Laurillard argues in her book Rethinking University Teaching (2002) that different kinds of media have different affordances for different kinds of student learning experiences. She lists five different forms of media: Communicative, Adaptive, Interactive, Narrative, and Productive Media. According to Conole and Fill (2005)

“Narrative media tell or show the learner something (e.g. text, image). Interactive media respond in a limited way to what the learner does (e.g. search engines, multiple choice tests, simple models). Communicative media facilitate exchanges between people (e.g. email, discussion forum). Adaptive media are changed by what the learner does (e.g. some simulations, virtual worlds). Productive media allow the learner to produce something (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet).”

The mission of our unit, Centre for Educational Development (CED), is to contribute, together with the faculties, to pedagogical development and to increase the quality of teaching and learning at Lund University. Incorporated within this mission is to support and stimulate the development of eLearning. We have used Laurillard´s different media for learning as a basis to develop The Media Wheel, a representation where student learning experience is illustrated in the centre. The sectors surrounding the core contain learning activities such as discussing, articulating, attending, exploring, experimenting, and practicing. Next to each sector is a category of media coined by Laurillard (2002). Different forms of media or technologies can be placed next to each sector to generate an overview of the learning experiences made available to learners in, for example, a particular course.

As a consequence of the web 2.0 and social software development (Shirky, 2003), a spectrum of new possibilities for teaching and learning has emerged. The convergence between online technologies for creating content and those used for communicating or networking (Alexander, 2005), brings a development where media evolve from being “only” narrative to becoming communicative and productive.This enables the learner to discuss, create, and share which affords a possibility of communicative, collaborative, and social activities in each of the sections above.

Applications of The Media Wheel

How can a blog or, a blog in combination with Second Life (SL), or a blog in combination with Second Life and iTunes U, promote learning online or in a blended classroom setting? And how can such pedagogical scenarios be explained and visualised to a diverse group of academic teachers, both innovators — early adopters — as well as beginners, when it comes to use of technology for teaching and learning? To face that challenge we developed The Media Wheel which serves as a straightforward instrument for illustrating the potential usage of technology in teaching and learning in a campus, distance, or blended settings. When using The Media Wheel to explain and visualise different affordances for learning it is possible to support teachers’ understanding of when a media is useful and why, and also when it might be better to combine the media or technologies with other tools.

An instrument for demonstrations

We know from our own experience that it is especially hard for many teachers to grasp the pedagogical aspects of how teaching and learning works in a virtual world, such as Second Life®. Below is an excerpt of images from a series of demonstrations explained in workshops and seminars.

When explaining Second Life applications this way before logging in, we found it easier for teachers to understand the demonstration inworld and what to expect from teaching and learning in a virtual world setting. It prepares the teachers for further use of Second Life and helps them to reflect upon how virtual worlds could be used in their own teaching and learning before they learn how to actually interact in the world, thus enabling them to focus on the pedagogical issues.

Outcome of Programme Design

In this example we use The Media Wheel for the purpose of programme development and quality enhancement of a Masters programme. The Media Wheel can give an overview of the pedagogical design as a whole and its outcome according to learning affordances.

The programme in this example is a fully internet based masters programme in GIS, planned to provide an international education and training for a diverse group of both professionals with needs for new competences in GIS and for students whose future work will include GIS. There are more than 500 students attending this programme, representing about 80 countries (many of them developing countries) and the majority are full- or halftime employees. To meet the needs of these diverse student needs, the programme was from the very beginning designed to be very flexible (Collis & Moonen, 2002) – not only in terms of a flexible starting date, study pace, and flexible study mode (online or CD-ROM), but also by giving individual choice whether to communicate and interact with fellow students or to study alone. Since the start of the programme in 2004, there has been an ongoing research project studying the experienced affordances (Boud, 2004), how the students in this flexible context experience, understand and act, and how this impinges their learning. We know that they are very satisfied with the flexibility given (Larson et al, 2006) and of the variation of learning experiences (Antman et al, 2007).

Applied in The Media Wheel the programme can be illustrated to the teachers as follows:

Learner interaction is afforded when students intellectually interact with the theoretical parts, which are delivered in a variety of formats (narrative media), and when they interact with quizzes and interactive tools, analysing, for instance, spatial data (interactive media). We know that learning through practical exercises is carried out when the students are offline, at their own computers with special GIS software. The students analyse, manipulate, and produce GIS objects (adaptive and productive media). It is then completed by teacher interaction, supervision, and feedback online (communicative media). But, illustrated by the three ??? within the communicative media section, we highlight that one important part of interactive learning is missing. It is the one the research tells us; namely that many students do not meaningfully interact with other students, neither for learning interaction nor for social purposes (Larson, 2008). This is something that has to be improved from a quality assurance and learning perspective. We have used The Media Wheel as a simplified model and starting point in our discussions with the teachers. Together we decided to design a combination of increased synchronous learning activities online, focused on the practical GIS and above the course level. Different media through various forms of web 2.0 tools will be implemented after the summer holiday. A social network in NING will be set up in a small pilot, as well as testing Second Life for interaction and learning.

Mapping media forms for development projects

In the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural project “West Meets East” in Second Life (presented at SLEDcc08), a small group of students from Lund University in Sweden, met and interacted in Second Life with Chinese students at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. The aim of the project was, together with Chinese language teacher, assistant professor Marita Ljungqvist, from the Centre For Languages and Litterature (SOL) to help the students learn more about each others’ cultures and languages. The project was also an educational development pilot, with the objective to test the affordances for learning and teaching in Second Life, using the Media Wheel concept as one of the resources for planning.

When exploring the possibilities for teaching and learning in a virtual world one has to bear in mind that a virtual world like Second Life does not automatically provide the teacher with immersive and engaging learning activities, but provides the teacher the tools and the environment for creating such activities (in press). In order for students to learn how to interact in cross-cultural groups and seminars we used different media forms to create learning experiences where students could practice techniques, compensating, for instance, for the lack of body language and eye contact.

In order to demonstrate we used narrative media in the form of video tutorials to explain how to take snapshots. That is, how one zooms in on an avatar or object before a picture is taken. With this skill (alt zoom practice), one is able to focus on individuals in an audience. As an exercise the students interacted in a photo course inworld taking snapshots of each other. The students used Second Life as a productive media when they learned how to create and build signs for their seminar. The seminars were arranged as exhibitions in order to create presentations where the speaker moved from sign to sign together with the audience in order to avoid the “non-responsive wall of faces lacking expression.” In order to compensate Second Life’s synchronous form of communicative media a NING network site was primarily set up for reflection in blogs, but was also used as a centre for networking. Furthermore, it was planned to be the repository for images, video tutorials and links.

Discussion

The intention of the representation of the categories of media (Laurillard, 2002) — The Media Wheel — is to develop one straightforward instrument for teachers to examine what kind of learning experience they offer their students and how they can combine or implement tools for different teaching and learning activities. This is to support student learning and, in a longer perspective, scaffold students when achieving their intended learning outcomes.

For educational developers, The Media Wheel could be used as a tool to give an overview or demonstration of the possibilities and limitations of a technology, and/or combinations of social software; an overview of the interaction, communication or collaborations within a course; or as a first step in planning a course. However, The Media Wheel does not take all aspects of the learning process into consideration. Laurillard’s conversational framework (2002) is a more elaborate representation of interaction between teachers, students and their peers. An important part of her framework is how learning takes place through the iteration of communication between teacher, students, and peers, and how the students adapt their actions with their understanding of the concept and how, after feedback, they reflect upon their actions. The framework is not a theory of learning, but a representation that could be used to illustrate the different aspects of theories of learning, such as instructionism, constructionism, or socio-cultural learning (Laurillard, 2009).

From our own perspective we find The Media Wheel useful since it enhances the quality of our own diverse practise. So far, we do not have any scientific underpinnings on teachers’ experiences, understanding, and feelings from the usage of The Media Wheel in their own teaching and planning, but, nevertheless, we belive to have captured their spontaneous reactions.

These can be summarised as “useful and workable,” since teachers expressed that The Media Wheel helped them to increase their vocabulary and know-how when it comes to teaching and learning activities, as well as media forms online. It helped them to balance their teaching online (or in a blended setting) and to move from a one-way instructivist student learning approach to a more active student learning approach. They also expressed notions of increasing their repertoire to constructively align learning outcomes, learning activities, and examinations (Biggs & Tang, 2007). One of the comments in the evaluation of our breakout session at the NMC Summer Conference expresses what we feel is an important reflection when mapping their own practice with the help of The Media Wheel:

“…it helps me to think about the links between what we want our students to be able to do, the challenges we face when developing these skills and the kinds of things different digital media are good at doing.”

In conclusion, we will strive to develop The Media Wheel further in dialogue and collaboration with teachers and collegues. The ultimate objective is to ensure on a continuous basis – again inspired by Laurillard (2009) – that pedagogy exploits and challenges technology.

References

Alexander, B. (2006) Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2: 32–44.

Antman, L., Larson, L. and Pilesjö, P. (2007). Diversity meets flexibility at a distance: Experienced affordances for learning. Accepted for the EARLI 2007 conference in Budapest, Hungary (Referee. Also published as paper no 3 in Learning Lund Report no 3

Biggs, J. B. and Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for quality learning at university. Open University Press/Mc Graw-Hill Education.

Boud, D. (2004) Control, influence and beyond: Logics of learning networks. Networks Learning Conference, University of Lancaster.

Collis, B & Moonen, J. (2002). Flexible Learning in a Digital World. Open Learning, Vol 17, No. 3.

Conole, G. and Fill, K. (2005). A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2005(08).

Kreber, C. (2002). Teaching excellence, teaching expertise, and the scholarship of teaching Innovative Higher Educ. 27:5-23.

Larson, L., Antman.L, Pilesjö, P., Mårtensson, U. (2006). Experiences from the LUMA-GIS eLearning master’s program: Student perspective and pedagogic models. Accepted for the Fifth European GIS Education Seminar, Krakow, Poland

Larson, L. (2008). Networked Learning in a Flexible Fully Internet-based International Masters´ Course. – Possibilities and Limits. Accepted for the Networked Learning Conference 2008 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Also published as paper no 3 in Learning Lund Report no 2.

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching : a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (2nd ed.): RoutledgeFalmer.

Laurillard, D. (2009). The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4 (1), 5-20.

Ljungqvist & Hedberg (2008) Designing learning environments for heterogeneous groups in Second Life, presented at SLEDCC08, Second Life (abstract: http://sledcc.wikispaces.com/SLEDcc+in+Second+Life)

Shirky, Clay (2003). Social software and the politics of groups. Available at http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html

This session was planned as an educator specific introduction to Second Life builds and projects that highlighted the specific needs of institutions as they take on virtual worlds in the classroom, as part of pedagogy, and otherwise. The session itself was divided into three sections:

1. A tour of some current NMC Virtual Worlds development projects showing solid examples of pedagogical driven Second Life builds.
2. An introduction to some basic elements of building and scripting, as well as an explanation of the amendments done to real world architecture in order to make it work in virtual space.
3. An overview of Land Management tools, groups, permissions, and various other technical aspects of maintaining and creating a Second Life build.

Introduction

In a departure from our previous sessions where we focused on hands-on building skills, we decided to step back and take a look at the bigger picture this year. Many session attendees were old faces and I’m sure by now, well on their way to becoming expert builders.

The fact is that although most (if not all) of you will have a go at creating things in Second Life, you’re all representatives of educational institutions, faculties, museums, or research establishments whose needs are likely to be larger or more complex than you can accomplish by yourself.

This is where we come in, or indeed any other professional developer you might choose to hire. Even if you don’t go down this route, you’ll still have to effectively manage an in-house team to help you realize your project in the Virtual World.

That’s not to say the process then becomes a hands off experience for you. Rather your role changes and you become an integral part of that development team. The end results will only be as good as your initial ideas & concepts, the thoroughness of the brief, the abilities of the team to brainstorm, refine, specify & communicate throughout the process, and finally when it’s all done, the running and management of the project after it has been handed over to you.

We’ll start by discussing some of the basic build types most commonly commissioned, before looking at the commissioning & development process itself.

Build types

So what is an Educational build? As far as we’re concerned, anything built by or for you!

Although we’re greatly interested in the pedagogy of digital learning here at the NMC, not all of the educational builds we’re involved in will necessarily be directly related to digital learning. They may be commissioned by a variety of people ranging from an institution’s marketing department right through to individual faculty members.

‘Clocktowers’

So we’ll start with a type of build perhaps more relevant to former group for several reasons. I often refer to these as “Clocktower Builds” in a less than complimentary manner, but don’t get me wrong. They served a purpose and, in fact, still do. They’re actually some of the first educational builds to be created in SL and are still one of the most commonly commissioned types. Although not of direct interest to faculty staff, they are often the builds that initiate an organization’s entry to the virtual world, and may be the catalyst for the funding you require to develop your own project.

Anyway, word will come down from on high that you must have a presence in this virtual world called Second Life and it’s your job to make it happen, most likely with a brief put together by someone who’s never actually spent any time there, aided by the marketing department. Commercial marketing departments love their logos… and educational marketing departments love their Clock Towers.
What I really mean by clock towers, however, are iconic campus or institutional buildings, and it’s this iconic aspect that, despite my criticism, also makes them useful tools. Identity, familiarity, recognition, and orientation are all real world phenomenon which have their place in the virtual world and are served by this type of building. I even enjoy building them, and they’re certainly eye catching!

The downside is that their real world counterpoints are typically very big so the re-creations themselves are often the largest thing in the sim, which leaves us with the problem of what to do with them.

Very often we have requests for offices and classrooms, or even a re-creation of the building’s interior. I’d implore you to resist the temptation to do all of these things for a number of reasons. Big though they are, the scaling challenges of SL usually mean that the interiors are simply not suitable for modeling, resulting in unusable and difficult to navigate spaces. Additionally, although I’ve built a few, I have yet to see ANY office or classroom in SL actually used. No one does office work in SL, and experience shows there are far more suitable environments for in-world learning than a classroom.

Instead I would use these buildings at the arrival point in the sim to immediately establish your identity and, most importantly, the visitor’s location on your campus.

Internally, we typically build them out to be an open plan with one, or at most two, spaces inside. Given their position in the hierarchy of the build as a whole, they are useful places to provide an introduction, whether it’s simply the history of and information about the real life university or a summary, complete with teleports, to what else is going on in the sim, faculty builds, conference facilities or whatever. You might use simple display boards and art work, dynamic displays with clickable links to website pages or, if you’ve included some kind of auditorium in the build, show a promotional video.

So whether it’s by choice or under duress, clock tower builds can still serve a useful purpose today.

Other components of non-faculty sims may include: newbie orientation, amphitheatre, art gallery, or simply a “fun” element taking advantage of the interactivity and dynamics available in Second Life: a lift up a tower into the clouds, a boat or other vehicle trip around the sim, etc. Why not simply inspire and engage visitors, staff, and students, while hopefully demonstrating some of the potential? Seemingly flippant and possibly not entirely educational or specific to your establishment, an interesting piece of interactivity or something dynamic like a ride hints at some of the potential of SL to your visitor so they’re not left with the impression that this is a lifeless static world.

These builds can also provide an “in” for staff and faculty members who may find a real use… early adopters like us. So what features are useful here?

Most importantly, beautiful though re-creations of existing campus buildings can be, they do nothing to encourage a visitor to simply stop, think, and then play and investigate the potential of what can be done in a virtual world. A sim that is fully built out remains a monument to the original commission rather than a living place that encourages its own evolution.

All the facilities discussed so far could quite happily reside in half a sim, leaving the other half free for a sandbox or future development, which, with careful sim design and planning by you and your developer, need not be an eyesore to detract from the marketing shots used in the university brochure.

Finally, there are some notable exceptions to the typical Clocktower Build: Case Admissions Program, a build that initially seemed to serve no purpose, came alive with the addition of people and a purpose. Student ambassadors met potential students and talked about Case University. The build served as a backdrop, conversation piece, and created a sense of being there together.

While there are many uses for physical builds and buildings, I think the whole land/build metaphor employed by Second Life can be misleading. It immediately implies that the most important thing about our Second Life presence is what we physically construct. But let’s step back for a minute and look at it another way: You’re renting a plot of land on one of our educational sims. Your neighbors might be a French university. With a little effort and the use of the land tools you can find out who’s responsible for their parcel, put out feelers, and establish communication with them. By some mighty feat of planning you actually manage to get a group of your students in world at the same time as a group of French students and by a stroke of luck (or not) they’re both language classes.

The fact is this empty plot of land with a handful of students on it has already achieved what would otherwise costs tens of thousands of dollars and an overseas field trip to do. You’ve got your students in a social, conversational setting with native French speaking peers. You still have to coax and cajole them into talking to each other, but you’d be doing that if you were in Paris, too! It’s a simplistic example but it serves to demonstrate that in some cases it’s nothing but people that make a successful project.

And this is the kind of project I love. Functionality and real benefits came first. In my experience, it’s these kind of projects that thrive, grow and become real successes, in a built form, too… because having established a raison d’être for even being in the world, you might now consider building or employing someone like us to build something to support your project. An environment to promote the kind of communication, language, and vocabulary you want to foster, and perhaps to fully engage the students’ interest in the (virtual) world around them: a market place, a mall; in fact any environment your students need to feel comfortable. I previously begged you not to put offices in your builds, but even an office now has a purpose if it’s carefully populated with objects designed to expand your students vocabulary. You can’t make copies on a virtual photocopier (and yes, I’ve built one in Second Life), but having your student be able to simply identify it in a foreign language is an end in itself. Throw in a little interactivity such as scripted objects that listen for their name in French and respond to the user and we’ve started to build an environment that can be used by a student on their own out of class, too.

Meetings & Conference Venues

Our next build type bridges the gap between clock tower builds and some of the more interesting examples we’ll look at later.

Obviously the principle components of this build are the venues themselves, consisting of stages, seating, amphitheatres, etc., and, after the clock tower, this is the other component we’re usually asked to include in the general builds we do. The NMC Conference Center sim serves to demonstrate why you might actually want them in the first place and how you can best implement them.

First off, if you think these spaces are going to be used principally by the staff or students at your own organization, forget it. They can all meet face to face in the real world, without the technological hassle and limitations of mediating the experience through a virtual world.

The key feature of conferences, such as those NMC hosts, are that they draw both audiences and speakers from all around the world.
After teaching and research, conferences are the bread & butter of educational institutions. Real life conferences are very expensive for attendees, particularly in today’s economic climate. Virtual conferences offer most of the benefits, like the global participation, the social interaction, for a fraction of the cost. They have proven, as in the case of the NMC’s own conferences, to generate revenue for the hosting organization.

While most of you won’t be developing an entire conference sim, if you’ve a mind to effectively implement a meeting space, there’s a lot to learn from our conference sim.

Experience has shown us that open air venues are most popular and that traditional classroom spaces remain largely unused.

Additionally different types of venue are more suitable for promoting different types of audience participation, for example traditional front facing auditoria work well for formal presentations while venues in the round, such as the amphitheatre, promote audience participation and work well for more practical demonstrations.

As well as formal venues, it is also important to consider supporting spaces for breakout sessions, or simply to help structure informal social interaction in and around the conference.

Finally, organizing conferences and events requires much more than the physical venue. The NMC employs considerable human support and mediation for events which, together with orientation areas, help desks, and clear, event-specific signage all contribute to giving attendees a smooth and trouble free experience.

The conference sim is also a good example to introduce the RegAPI, a complicated term for something quite simple, best illustrated with this weblink: http://sl.nmc.org/join.

Many of our conference attendees are surprisingly not actually SL natives, which, while it demonstrates that using SL for events isn’t simply a means unto itself, presents some problems. Most of you will know what it was like entering SL for the first time, navigating LL’s own website, before being kicked out on your own into a world of strangers and chaos. Exhilarating for the bold explorer of the virtual world but frankly a confusing annoyance for someone who’s goal is simply to attend a conference. Having your developer implement the RegAPI for you means that you can control, direct, and assist new users entering your world. You can provide relevant instruction to them on the website, have them arrive directly in your sim or venue, and even be there to meet and greet them when they arrive.

It’s also useful for other types of build. Barnfield College supports students of a widely varied age range, and as a result built two identical sims, one on the main grid, one on the teen grid. By implementing the Reg API for them on their own website, they can control the sign up process, directing students to the appropriate grid and, as far as possible, keep the whole experience in-house.

Other Build Types

Having covered general purpose sims and spaces designed for conferences and meetings we move onto more specialized types of build. The diversity of such builds are best illustrated by case studies, such as those found at http://virtualworlds.nmc.org/portfolio/.

However, there are a few worthwhile points to be made. Simulations are another widely commissioned build type in Second Life, but it’s important to consider what Second Life is and isn’t good at simulating. SL can simulate environments quite effectively, and it’s possible to give a pretty good sense of actually being in a factory, the heart of a nuclear power plant, or anywhere else you can conceive. The fact is, there’s not even a great deal of fancy scripted interactivity required; it simply relies on good research to accurately recreate the environment and the use of some sound and environmental effects to give it atmosphere. Embedded, clickable links can even provide more information from a supporting website, without needing to import or recreate existing material in Second Life.

Other kinds of simulation are more problematic, however. On more than one occasion I’ve had to discuss the difficulties of simulating a medical operation procedure in SL with a client. As great as it is in so many ways, any of us who have spent any time here know our avatars can walk (or waddle like a duck if we haven’t discovered the joys of AO’s), talk, and at the height of sophistication,sit on poseballs. The fact is that simulation of specialized human activity is currently not a viable possibility.

The one human activity that is possible however is interaction with each other, which leads me to another kind of simulation, that of roleplay. From a build point of view this is relatively easy to facilitate, what you need is a supporting environment to promote immersion in the scenario. Additionally, and this is something worth considering when you’re choosing a developer for your projects, you may want to consider custom avatars, outfits, and clothing to further add realism to your scenarios.Not all developers will offer this service, and, while it’s an aspect that’s often overlooked, it soon becomes apparent that the scenario requires them to function.
While this type of build is relatively easy to commission and create, it’s effectiveness relies on the fact that it’s a human mediated experience, and that means more work on your part: planning the classes, having supporting staff to play certain roles, etc.

The Process from Commissioning to Completion

In the second session we talked about the process of actually realizing your build.

Familiarize yourself and your colleagues with the world

Before you do anything, familiarize yourself with Second Life. Chances are, most of you here are already old hands, but many clients aren’t. Additionally, since you won’t be doing this on your own, familiarize other staff members with the world – you may be seeding ideas in the minds of faculty members who may contribute down the road by helping to set and manage the expectations of your boss or the marketing department, or initiating a small student group to be the pioneers or test subjects for your project. At this stage no one need be an expert, they might have had only an hour in-world, but that one hour will make a huge difference to both their expectations and their enthusiasm for the project.

Outline your concept; try to define your goals & outcomes rather than a list of buildings.

Before you even approach a development company you need to establish the nature of your project, the goals and concepts. As I’ve said many times already today, a successful build or project in Second Life is far more than a collection of virtual buildings; even if it’s a clocktower build in the first instance, try to be clear about what you hope to achieve.

As an example, I’ve had briefs from clients that looked like nothing more than a shopping list of buildings: a mall, a school with offices and classrooms, sports fields, a music room, and so on.

Well, this list probably came down from on high and, in fact, they probably had no idea what these buildings would actually achieve for them in Second Life. It was left to me to try and make sense of them in the context of Second Life.

So the mall became a place for making free resources, clothes, avatars, building tools available to students, as well as a potential venue for students to make their own work available to others, with vendors set up, ready to accept and then give out what was dropped in them. However, this functionality came from me, not the client, so although I made them aware of what I had in mind, they were never used, because they simply didn’t have a plan in mind for any kind of use after the build was completed. It’s far better coming from you in the first place.

Finding a developer

It’s possible that some of you will actually build it yourself, though if your project is of any size or complexity you’ll be working with a team, in which case the process of clearly defining your goals and developing a brief, which we’ll look at shortly, will still apply.

We’re going to start with the assumption that you’ll be seeking the help of a professional developer, such as ourselves, but I will point out, in the interests of fairness, that although we welcome your work, NMC Virtual Worlds is just one of over 250 developers recognized by Linden Lab in their Solution Provider Program.

You can find a full List of developers at http://solutionproviders.secondlife.com/, complete with information about them and links to their websites.

Check their credentials, portfolios, references, and areas of specialty. Compile a short list, don’t settle on one yet.

Also bear in mind that complex projects in SL require different disciplines:

• building is just the start, and most obvious
• scripting, for interactivity
• animations
• avatars & clothing, particularly for role playing and simulation
• backend services, from media streaming to Reg API & databases
• event management

Initial Meetings should be more of an interview process than anything, because, hopefully, you shortlisted several developers. Armed with your initial concept, it’ll serve to get you budget prices for comparison, to determine if the developer has the skills and ideas to make your project a reality, and perhaps, most importantly, ascertain whether you can enjoy a good working relationship, because between this point and completion, the success of the project will rely to a great extent on the communication and level of understand between you and your developer. You’re not simply going to hand over your sketch and expect to come back in a month a find a fully completed build! There’ll be a lot more talking and negotiating before you get there.

You should also bear in mind that at this stage, depending on the size of the company, you’ll most likely be dealing with a CEO or manager of some kind, who‘s principle job is to sell their services to you rather than actually build it out.

If your initial list of goals or concept includes the implementation of real-life training procedures in the virtual world(medicine or dentistry serves as a good examples), you may well be shown immaculately detailed operating theatres in second life and sold the wonderful concept of virtual training, leaving you with a vision of teams of students conducting virtual heart bypass operations on virtual patients. The truth is, if you’ve spent just enough time in SL yourself to have clumsily hopped on to a poseball for a dance, you’ll know how unlikely this outcome really is.

The better educated you are about the nature, potential, and limitations of Second Life, the less disappointed you’ll be with the result and the better prepared you’ll be for the next step, which will be to constructively develop a brief and specifications with achievable and practical goals.

We’ll assume you’ve selected your developer and agreed on a price. The next stage is to develop the final brief and specifications.
In the case of hands-off clients, this will typically happen in-house and then be presented along with a final cost, but in the best cases, it will be the result of a dialog or series of meetings between the developer and the client. Typically, the developer’s representative at this point will be someone more practically grounded in the process of building in SL, if not the lead builder, rather than the project manager who works with them on a daily basis.

Brainstorming -> brief & spec

I can best illustrate the difference between your initial concept and a specification with something I find myself saying a lot when I’m working. ‘I’m just a humble builder’, in effect, I have to put a prim here and a prim here and texture that and so on…. You might have asked for a Hospital or a Paper Mill but this really doesn’t inform what I have to do here and now on the ground.

So the development of a brief and specification is essentially the process of Translation & Itemization.

By translation, I mean turning some of those initial concepts into a workable realization, and most often these will be the interactive experiences. Going back to the medical example, we just can’t facilitate a virtual operation, so at this point a period of brainstorming will be required to find a happy medium between what you want to achieve and what the builder can actually create.

In this case, experience in this field has informed us that case-based learning can work well. Simply delivering the information required for a student to make a diagnosis in the form of images and reports in an immersive and appropriate environment has been shown to make the exercise more compelling and engaging to the student. Through a discussion with the client we will hopefully arrive at an effective implementation of what will be the KEY interactive element of the build.

By itemization, I simply mean the listing of every component of the build, each building, each room, each piece of interactivity and prop, be it a clothing outfit or a custom animation. This is essentially a specification, a document I became intimately familiar with as an architect, where no matter how large a building was, every last component down the screws used to hang the doors were listed and expected to be present in the completed build.

Well, one of the things I love about my job now is that a build in SL does away with most of those tedious components and I can focus on the bigger things. But a full sim build is a large and complex entity, comprising potentially 15,000 prims, many hundreds or even thousands of objects which don’t just magically happen, but have to be deliberately built and put there.

The specification does several things: it informs the builders on the ground exactly what they’re expected to create, and, as part of a legally binding contract, ensures you get exactly what you want. The former is invaluable because the better described a project is, the easier it is for a builder to simply get on with it, without delay, without time wasted either trying to work out for themselves what they’re supposed to be building, or waiting for a reply from someone who does know.

Because a specification deals with the detail of a project, this a good time to introduce another of your jobs as the client: the provision of both source material and content – ideally shown as action items in the brief–to remind everyone that certain things can’t happen until you’ve done your bit.

Again, often this is overlooked, but in the first instance if you come from a faculty background and are bringing a highly specialized build into a Virtual World, not only will you likely be the foremost expert in your field, but additionally, with the best will in the world and even prior experience, your builder will be largely ignorant of the subject matter, or more importantly what aspect of the subject matter is most important to you.

All builds in SL are impressions at the end of the day. An operating theatre resembles one in the real world but can never contain every last detail of the real thing. For a builder to create an environment like this he requires good source material – lots of photographs for instance, a sketch if you can manage it; but beyond that they need to know what about it is important to you. Which machines and details have to be modeled accurately and be present in the final build? Give a builder a picture of an operating theatre and tell them to build it with no further instruction and several months later you’ll find they’re still laboring away, having used nearly an entire sim’s resources of prims building the operating table alone.

Prepare source material and content in advance for timely delivery

I also mentioned content and, hopefully, having sat this far through the session, you’ve come to appreciate the importance of functionality and its associated content. The timely delivery of this will also aid the building process. If you’ve attended these sessions before or done any building in SL you’ll appreciate how fine grained the work of a builder is. A prim used to create a simple display board needs to be sized and correctly proportioned to properly display the texture that is to be placed on it. Even if your content is only a display describing the history of your University to be located in the clock tower building – perhaps derived from an existing publicity document, the sooner the builder has it and knows how it’s to be used, the better able they’ll be to display to its best advantage. Sure, we can create generic displays for you to populate later, but by their nature they will be a compromise. If you’re implanting case studies, their media and format may well inform how a scripter will choose to deliver them within the interactive experience.

Appoint a liaison or be prepared to answer subject specific questions during the build

A written document can’t be expected to answer every question as it arises, particularly within a specialized academic build, and I appreciate that as a commissioning client you’re likely a very busy person. We have found particularly useful in past projects the assignment of a post graduate student to the project, whose role is to liaise with the team as questions of a technical nature about the subject material arise. Their role is not to manage the build, but to contribute their specialized knowledge where it’s needed.

Establish milestones as checkpoints throughout the build, but don’t interfere

By this point your build should be underway, guided by an accurate and complete brief. The builders should know what they’re doing and will most likely have their heads down working hard to complete it on time. For a hands-on client it can be very difficult at this stage to take a step back, but the implications of trying to micromanage the build at this point can be disastrous. Consider the building team as laborers; distracting them for an hour every day can seriously set them back, particularly if you start making changes, having them undo what they’ve worked on, spend time devising new solutions, or adding new components to the build.

Be aware that if you’ve hired an outside developer, at this point you’ll be subject to delays and—worse still– additional costs. The original brief is part of a binding legal contract to deliver what is specified. Variance from that makes you liable and at the mercy of the developer to re-price the work and reassess the schedule. Just as with a real building, if you’re half way through the build, it’s very difficult to say no to his demands.

This is why properly developing the brief in the first place is crucial. As part of that brief you should specify milestones which allow you to check the work and sign off on it if it is to your satisfaction.

The truth is, though, that most developers are not out to make your life difficult. It’s in our interests to make sure you’re happy with the result. Furthermore, given the new territory we’re exploring and the evolving nature of the platform, we simply have to be flexible enough to allow for some experimentation and reassessment of the brief during the build, so use those milestones as the time to make necessary changes.

Blocking out: Some developers will construct models so you can see how the sim or build will be arranged. We’ve found a better solution is to block the build out full size. In this way the terraforming, key buildings, components, landscaping, and pathways can be established in a day or two, allowing you to walk through your entire sim and get a real sense of how it will feel when completed. At this stage the buildings will be nothing but solid blocks of an appropriate scale and proportion, and likely everything in the sim will be white and un-textured, so it requires a degree of imagination, but it’s sufficient to tell whether, for example, the arrival point is correctly located, the key buildings or experiences have the right relationship to each other, and so on.
Essentially, this enables you to sign off on the overall planning of the sim or build.

Buildings and internal spaces: If your build comprises traditional building forms they will quickly take shape as the solid blocks are replaced by walls and roofs. Although likely un-textured at this point, when completed are the internal arrangements correct? For example, does the foyer link to the right rooms? This is particularly important if we’re trying to recreate specific environments for simulations.

Content & Interactive experiences: Interactive and scripted experiences are the trickiest things to get right in SL. Not only are we fighting with the limitations of the platform, but we enter the realm of usability and interface design. When the developer has had a chance to implement a piece of interactivity, it’s often useful to have a run through with the client so it can be fine-tuned for maximum effect, from the point of view of providing clear instructions, to tweaking the parameters of the scripts which will allow sufficient time for an exercise to be completed. You needn’t be versed in the intricacies of the script itself, but if it takes you ten minutes to complete an interactive experience where the programmer imagined it would take only five, he’ll know what needs to be changed to ensure it’ll run smoothly under real-world conditions.

Final walk throughs: Eager to sign off and be paid, the developer won’t be shy about telling you the project is complete, but I would anticipate at least two walkthroughs. If you can walk through with the developer, discuss potential issues and point out anything that might clearly be missing or incorrect.

Before delivering a punch list of items needing attention however, try to do a walk through on your own. It’s one thing to be guided round by the person who built and intimately understands every part of the build, but quite another to find yourself alone, with only your wits to guide you through an unfamiliar environment – and after the developer has left, you will be!

This is a good opportunity to spend more time thoroughly checking items off the specification; actually testing the usability of the space from the perspective of a user: Are things clearly signed? Is it obvious where to go and what to do? Do things function as they should?

A good developer will thoroughly test interactive experiences and scripted objects, but, in truth, it’s not possible to account for the way that inexperienced users might mistakenly try and use them. If you can, get a group of people to help you. I’d recommend you give them a good hammering, and deliberately misuse them to breaking point!

Whatever issues this process raises, do try and thoroughly document them in as much detail as possible so the developer can quickly find the underlying problem.

For the many other, potentially less serious issues, such as spelling mistakes, mis-textured prims and so on, ensure each one is itemized in a simple checklist so the builder can go back and attend to each one.

A final walkthrough should confirm that these items have been done and everything works as it should.

Set aside a portion of time or budget for changes and training at the end

Whilst it’s reasonable to expect a developer to correct their errors within the scope and budget of the brief, it’s possible, particularly if you’re bringing a new and challenging idea to SL, that some aspects of the finished build may not fulfill your original vision. Not because the developer built them incorrectly, but because the concept simply didn’t live up to expectations. I’ve said we, as developers, have to be flexible in this environment, but for projects of this type I recommend actively specifying a portion of the build time or budget, up to as much as 25%, for tweaks, changes and, if necessary, redesign at the end.

Even if this is not the case, and you’ve commissioned the simplest of clock tower builds with minimal interactivity, I would suggest a couple of hours for training at the end, simply to ensure you understand how to configure elements, such as media streams, note card givers, objects with clickable weblinks, and so on.

Finally, DO try and maintain good relations with your developer! During the process, encouragement and constructive feedback will yield far better results than unhelpful and negative criticism. In most cases the developer genuinely wants to make you happy, and if something goes wrong, it’s most likely the result of a misunderstanding or miscommunication. The sooner everyone is on the same page the better.

Almost certainly, you’ll want your developer to come back, too. The complexity of a large build is such that it’s impossible to catch every snag at the end, so when you discover something a few weeks later, after the developer has been paid, it is nice to think that a request will be met positively and in a timely manner. Speaking personally, professional pride is sufficient to get me back to fix something, even if we’ve had the final payment.

All that remains is to wish you the best of luck with your endeavors in Second Life. If you follow the guide here you shouldn’t go wrong. If we have the pleasure of working with you in the future, we look forward to it!

Land management

When discussing Land Management and its relation to educational Second Life builds, we wanted to give educators a no-nonsense, straightforward look at how to best create a build that would take as little time as possible away from their busy schedules. We suggested many things that we have learned from our experience in working with educators in Second Life through NMC Virtual Worlds, as well as many technical aspects of Second Life as a platform that can enhance or hinder an educator’s goals for his/her project.

An underlying theme that we wished to stress to all of the attending educators is something that we have seen and dealt with enormously: the nature of a growing, living project after the build has been completed. We wanted to show attendees how projects can blossom and evolve with help and support from students and faculty and become richer experiences because of that involvement. We highlighted that the most successful projects in Second Life have made creating community a major goal.

Continuing on our theme of developer/educator relationships, we talked about Second Life technical settings and how it was important to have a method of transfer or sharing decided upon before the project has even begun. While Second Life is a rich, adaptable world that is at its very core a place of community, it is also a place where intellectual property is guarded in a somewhat automatic fashion; a careless developer could neglect to account for an educator’s true need for open source and adaptable content.
As of this session, our current suggestion for best handling the land-object permission conundrum in Second Life is to use the group method for deeding land and setting/sharing objects. We believe this method allows the maximum amount of participation between educators, faculty, students, and developer. This method is actually preferable over total ownership of Second Life objects by the educator because it allows for the developers to continue to make changes and provide support in the future. This is yet another opportunity to stress the extreme importance of choosing a reputable developer who will continue to work with your institution and support a growing, successful project.

We also pointed out the impact of this arrangement on other types of land management and technical restrictions. Since land will ideally be set or deeded to a group, media screens will need to match the land set-up. We pointed out that the most common issue we have seen when providing support for in-world media screens is a mismatched ownership level on the media screens themselves. Media screens need to be owned by the same avatar or group who owns the land, as well as “Shared with Group.”

We also explained how ownership and permissions issues are important for inhabiting the space as educators, faculty, students, and community. Eventually, educators often wish to have faculty and students come into the space, facilitate within it, or modify and add to the space in order to make it the institution’s own. This is yet another reason why group permissions become exceedingly useful. We explained that by deeding objects to a group and having your developer set the objects to the group, everyone is providing access to any additional members of your team who you wish to use the space.

Because we really do realize that educators often have many aspects to their job that do not relate to Second Life, we wanted to highlight some of the ways that one can automate a bit of the land management process and cut down on time needed to maintain an existing project. We know that the more folks you involve in your project and encourage to participate, the greater need one will find for autoreturn. “Autoreturn” is a setting that returns prims to their owners (if they are not in the correct group) after a defined period of time. We also explained a method of using autoreturn in the development process that may differ from the land maintenance period of a Second Life project. During development, developers may set “Autoreturn” for one minute, which is the lowest possible time. This is because a developer might need to frequently switch groups for revolving projects; having autoreturn set to a low number minimizes the work that a developer can do with the wrong group or “tag” activated. When development has finished, this number can be changed to whatever seems appropriates. An area that is reserved for a sandbox, for instance, may require an “Autoreturn” time of several hours to a full day, while an area used for a classroom might be best set for a few hours. We also explained that autoreturn only works for prims that are set to different groups than the land.

We explained various types of situations in which we have seen portions of a build or entire projects unintentionally returned. We explained that it is best to contact the developer to survey the damage and see if it is manually fixable. We also explained that if the situation is not possibly remedied manually, it is possible to request a “Rollback” from Linden Lab. This will restore the sim to an approximate previous time.

We discussed Groups, Permissions, and Parcels beyond the basic set-up that one might find themselves using for an educational build in Second Life. When projects organically evolve over time, as we have suggested as a goal, educators will often find a need to change some of the initial plan. One of the most important facets of making changes will be the group used for the project. When land is deeded to a group, managing the group becomes another important task. The default set-up for groups allows a specific set of permissions that many do not find a need to change, but the option is there, should you choose to do so.

We explained that it is best for an educator to create the group himself/herself rather than have his/her developer handle this task. This will ensure that the educator can take full control of the group once the developer has finished. When developers are added to the group, they will likely need to be owners in order to access all of the needed settings. We suggested that educators talk to their developers about using this group for social purposes afterwards. While it may be possible, it is important to know which prims are set to a group, because those invited to this group in the future might have access to more than one would want. A large cause of prim return accidents are caused by well meaning group “Officers”, who simply clicked “return” on the pie menu without knowing they had the power to return objects.

We also talked about Parcels and their places in a Second Life educational build, as well as how to make them, and how to adjust the settings for specific needs. Parcels are useful in two ways: to define ownership of a certain section of land to a faculty member or student, and to provide multiple locations for media. In some instances, it might be necessary to section of a small piece of the sim to provide ownership to another faculty member, student, or a group. Parcels are also sometimes used to create a set-up for multiple media. Currently, Second Life defines media in the “About Land” tab of a parcel. In order to have multiple instances of videos on different screens on the sim, one needs to have more than one parcel. The media can then be assigned to an individual screen or location on the same sim. We also suggested that educators ask their developer to show any parcels on the space and explain the reason they are there.

As a last step in discussing successful Second Life projects, we talked about promoting the project and using it to create community. We explained that the most successful projects are those that are dynamic living organisms that change and grow organically over time. We feel that just like any living thing, if interest is not taken and new opportunities are not explored for a Second Life project, one runs the risk of the project dying or not fulfilling its potential. We suggested that involving other faculty members and identifying evangelists in staff and faculty will assist greatly in opportunities to learn new uses for the space. Students can also be a large driving force to a successful Second Life educational project, whether it be by directly contributing or outlining new uses, reframing new possibilities for existing functionalities, etc. The more individuals that become involved and take an interest in a project’s success, the more changes and opportunities that can be discovered. Second Life lends itself to experimentation and is by no means a hands-off world.

The emergence of Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005 redefined and opened the door to what is possible on the geospatial web. These powerful technologies have enabled geospatial data to be easily visualized and shared in ways that were very difficult- if not impossible- before. The possibilities for using geodata in disciplines outside of the traditional geosciences is now greatly expanded, allowing these technologies to be a platform for data visualization, presentation, discovery and storytelling. Specific examples, resources and discussion about these possibilities are presented in a comprehensive fashion so that educators may better understand the emergence of this broad, rich field and further apply these technologies to their teaching and research, both within their classrooms and beyond.

Brave New Worlds

In 2005 the world of online mapping began a new era. Two significant products were launched in the first six months of the year that changed the course of how maps and geographic data are used on the World Wide Web. First, the 2D Google Maps were launched publicly on February 8, 2005 using the combined web technologies Javascript and XML. Collectively, these two technologies are called AJAX for asynchronous Javascript and XML, and give users a smooth, seamless interface with which to navigate maps. Several months later the 3D geobrowser Google Earth was released with high resolution satellite data allowing users to explore, interact, add data, and visualize geographic content in new ways. While both Google Maps and Google Earth were not new, the acquisition by Google gave these technologies a greatly expanded user base and much higher visibility to the public. Both were immediately received enthusiastically by the online world. Following these releases, Google launched the application programming interface (API) for Google Maps, and later, Google Earth. Using its plug-in allows users to have the same 3D globe experience within a web browser, instead of having to use the stand-alone Google Earth application.

These new products from Google are not the only web mapping technologies available, but they opened the flood gates and had wide adoption for the development of what is now commonly called the Geoweb. Yahoo!, OpenStreet Maps, and Microsoft’s Bing Maps have also developed 2D web mapping technologies, and Microsoft, NASA, and ESRI offer 3D Globe applications, as well. However, Google’s offerings have arguably been the most instrumental in moving web mapping into the mainstream. Today, geospatial data is being used in innovative ways to tell stories and visualize images, video, data and animations.

This discussion focuses primarily on the use of Google Earth and, to a lesser extent, Google Maps as the potential for new storytelling within a geographic context. Google Earth’s 3D experience, animation and touring capabilities make it especially compelling. Google Earth and Maps were chosen because they are free, cross platform, and have a broad and deep user base at the time of this writing. The focus here is on examples of this technology for storytelling to highlight its potential as an emerging technology that occupies a unique niche in the online world.

Lifting the Lid on Earth

In order to understand why Google Earth has such compelling storytelling capabilities, it’s worth taking a look at the features that make it unique. For this overview, the focus is on the stand alone Google Earth application. The browser plug-in will also be addressed, but for the authoring of geo-stories, the stand alone application is needed. Viewers of these tours can see the work using the browser plug-in.

As of this writing, Google Earth is at version 5. This was a major release which was publicly available in February 2009. There are five major features/capabilities which came out in this release:

1. The ability to explore both Mars and the Universe through the Google Earth application. The Moon was recently added, as well, allowing viewers to virtually explore these extraterrestrial bodies, just like one can do with Earth in the application.
2. Another major feature was the incorporation of underwater terrain data which now allows a user to fly underwater in 3D. This portion of the Google Earth is commonly referred to as Google Ocean and, with its release, a other ocean-oriented content was also released, all of it accessible through the same interface of the application. The Google Ocean layer has to be activated to see this content.
3. A timeline feature that allows one to animate changes in geodata over time was improved for easier use and control.
4. Google added their stockpile of historical satellite imagery to the application which can be activated in the Timeline feature to see changes in satellite imagery over time. Google has added all the historical imagery they have for this feature. Some areas may have more historical imagery than others. This is especially useful for educators who want to show changes through time on the landscape.
5. One of the biggest improvements is the Touring feature. While Tours of geographic content have been around for a while in Google Earth, this improved feature set has made authoring Tours very easy; it has also made the ability to create sophisticated Tours a relatively straightforward affair.

The improved Tour feature along with the historical imagery capabilities and the underwater terrain addition has the potential for the greatest use by educators.

In addition to these features, Google’s release of a web browser plug-in was a major new addition to the Google suite of geospatial technologies. The plug-in now allows users to see and interact with content within the same 3D space as the stand alone Google Earth application, but through the convenience of a web browser. With this release was the API for the plug-in based on an extended Javascript library, allowing developers to do more customized developments with Google Earth, including sophisticated tours and animations. This ability is one of the reasons Google Earth and Maps are opening up to become compelling geo-story authoring and delivery platforms. Increasingly, there is a merging of the 2D Google Maps experience with the 3D experience of Google Earth. Google Earth’s Keyhole Markup Language (KML), which Google has released to the Open Geospatial Consortium, is tying these two applications together so both 2D and 3D mapping experiences can easily be experienced by users. Google Maps initially did not utilize KML, but now it is becoming an integral part of 2D Maps, allowing KML content from Google Earth to be imported and connected in Google Maps.

Google Maps – The 2D Map Web App is Becoming One with 3D Google Earth

Google Maps has rapidly evolved since its launch in 2005 to become an almost ubiquitous tool for Netizens needing maps. Increasingly, Google Maps is becoming a more interactive and user friendly web application that allows the most novice mappers to create maps quickly and easily. Integrated into the services of a user’s Google account is the MyMaps feature. MyMaps allows users to log into their account and create customized maps which can be shared, edited, and opened for collaboration. An important feature to mention is the ability to import Google Earth KML files into a 2D Google Map. The import feature is found at the lower left of MyMaps when one is editing or creating a new Map.

Google Maps is now able to support large data sets of points, lines, polygons, and overlays in a KML file. Initially, Google Maps could only load small sets of points, polygons, and lines, but increasingly, it is able to handle larger datasets as Google expands Maps’ capabilities. It should be noted that the latest release of the Google Maps API (v.3) will allow more seamless transition between the 2D Google Map and the 3D Google plug-in. It will also offer the ability to view 2D maps in a pseudo 3D mode for oblique viewing angles.

Another unique feature that began life in Google Maps (but has also migrated over into Google Earth) is StreetView. This allows users to see a street level panorama of photo images from one’s location. These images are stills pulled from video captured within 360 degrees. Also, user photos taken in this same area can also be shown through StreetView, giving additional content and context for the location the user is currently exploring. Google Earth adopted this feature, as well, and gives one a more immersive 3D view of an area with a photographic overlay. This is another example of the two mapping applications becoming more unified in their feature set.

Several intriguing sites that show off unique uses of the 2D Google Maps provide ideas and inspiration for how Google Maps can be used in various scenarios. These maps all make use of the Google Maps API, which makes use of Javascript.

1. The Henry Hudson Map – This Google Map provides rich detail of the Henry Hudson voyages to the New World and gives lots of additional information within a geographic context. Google Maps provides a great anchor for telling this story of discovery and is a great example of what is possible with Google Maps.
2. Hey What’s That? – This Google Map project allows users to pick a place on the planet and then see which major landmarks are within a 360 degree view. This is particularly handy for features such as mountains. It gives distance, heading, and more information about what one is looking at through the map interface.
3. MashedWorld.com – This site gives users the ability to embed more than one map into their website or blog. It allows one to use map views such as StreetView, and also use map views from different services, such as Microsoft’s Bing Maps Birds’ Eye view which is a nice complement to 2D Google Maps. The service is free; just cut and paste code in your own site to enable.
4. Thematic Mapping – Themed maps have long been a staple to cartographers and geographers. Up2Maps.net is a new site that allows one to upload, download, share and visualize thematically-based maps.
5. Other options – CNET recently reviewed a number of services that give users the ability to easily create, share and embed maps.

Getting Around the Globe – a Few Tips for Navigating and Touring Google Earth

The stand alone application of the 3D Google Earth is not an overly complicated program to master. However, many of its features are not intuitive, so it’s worth one’s while to look over the Google Earth User Guide for more information. Pay specific attention to the navigation features and the interface. Two particularly important areas are the Tour creation and familiarity with KML and KMZ file formats, which are detailed further below.

For authoring Tours or creating movies (done with Google Earth Pro or screen capture software), it may be beneficial to use a joystick controller which can give you smooth control over your movements in Google Earth. A particularly good tool for this is 3DConnexion’s SpaceNavigator, whose drivers are built into Google Earth providing plug and play capability. Typical joystick controllers can also be used for the controlling the built-in Flight Simulator, a full-featured simulator which can be activated under the Tools Menu.

Tours are created by clicking the small tour icon button at the top of the application window. A small controller Heads Up Display (HUD) appears at the bottom left of the 3D Viewer window. Clicking the Record button will capture all movements and audio as you navigate Google Earth. You then have the ability to redo the tour or save it. Once saved, it can be emailed to others for viewing or embedded into websites using the Google Earth plug-in. Very sophisticated tours can be done with this tour. These are authored automatically in KML and can only be viewed with Google Earth or the plug-in, so they are proprietary. However, the KML can be further edited by coders, if desired. A nice feature of Tours is that they can be paused and the user can go off and explore other areas in Google Earth. Hitting the play button picks right back up where the Tour left off. This is extremely useful and convenient for users.

It’s also important to become familiar with the two main file formats of Google Earth. These are called Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files and Keyhole Markup Language Zipped (KMZ) files. Keyhole Markup Language is a scripting language based on XML and is how all content is geographically scripted or marked-up for display in Google Earth. Its name comes from the company, Keyhole, which developed the Google Earth technology. It was purchased by Google and rebranded as Google Earth. A KMZ file is just a compressed (or zipped) archive of a KML file. KMZ files can be imported and decompressed within Google Earth. These cannot be indexed online and searched. KML files are uncompressed and can be indexed and searched if placed online. KML files can be edited within Google Earth and also in any text editor used for HTML or script authoring. KML files are the native file format for Google Earth.

Google Earth – The 3D Globe As a Storytelling Canvas

The refinements and progress of development in Google Earth and Maps illustrate that these platforms are maturing and becoming ideal tools for creating interactive content that is anchored to geographic information. Additionally, their increased ease of use, low cost (free), wide adoption, and cross-platform compatibility further strengthen their use as avenues for storytelling, particularly in academic settings where budgets are constrained and multiple OS platforms may be used in labs and on campus.

The area that holds perhaps the most promise is the arrival of innovative uses and applications of the Google Earth plug-in. Not only can the user benefit from the convenience of accessing Google Earth within a web browser, but developers can now customize and create new ways to use the Earth plug-in, thanks to its Javascript API (which was released with it). As the API and plug-in are relatively new for users, this is a time for experimenting and trying new things to see what is possible. These examples give a peek at the present and future of interactive geo-storytelling with the Google Earth plug-in:

• Earth Pad (collaborative mapping) – This site shows how it’s possible to find, annotate and share locations within a collaborative environment between people with Google accounts.
• Earth Atlas – This site allows one to upload their own KML/KMZ files for visualization with the Google Earth plug-in, or to view certain public databases which overlay pie charts and 3D graphics onto the globe for thematic viewing.
• KML Factbook – The CIA Factbook containing a wide range of information is now available for customizing and downloading of KML/KMZ files. This is a good tool for putting together information about countries and visualizing this information within a 3D environment of the Google Earth plug-in.


Figure 1: KMLfactbook.org showing arable land using CIA Factbook data

• Multiple Google Earths – This is an example of what is possible and is purely an experimental use of the plug-in. It shows how one can put up multiple instances of the plug-in onto one webpage. This is quite processor- and memory-intensive if more than about four globes are show at once.
• MyMaps with GE Plug-in – Again, another experimental use of the plug-in. This one shows how it’s possible to visualize the custom-made maps in your MyMaps account within Google Earth using the plug-in.
• EarthSwoop – Nice community site where people can upload, view and share places of interest found on Google Earth. The places are visualized through the GE plug-in.
• Dreaming New Mexico presentation – This was one of the first examples of the Google Earth plug-in, appearing just after it was publicly launched. This project uses the GE plug-in in the context of a slideshow presentation within the web browser. The slides are actually views from within Google Earth using the plug-in. The site shows the potential uses (and sites of) green energy in New Mexico.
• Mars Tour podcast – Another example of what is possible. This person took an NPR podcast and timed it with a Google Earth tour that he created.
• YouTube synchronization – This example syncs a YouTube video of the Vatican with a tour using the plug-in.
• Google Earth Tour Gallery – Google’s own gallery of projects people have submitted.
• Interactive trips and photo galleries – @Trip.com is a website that enables members to upload their geotagged images and GPS track logs to create travel stories or journals with the Google Earth plug-in. See Figure 2.


Figure 2: A-Trip.com allows users to upload GPS data, video and images for display in Google Maps and Earth.

• Snoovel.com – This German website allows you to create and edit Google Earth Tours using its Tour Director feature. A unique feature is the ability to incorporate 3D objects and other types of multimedia.

Potential for Visualization, Animation, Gaming and 3D Environments

A rich area for innovation and exploration using the Google Earth plug-in is with animations and the possibilities of game development. Additionally, complex and compelling visualizations are now possible for developers who know or are willing to learn KML, JavaScript, HTML and some PHP. The use of KML Network Links is very useful for updating information over the Internet and for dynamic data that is constantly changing. Many Google Earth visualizations and animations make use of Network Links and have made the process of sharing dynamic imagery and projects much easier and accessible.

Two excellent examples of the Google Earth plug-in possibilities in terms of gaming and animations is the work done at PlanetInAction.com and the work done by James Stafford. The ship game at Planet In Action is particularly innovative and an example of the types of games situated in the real world via Google Earth that are possible. The interface of the Shipping animation/game demonstrates the ability to overlay a sophisticated user interface over the 3D view of the Google Earth plug-in, which is done with HTML and Javascript using the API.

Another area where the Google Earth platform is proving to be valuable is in the visualization of panoramic imagery, such as the type created with a Gigapan System or other spherical panorama stitching applications (i.e. Autopano Pro Giga and PTGui Pro software). The end result images from devices like this can be seen in the Gigapan and 360cities.net layers within Google Earth or at the Gigapan.org and 360cities.net websites. The 180 degree panorama images and the 360 degree spherical images give users a real world immersive experience within Google Earth.

The websites for these technologies give tutorials and instructions on how to create spherical panoramas and then how to embed them into Google Earth so users are not dependent on Google hosting their images in the 360cities.net layers within Google Earth. The Gigapan Systems website also gives users tutorials in how to do this. Note: These layers are controlled by Google and only certain content may be seen in these layers.

As Google Earth and Maps begin to merge, another area of Google Earth is also gaining prominence. This is the ability to embed 3D objects with the Google Earth environment. Using tools like Google’s Sketchup, authors can create 3D objects ranging from the simple to the complex. These can be shared via the 3D Warehouse from within Google Earth or loaded as KML files. Many major cities now have a great deal of 3D building imagery. Animations and games are also using 3D objects. Moving forward, the Google Earth of tomorrow will have more than just rich 3D terrain, it will have buildings and objects.



Figure 3: 3D buildings in Google Earth (Manhattan, New York)

Finally, rich geospatial visualizations are one of the main strengths of Google Earth. Currently, one of the most impressive examples is the Map The Fallen project, which maps casualties of the wars in Iraq and Pakistan. It tells a poignant and powerful story purely with the data it visualizes, including arcs across the globe connecting the places of where a fallen soldier perished to their home town, while liking out to various public databases where this information is found.



Figure 4 : Map the Fallen visualization linking casualties to their home towns in Google Earth.

Integration with Traditional GPS and GIS

Finally, Google Earth and Google maps have ushered in a new era of geographic visualization by rapidly expanding what is called the Geoweb. The Geoweb and geo visualization are becoming powerful areas of development, and research giving users much broader leverage of geographic content that can be mashed up, shared, and visualized in ways that were either impossible or very difficult a few years ago is now becoming available.

It’s important to note that geospatial visualization has been with us since humans first wanted to know about their surroundings and map the lay of the land. The concepts are not new, but the tools and means to do them easily certainly are. These new tools are democratizing the process, resulting in an explosion of geographically based content now made available on the Web. More traditional areas of geo-visualization have been cartography, geographic information system (GIS) analysis, and more recently, Global Positions Systems (GPS), which collect geographic content that can be visualized with tools like Google Earth and Google maps. Data from these traditional geo-systems can now be shared and visualized easily creating geo-story opportunities that are unprecedented.

A plethora of software now supports geotagging of media content, such as photographs. Almost all of these offer some level of support of visualizing the locations of images by exporting of KML/KMZ files that can be loaded into Google Earth or Google Maps through the MyMaps feature. For photographs, iPhoto 09 (Mac only, no Google Earth KML support yet) and Picasa (PC only for geotagging, Mac geotagging coming) are major examples of desktop apps that offer the ability to geotag your images, but others exist, too. Websites such as Flickr, Locr, and Panoramio also offer this capability. For using GPS data to geotag images, programs such as HoudahGeo (Mac), GeoSetter (PC), and RoboGeo (PC) offer good features and support for both data collected with GPS data loggers or traditional hand held GPS devices. There are other utilities to handle this, too, and more seem to appear on a regular basis. On the Web, sites like gpsvisualizer.com, everytrail.com, and mygeodiary.com offer the ability to link photos and GPS data together and to create KML files for visualizing in Google Earth.

In the area of GIS, there are a number of tools emerging that can take GIS data and easily export it for visualization within Google Earth, including Microsoft’s Explorer and Esri’s ArcGIS, another 3D geo-browser. An important distinction to make between a GIS and tools like Google Earth is these 3D globes are geo-browsers, much like a web browser is for viewing content online. Geobrowsers do not support geographic information analysis, but rather offer a platform for visualizing the end result of analysis and enabling easy sharing and viewing of these outcomes. Several examples of GIS integration with Google Earth include the MapWindow GIS (Win) plug-in Shape2Earth, the plug-in Arc2Earth, for use with ESRI’s ArcGIS (Win), and the newly released Cartographica, a Mac only GIS that can import and export KML files . Several other GIS platforms that support KML files are: the open source GIS GRASS, and MicroImages’ TNTmips, a full featured GIS. ESRI’s ArcGIS supports the export of KML files, as well, but the plug-in mentioned above offers more options and better customization options of the KML.

Together, these tools and technologies enable the Google Earth experience to be easily incorporated into the mature tech realm of GIS, helping to bridge the gap between traditional geographic analysis and end result visualizations that can be shared and edited with ease. The emergences of Google Earth and Maps have ushered in a new era of geo visualization and the geospatial web. As these technologies mature, expect further integration and sophistication of GIS, GPS, and Geoweb projects.

Tools for Everyone

In many of the examples shown, specific knowledge of KML, Javascript, HTML, and some PHP is necessary to create these projects. However, non-programmers can get up to speed fairly easily and do some interesting things without creating or tweaking any code at all. Several resources are available for those interested in delving further into this aspect of Google Earth. The book KML Handbook is a great resource for learning KML. Google has also provided free and comprehensive documentation for the Google Earth Plug-in, Google Maps and KML.

Additionally, the excellent Google Earth Outreach Group has provided extensive videos, examples, and tutorials for how to use Google Earth. They have also created a Google Spreadsheet called the Spreadsheet Mapper, which enables users to upload large amounts of georeferenced data that can be customized, edited, and then exported as KML. Finally, Google provides a Google Earth API code playground that allows one to copy, paste, change, and experiment with KML to see what it can do. This is an excellent resource.

A particularly helpful tool for non-programmers is a Google Gadget which allows one to embed a Google Earth Tour in a website. The Gadget creates all the code; just cut and paste to the desired website. The user needs to have the plug-in installed and the KML/KMZ file needs to be uploaded to a server for web access. This is an indispensable tool for those wishing to create and share elaborate Google Earth Tours.

It’s important to keep in mind that these tools and technologies have opened the door for geographic visualization beyond the traditional geosciences. Today, the humanities and social sciences can equally benefit from geo-storytelling and visualization, as many areas deal with geographic information. Disciplines such as anthropology (incl. archaeology), urban studies (incl. architecture), literature, and information design can stand to benefit greatly as tools like Google Earth become ubiquitously embedded in the web. They provide low overhead learning curves for non-technically minded researchers and teachers.

These resources offer a range of options and opportunities for educators to quickly dive into Google Earth and Google Maps to begin mapping projects that can offer compelling stories for teaching, training, presentation and research. This is one of the richest areas of the web at the moment. This will only get larger as more people realize the power and potential of geographic visualization in a range of disciplines.

For a more academic take on the geospatial web and the geo visualizations, the publications listed below offer some additional insight.

References

Sharl, Arno and Tochtermann, Klaus, eds., The Geospatial Web: How Geobrowsers Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society, (London: Springer-Verlag, 2007).

Dodge, Martin, McDerby, Mary and Turner, Martin, eds., Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications, (West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2008).

Lastly, two great resources for Google Earth in general and for geo developer news are two blogs: Google Earth Blog (not affiliated with Google) and Google’s Geo Developers Blog.

Author Biography

At the time of this publication Keene Haywood was charged with researching and exploring emerging technologies that have potential for integration into teaching and research at UT-Austin. He worked closely with faculty and staff giving presentations, consultations, and training on emerging technology. His specialties include digital video production, geospatial technologies, and emerging media technology. Prior to UT, Keene worked for The National Geographic Society and The Nature Conservancy of Texas. Keene holds a Ph.D in Geography from the University of Texas, an MFA in filmmaking from Montana State Univ. and an MA and BA from the University of Miami, Florida.

]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/more-than-meets-the-eye/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/gaming-initiative/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/gaming-initiative/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 01:15:34 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=881 Abstract

A faculty-staff course development team at Johns Hopkins University designed an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional gaming course taught by faculty, game industry professionals, computer scientists, and multimedia developers from throughout the Baltimore, MD region. Students gained a broad knowledge of gaming along with practical development skills through a regular lecture-discussion course coordinated with a weekly lab. The interdisciplinary student teams were mentored by industry professionals and worked throughout the semester to produce games. The course development team faced a variety of challenges stemming from the inter-institutional, inter-departmental collaboration.

Introduction

In 2008, video games represented a market of $11.7 billion with about 68% of U.S. households reporting gaming activity (Entertainment Software Association, 2009) ¹. Video games represent a maturing field and are prevalent enough to warrant academic attention from a wide variety of disciplines. Game development courses also present an opportunity to teach students technical skills in a challenging, authentic learning environment.

This paper is primarily a case study of how one gaming course was designed and implemented, but the authors hope they can assist others who plan to develop similar courses in the future by sharing several best practices and lessons learned. We begin by describing the development and facilitation of an introductory gaming course first taught at Johns Hopkins in the Spring 2009 semester. The paper concludes with a summary of the evaluation data and suggested questions you may want to explore if you embark on a similar project.

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Catalog Description
A broad survey course in video game design (as opposed to mathematical game theory), covering artistic, technical, as well as sociological aspects of video games. Students will learn about the history of video games, archetypal game styles, computer graphics and programming, user interface and interaction design, graphical design, spatial and object design, character animation, basic game physics, plot and character development, as well as psychological and sociological impact of games. Students will design and implement an experimental video game in interdisciplinary teams of 3-4 students as part of a semester-long project.

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Motivating Forces

Several driving forces led to the creation of this course. First, industry and accreditation agencies are increasingly encouraging universities to offer students interdisciplinary, team-based learning opportunities. The jobs of the future do not simply align with the departmental structure of our colleges and universities (Frank and Gabler, 2006)². In addition, students will not likely work in disciplinary silos, but will collaborate with colleagues of diverse professional backgrounds. Universities have an obligation to prepare their students for this collaborative work environment before they graduate.

Second, undergraduate enrollments in computer science soared through the 1990s before reaching their peak seven years ago, however, recently those enrollments retreated almost 50% at some institutions (Zweben, 2008)³. The computer science department at Johns Hopkins experienced a similar trend and began actively exploring courses and programs that would excite students about the field.

Third, students, almost ubiquitously, hold an interest in gaming. Students began requesting a gaming course at Johns Hopkins years ago with the frequency increasing annually. Several JHU alumni either work for or have started their own successful gaming companies, and are interested in supporting these types of course offerings so they can recruit qualified students. In addition, Johns Hopkins is located 15 miles south of one of the nation’s highest concentration of gaming companies in the United States. Hunt Valley, MD houses the headquarters of several gaming companies, including Firaxis Games, Breakaway Games, Day One Studios, and Big Huge Games. Executives from these companies, also hungry for talented programmers, artists, and writers, contacted JHU Computer Science faculty about the possibility of offering a course or even a curriculum in gaming.

Together this confluence of forces led to the first game development course offered at Johns Hopkins in the Spring 2009 semester. The Computer Science department and Whiting School of Engineering are now exploring whether or not to expand the program into a concentration.

Course Design

The course design began with the final assessment: student teams would develop a working video game in a course-long project. All other elements of the course evolved from the central role of the students’ game development project. Students were exposed to introductory gaming topics (e.g., gaming genres, gaming history) in a standard lecture course. The instructor of record and primary lecturer, Dr. Peter Fröhlich, invited guests from industry and other universities to lecture and mentor students teams as they worked on their game project. An associated lab section offered by the Digital Media Center (DMC) – the campus student multimedia lab –focused on the development of design and implementation skills (e.g., 3-D modeling, graphic design).

The primary project goals of the course design were the following:

1. Design the scope and requirements of the course final project.
2. Design the learning objectives and conceptual content of an introductory video game course.
3. Identify, recruit, and coordinate guest lecturers from the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Whiting School of Engineering, Maryland College Institute of Art, and the local gaming industry.
4. Identify and coordinate campus hardware and software resources to ensure the student game development experience is supported by appropriate technology resources.
5. Develop an assessment strategy to evaluate the success of the course learning objectives.

The team also worked with the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries to establish a modest gaming collection. The professor required students to play and review games as part of their course assignments. While many students owned games, the instructor felt it was important for them to have the opportunity to play games from different genres and systems. The librarian for computer science joined the development team and led the game collection development effort. She also helped the team navigate the difficult process of establishing new library borrowing privileges and policies for game media because the Libraries’ policies for traditional audio-visual materials (e.g., DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs) did not directly apply to video games. The library did not purchase consoles for students to play the games because the DMC already owned consoles that students could borrow. In the spirit of collaboration, the librarian successfully pushed to have the Libraries’ game collection managed through the DMC’s equipment reservation office. Students in the gaming course spent most of their time in the DMC — the location of the lab section and the site where most student teams met to develop their games. Checking out games and consoles through the DMC exemplifies the Libraries’ commitment to providing convenient, common-sense service. Still, it would not have happened without the librarian advocating for this agreement.



Figure 1 - Gaming Lab (Photo Credit: HIPS, Will Kirk)

In addition to teaching the lab section of the course, DMC staff developed two connected spaces to support game design, prototyping, testing, and research (aka fun): the Gaming Lab and Gaming Lounge. The JHU Gaming Lab is a fully equipped development and testing lab created to support course-related and independent game development and exploration by students. The lab contains high-end workstations, including NVIDIA graphics cards and an array of cutting-edge development software, as well as a large-format Samsung screen and 5.1 surround-sound system for testing and game play. Resources for the JHU Gaming Lab and other gaming-related initiatives were gathered from existing equipment stock at the Digital Media Center and Department of Computer Science, personal donations by staff, software purchased by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, a grant from the Smart Family Foundation managed by the Center for Educational Resources, an in-kind donation from NVIDIA Corporation, and a partnership with Valve Incorporated.



Figure 2 - Gaming Lounge (Photo Credit: HIPS, Will Kirk)

The Gaming Lounge is a student-friendly space that features comfortable furniture attractively arranged around a series of gaming stations. Game stations include: a flat-panel display with parabolic speakers for directed sound that can accommodate a number of different game consoles; a classic arcade-style gaming table; and a beta-test kiosk that can be used for console play or to display student-developed games. In response to increased interest in gaming among students, the DMC also sponsors a number of game-related events. Networked gaming nights are held four times per year, during which all 18 of the DMC’s workstations are converted to a cyber-café for networked multiplayer gaming.

Video Game Lab, Lounge, and Design Course from Digital Media Center on Vimeo.

Course Elements

Course Project

The game design project provided the core element of the course around which the other elements were designed. In short, student teams needed to develop a working game by the end of the semester. The faculty and staff course developers debated whether to provide students with a design specification for the game or to give them free rein. Some argued that open criteria would encourage students to be creative, whereas supporters of design specifications felt students new to game development would benefit from starting within a framework. An industry partner interviewed during the needs analysis phase suggested from her teaching experience that students can be more creative when operating in a restricted design environment because they would have an existing scaffold on which to build. This was one of the most intensely debated issues of the course and in the end the course developers decided to specify very few criteria thinking students hailing from different disciplines would want more freedom to choose their development path and game genre. Those criteria were as follows.

Your game must:

• be fun
• be a game
• have progression (e.g., levels, stages)
• include graphics
• include sound
• include a manual

Mentoring

To make up for the lack of specification, the primary instructor assigned each student team a mentor from a regional gaming company. In addition to providing advice, the goal of the mentorship was to develop a relationship between students/teams and the gaming company in the hopes of leading to internships and job offers. The teams met with their mentor once a week to review their recent work, ask for design advice, and set deadlines for the coming weeks. While meeting weekly helped to keep students on task, the industry relationships also produced unexpected benefits. One mentor shared an audio library with a team; another recruited a colleague to provide advice on graphic design. The mentor structure provided to be one of the most beneficial aspects of the course.

Student Teams

To ensure a balance in skill sets, the instructor restricted course enrollment by permission-only. Each student applied to the course by completing a brief survey about why they wanted to take the course and what skills they could contribute to the team. The lecture and lab instructors then assigned students to teams based on their skill sets and interest in gaming genres. Students were recruited from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory, the latter located on a different campus than the engineering undergraduate students. Demand exceeded course seats so the instructor included a four-person waitlist in case a student assigned to a team dropped out in the initial weeks of the semester.

Lecture Format

Students met in lecture three days a week for 50 minutes (M-W-F class). The lecture acted as a general survey of gaming as a form of entertainment with unique programming methods. Topics included a brief history of gaming, intellectual property issues, gaming and business, introductory programming, and computer graphics principles. The instructor wanted to cover the latter topics to expose students to the various technical sides of game development. The instructor strongly believed students needed cross-training on the technical skills not associated with their role on the team. For example, designers would need a basic understanding of how programmers write code that manipulates graphics (and programmers would need supplemental training on graphic design). While students were not expected to master the topics, they would have a basic appreciation of what is involved in writing code and designing graphics.

While the primary faculty member, Peter Fröhlich, facilitated many of the lectures, the diversity of topics covered required that he also rely on guest lecturers. Gaming legend Ken Rolston lectured on role playing design. Katie Hirsch, a designer from Firaxis Games and instructor from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, discussed user interface design. Tim Train, Chief Operating Officer of Big Huge Games talked about how to prepare for a career in gaming. Faculty from Johns Hopkins and other universities lectured on various elements of game design.

Student teams also demonstrated their project progress during the lecture section. The professor scheduled three demos throughout the semester to coincide with the teams’ Alpha, Beta, and Gold release. This was an excellent opportunity for students to receive feedback and learn development tricks from their peers.

Lab Format

The students participated in a co-requisite lab section with the goal of exposing programmers to media making techniques, showing artists to new tools, and introducing all students to the new workspace and support staff. These goals were very challenging to implement due to wide ranging skill sets, interest levels, and institutional scheduling. Each team was comprised of two programmers and two “creative types” (e.g., artist, graphic designer, musician, composer, writer). The teams were assigned one of two lab sessions that met once a week for 75 minutes.

Each lab was designed to focus on a different technology that could be integrated into the team designed and created games. Topics included work flow planning, character development, animation, 3D modeling, sound effects, titles and transitions, and even package and manual design. Each session included an introduction to the topic through an example, a short demo of a software tool used to deconstruct the example, and a hands-on opportunity to manipulate project files and complete a self-paced tutorial.

The lab syllabus attempted to sequence the topics with the lecture syllabus, student game development process, as well as the pedagogical sequence of building and reinforcing skills. Two lab sessions that did not follow this format were the second session on Game Rules and the final lab on writing product documentation and packaging design.



Figure 3 - Game Rules Lab Session

Many students commented that the Game Rules session was their favorite because it was fun and relevant to every member of the project team. Ironically, it was the only technology-free session. During this lab session, each team was given a different bag of small objects such as cards, dice, timer, clay, action figures, etc. Then each team was given a different game genre, such as one-on-one, play against self, team-on-team, and cooperative/non-competitive. They had 20 minutes to design a fun game within the genre using only the props provided. They also had to write the game objective and rules so that anyone could understand and play as directed. Teams swapped games and had 20 minutes to play and write critiques of the game and instructions. Finally teams discussed each other’s games and brainstormed improvements. Many groups used this same process to prototype and gather feedback for their video games throughout the semester.



Figure 4 - Packaging Lab Session

The final lab session focused on creating game documentation and product packaging. After a short presentation/discussion about audience, marketing, and media outlets, each group was given an assortment of fold-up box and brochure templates. They used design software to manipulate graphics from their video game into documentation, packaging, and advertising materials.


Student Assessments

Assessments and grading were done in several ways, by the faculty, teaching assistants, lab staff, and mentors, although the final grade was determined by the lead instructor. Because many students are wary of their grades being dependent on the work of a team, the instructor offered several opportunities for individual evaluation and extra points. Students used blogs to introduce themselves to their team and report on their progress. A short writing assignment/game review provided opportunities for individual students to get to know each other by playing several games, learning about different genres and development platforms, and writing and sharing their opinions of the games they played. At the end of the course, each student was asked to evaluate their teammates’ contributions to the final project as well as highlight their own major contributions.

As a group, each team was expected to demo their game three times, in Alpha, Beta, and Gold releases. These five-minute classroom presentations enabled everyone to follow the teams’ progress (although, sometimes a team’s biggest challenge was to successfully hook up their game platform to the projector and sound system before their 5 minutes elapsed). Teams were also invited to make their prototypes and final games available for play at two public events: the Digital Media Center’s Game Night and end-of-year open house. Many of the team took advantage of this opportunity to get feedback from less sophisticated gamers.

Industry mentors sent weekly email reports to the instructors after their team meetings by answering the following five questions:

1. Did everybody show up? Were they on time?
2. Did everybody seem involved?
3. Did they seem prepared with prototype, artwork, working code sounds, music, etc?
4. Did they make a decent amount of progress since last week? What are their major stumbling blocks?
5. Do they have problems with a specific area/technology that we need to help them with?

Evaluations

The course development team committed themselves to a rigorous formative assessment process to improve the course both as it ran and for future semesters. Assessment activities included collecting student feedback through interviews, focus groups, and anonymous online surveys.

Overall, students liked the concept of the course. The final project was regularly communicated as their favorite aspect of the course because it allowed them to work in teams and to create a product. One student commented, “Making a game was cool!” Students said they learned to appreciate the diversity of talents of their teammates. During a focus group a computer science major said, “Artists contributed a lot. They are amazing!” while an artist commented, “What computer scientists do is humbling.” In fact, several students felt they learned more game development skills from each other than from lecture and lab.

Students also enjoyed the exposure to industry experts as mentors and guest speakers. Several teams remarked how valuable their mentor’s advice had been. An unplanned but important learning experience arose when one of the companies that supplied mentors underwent a major downsizing in which the company laid off 1/3 of its staff. This unfortunate event became a learning opportunity as students saw firsthand the effects of the Great Recession. Many talked directly with their mentors about the experience. While the experience did not deter students from wanting to work in the gaming industry, they recognized the volatility of working in the entertainment sector.

In the online survey, a majority of students said they would recommend the course to a friend. However, students expressed frustration with the design of the course and project requirements that the instructor will address in future implementations. First, students wanted more frequent project deadlines. The three Alpha, Beta, and Gold deadlines were not enough. They wanted weekly assignments that would assist them in making progress towards larger milestones. Second, students wanted more detailed grading policies and stricter game design specifications. This was useful feedback because the course development team debated the virtue of assigning students a detailed design specification as opposed to general criteria to be met. For an introductory course, students felt narrow design parameters would enable them to focus on the basic skills of game development. Students felt creative opportunities for designing their own game could be facilitated through advanced game design courses (e.g., Capstone Design course). Third, students wanted more opportunities to demo their projects during class. They appreciated feedback from peers and wanted more of it to assist them in refining their game design and play. Students suggested they review each others’ games every 2-3 weeks and link these demos to submission deadlines. Students regularly took advantage of the gaming library and several asked for more game review homework opportunities to encourage them to play new games including modern games and possibly table top games.

Overall, students felt the syllabus included too many topics, many of which did not apply to their team’s game development efforts or did not occur in time to meet their needs (e.g., audio editing taught after Alpha release deadlines). The students also recommended reorganizing the course structure so the course emphasized labs more than lectures. Students felt the labs were too short and they did not get enough time to apply the concepts under the instruction of the lab teacher. Student teams comprised of members from different campuses and schools also wanted more open time in labs to collaborate because they experienced difficulty scheduling common times to meet. Students from the Maryland Institute College of Art have 5-hour studio courses where Johns Hopkins students typically enroll in 50- or 90-minute classes. Students, again, suggested the instructor assign a pre-determined development platform to make lectures and labs more applicable to all teams.

Another suggestion was to offer two tracks, one on gaming programming and the other on artistic development for gaming. Students would enroll in the course track most aligned with their expertise (programming vs. creative arts) and then meet during labs to work together on projects. Students also suggested establishing open, self-paced labs in which they would receive credits for demonstrating competencies they master. This would enable them to learn the specific skills needed for their project.

Though students liked interdisciplinary teams, some groups reported conflicts and difficulty communicating ideas across disciplinary boundaries. They requested more instruction on managing team dynamics and project management. Faculty from other departments who teach courses with team projects offered to share materials and assignments used to prepare students for working in teams.

Conclusion

Our hope in sharing this case study is that others can benefit from the best practices identified and lessons learned by one course development team implementing a gaming course at a particular university. Shortly after the course ended, the course development team hosted several conversations with faculty from different disciplines (e.g., cognitive science, music composition) and regional colleges to explore opportunities to expand gaming course offerings at Johns Hopkins and in the region. Stemming from these meetings, the course development team noted a lot of interest in partnering; new and existing course offerings are expected in the future. Two courses are schedule for the 2009-10 academic year. The Introductory Course will be offered again for a new cohort in Spring 2010. Students from the Spring 2009 course will have the opportunity to resurrect project teams and continue working on their games in an advanced, independent study course.

As with any new collaboration, there were many questions that needed to be asked and difficult conversations that were carefully facilitated. Throughout the course development and implementation, the course development team faced a variety of issues that were resolved and learned from. Here are some key questions you may want to ask if you embark on a similar project. Several of these were raised and/or discussed by attendees at the NMC Summer conference session.

• Who are the stakeholders and what are the conditions of their participation?
  Does a single department or institution need to have “ownership” of the course for the flow of tuition dollars? Does another department need to fund additional staff hours to support this course? What are the inter-institutional registration issues? Are there scheduling conflicts due to differences in term starts, holiday schedules, and teaching period lengths?
• Which is more important, the process or the product?
  Do students have several semesters in which to learn all aspects of video game design or does there need to be a tangible result quickly? Will this be the only course available or can multiple departments and majors be included in developing a concentration, minor, or major? Are students focused on gaining job skills and developing a gaming portfolio or is an academic exploration of the field more in keeping with institutional priorities?
• What are the best ways to integrate industry mentors and how can this be achieved without proximity?
  Are your students at a sufficient level that they can make use of mentors or are staff and graduate students adequate? What is the incentive and pay off for the industry representative and is that in keeping with your goals? Are there alumni who can fill this role? Can professional associates available through online communications be available?
• What is the balance of providing hands-on experience versus theoretical background? How can lecture and lab sessions be used most effectively?
  Do all students need the same content at the same level? What aspects of instruction are important skills to learn regardless of their application in the final product? How can topics be taught without the expertise availability on your campus? How important is it for the lectures and labs to be in sync and for the theoretical and practical interwoven?
• How much time is needed to achieve your educational objectives?
  How many credit hours will the students devote to this course (lecture/lab combo)? Is the amount of time needed to complete the team project commensurate with the credits received? Should lab time be devoted to working on the project in teams?
• What are the best ways to work with teams?
  Should you group students with advanced skills with similar students to encourage them to challenge each other or with novice students to provide new teaching opportunities? What are the benefits of allowing teams to self-select based on project interest rather than skills? How much team training do you provide to foster good working relationships?

Author Bios



Mike Reese and Joan Freedman

Mike Reese is the Assistant Director at the JHU Center for Educational Resources (CER). In this role, he acts as a project manager overseeing projects in which the CER partners with faculty to explore innovative uses of technology in support of teaching. He is also a doctoral student in sociology with a research focus on how ideas and innovations spread through school systems. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and an M.Ed. in instructional technology from the University of Virginia.

Joan Freedman has been involved with art and technology in various ways for the last 20 years. Throughout the late 80s, early 90’s she worked with multimedia pioneers in the San Francisco Bay Area creating interactive museum exhibits, educational software, and games. Currently Ms. Freedman is the Director of the Johns Hopkins University Digital Media Center, collaborating with students and faculty in many departments such as Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Art as Applied to Medicine, History, Entrepreneurship & Management, Film and Media, and Writing Seminars. She holds a BFA in Design and Technology, and an M.S. in Instructional Technology.

Peter Fröhlich is a senior lecturer for the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. His interests include programming languages, software engineering, and systems software (e.g., compilers, networking, operating systems). He is the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Gaming Lab. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Munich University of Applied Sciences and a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Irvine.

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Citations

¹Entertainment Software Association. “Top 10 Industry Facts.” 19 August 2009 http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp.
²Frank, David J., and Jay Gabler. Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
¹Zweben, Stuart. Computing Degree and Enrollment Trends. Washington, DC: Computing Research Association, 2008.
]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/gaming-initiative/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/online-teaching-in-museums/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/online-teaching-in-museums/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:10:56 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=731 Introduction

Museums invite visitors to explore collections in a variety of ways. Visitors may join group experiences such as public talks or tours, scholarly lectures, or drop-in weekend family programs. They read wall labels, listen to audio tours, sketch, and explore hands-on displays. They enjoy the company of family members, friends and museum staff during their visit, or they may also choose to spend time in the galleries alone. Museums honor the diverse experiences that may occur in their institutions, and are eager to facilitate experiences for visitors that are tailored to their needs and interests.

In a number of ways, when we go online and click our way around the Internet, we have an experience that is similar to a museum visit. On the Web, we engage in an active process of seeking, selecting, scanning and immersing ourselves in a variety of experiences. We browse, search, select, and discover. We go online to connect with friends, families and communities, or we can spend time alone. We sometimes get frustrated when we are not able to locate what we are seeking—and sometimes we delight in an unexpected find.

Of course, there are clear differences between browsing web pages and meandering through the halls of a museum. Even though digital technologies have increased in their sophistication and aesthetics, they cannot replace the experience of standing in front of an original Velázquez oil painting, or the moment of reading original documents penned by our nation’s founders, or what it is like to stand in awe in front of a massive, fossilized dinosaur skeleton. The Internet is a place that operates on the values of effective communication and visitor engagement. It invites feedback, and offers a wide spectrum of ways for the visitor to connect and contribute. Like museums, the Internet is in a process of constant change, reevaluation and renewal as websites are added, reviewed, edited and reorganized as information and research changes, and as visitors change.

Both the museum visit and the online experience include processes of seeking and discovering, and as our daily lives become more rooted in digital communications and interactions, it is becoming clear that museums and visitors can find new ways of intersecting, and interacting, in an online format. In this paper, we define what online learning currently means, and what it might mean, to educational experiences in museums. We see a number of parallels between current learner-centric, constructivist museum education practices, and the participatory nature of the Internet, and we will examine a variety of ways that online learning can be not only effective, but also expansive, for a museum’s educational vision.

What is Online Learning?

Educators, scientists and scholars have been developing and researching methodologies for teaching in alternative formats, often discussed under the umbrella term—distance learning. Building on the effectiveness of educational broadcasting in radio and television, educators began to utilize telecommunications networks to connect with learners. Videoconferencing, a technology developed in 1980s and still used today by a number of museums, allowed educators to be seen and heard on a type of closed-circuit television, and to see and hear their students as well.

Digital learning, or the exchange of information using computer technology in networked environments, has a history that dates prior to widespread use of the Internet, when users from across distant geographic areas were first beginning to communicate using simple digital bulletin boards and early forms of chat through connected systems. These early pioneering efforts, often created and led by university researchers, scientists and scholars, provided a venue to offer a computer-based campus for faculty and researchers in higher education. By the 1990’s, when the Internet began to blossom and increasingly visual user interfaces made the online world more user-friendly, the development of course management systems (CMS) allowed universities to offer the alternate formats of course delivery, primarily as a means of distance education for students living away from the physical campus. Online learning, also at times called e-learning, was sometimes in its early stages seen as a second-rate version of an in-person classroom experience—less rigorous and a poor substitute for the on-campus course.

Online learning is now no longer seen as a substitute for the in-person encounter, or a less desirable alternative, but rather a new way for educators and learners to interact across time and space. Online learning now takes many forms, including:

• Technology-enhanced courses: Classes meet primarily face-to-face, but there are online components that allow for continuous interaction
• Hybrid, or blended courses: These combine online interaction with some face-to-face interaction.
• Fully online courses: In this model, educational experiences occur entirely online, and participants may never meet face-to-face

.

As online learning has expanded and become more accepted, pedagogies and best practices have developed for instructors teaching in this new and ever-expanding environment. Workshops and publications are now offered specifically about the various strategies for engaging students online, and recommendations about how to avoid the various pitfalls that online teaching can bring.



Image 1: A teacher-participant logs into an online workshop offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Why Online Learning for Museums?

Museums give much attention to the encounters that visitors have within their walls, but we know that the museum experience begins long before the visitor darkens the doorstep of the building itself. Visitors learn about museums from others, from billboards and brochures, radio and television, and of course, the Internet. They begin to formulate ideas and responses to their experience before the encounter with the exhibition or collections. They reflect on their childhood experiences in museums if they have visited these institutions before. Additionally, we know that visitors carry their experiences with them long after the actual visit to the museum, often making connections or seeing relationships months or even years after their encounter in the physical collections. ¹

Museums, along with other institutions, businesses and even individuals, began their online presence in the 1990’s. These initial web pages met the basic needs of communication, and included important data such as location and visitor information. Later, museums began to display the museums’ collections online, and added text from wall labels as well as materials for educators. Museums initially thought that the Internet was the golden ticket—an efficient and cost-effective gathering place for all types of information. However, as information architects and web designers are already aware, we find that simply placing a multitude of information on the web is not the answer. In fact, as our exhibitions grow and expand, and as our downloadable documents increase in number, visitors can be lost and overwhelmed with information in the already daunting challenge of learning more about our often intimidating institutions.

Museums and museum educators have been exploring the role of interactive, inquiry-based conversation with visitors for the better part of the last century, seeing their museum collections not only as objects to be studied, but objects are intended for visitors to experience and enjoy. ² It is no longer viable for museums to simply place their collections on view and invite interested visitors to partake. Further, many museums no longer accept that lecturing to passive, large audiences is an effective means to educate or engage visitors. As we see in the writings of the philosopher John Dewey, as well as researchers such as Vygotsky and Piaget, we must acknowledge and connect with the unique experiences and backgrounds of the individuals in our museums in order to facilitate meaningful and lasting educative experiences. ³

Because online learners may access a learning experience anywhere where they can access a computer and the Internet, and because individuals may join online communities in any number of ways and on any number of topics, there is vast potential for museums to consider these visitor niches in new ways. Moving beyond efforts to broadcast their presence to a wide and diverse public, museums should also consider how they might connect to smaller communities to involve them in educational experiences. This targeting of a specific community, termed narrowcasting by the fields of marketing and advertising in the 1980’s, is again coming to the fore in the realm of new media.

Narrowcasting, while often referring to a business model to market to niche audiences, can be embraced by museums to interact with visitors. Sometimes referred to as “the right message at the right time to the right audience,” narrowcasting parallels several core tenets in the education field. Preparedness to learn, free-choice learning, and developmentally “appropriate” methodologies in teaching are all components of education that have much in common with the notion of narrowcasting.



Figure 1: Interaction and Collaboration Increases in Narrowcasting

Increased access to the Internet, increased content available to users, and increased interaction has effectively moved us from the “Information Age” to the “Collaboration Age.” We are no longer passive recipients of information, but seek out people of like mind and interest, share information, and collaborate on projects over time and space. User-generated content is the engine that powers the web. We live in a participatory culture—we want to shape the information that we receive, when we want to receive it, and be able to respond to it. Today, our challenge is less about a search for facts, but a way to make meaning, to network, and to connect to a community. As Thomas Friedman describes in The World is Flat, the future is not about production, or about being a clearinghouse of information; instead, we are entering an age that allows for unprecedented participation and collaboration. ⁴

How can this pluralism of voices, ideas and interpretations co-exist in a world where museums are seen as pillars of trust and knowledge? How can museums embrace participation and exchange through online interaction, while maintaining the museum’s voice and vision? How can museums continue to speak authoritatively, without being authoritarian? The possibilities for online interaction and exchange with our publics clearly have brought new challenges to the museum field, but they also bring with them great potential rewards. Let us examine some of the additional reasons for exploring this new landscape for learning for museums.

A. Access and Outreach

Any visitor who can access a museum’s website can gain a sense of the institution, its collections, its scope, even its services before, during and after their visit. For some museums with a national or international mission, this issue of access and outreach elevates the possibilities of interaction to a much larger scale. We now know that the Internet has become more accessible and used by a wide scope of people. Seniors use the Internet and e-mail as a vital connection to their families, friends and the world. Teachers and students are using the Internet to search for information, prepare lessons or complete homework. People who have limited mobility or who cannot travel extensively have found the web to be a place of community, interaction and engagement. In short, the web has the power to bring visitors virtually to museums, and to have these visitors form a community of learners around the institution.

B. Online Learning Can Tap Underutilized Resources

Another important benefit of online learning in museums is the opportunity to make use of existing resources that often are simply not available in traditional on-site programming, or are under-utilized. Consider the digital images of your institution’s collections—detail images, in situ photography, X-rays from conservation, historical photographs of the original owner or site. Maps, charts, diagrams and timelines, when used effectively, can illuminate a complex topic for a visitor in ways that dialogue cannot. Museums have something more to offer in an online environment—their professional staff. While universities and other learning institutions may tap into a museum’s collections for the teaching of various subjects, consider the potential for the museum’s professional staff as a body of teachers. In addition to museum educators who lead programs and activities, how might they partner with conservators who may share their expertise about the art and science of materials, or curators who specialize in particular topics, or museum librarians or archivists who bring resources to light for groups who may not have had contact with them before?

C. Economy, Flexibility, and Ease of Use

As museum professionals, we are fully aware of the cost and coordination of our physical galleries and classroom spaces. Online environments are economical, offered at low or little cost, and can be installed locally or hosted by an online service provider. The open source movement, along with freeware and shareware on the Internet, offers an incredibly diverse array of learning environments and learning tools. There are also a number of proprietary online learning environments and systems that may be licensed with fees. While the ongoing debate between whether open source versus proprietary platforms is beyond the scope of this text, museums should consider the cost-benefit relationship of both, bearing in mind that even free tools require the time and expertise of staff to manage. ⁵

Online environments are flexible, as users can make changes to data and design instantaneously. Besides being a much greener solution to our multitudes of printed brochures, teacher resource packets, articles and other analog resources, the digital environment allows our content to be current and updated as frequently as we choose. We can even add thoughts and materials to our interaction during the learning experience or after it has occurred, so that our visitors can continue to learn and make use of the museum.

D. The Ability to Document and Archive: A Mirror for Our Visitors and Ourselves

Perhaps one of the greatest possibilities for online learning in the museum context is how it offers museums the opportunity to learn more about our visitors, and ourselves. Online learning offers the opportunity to test, develop and pilot possibilities. Perhaps one of the strongest reasons for piloting or testing in the online environment is the ability to capture—at every step—the interactions that happen. Technology can document the participants’ reactions, thoughts, and opinions.

The Power of Participation

As educators, we know that participatory learning is more than offering an answer to a question. While the tools themselves incorporate a means for participants to provide feedback (emoticons, signals, text chat areas or even live discussion), they do not replace an essential component that must come from the educator: asking participants to interact in a variety of ways. When working with a group of learners, whether online or in-person, it is important to take the “temperature” of the group, to inquire, to check and to make sure that everyone is on board. Fortunately, online interaction takes concrete forms: participants write blog entries or contribute to a threaded discussion, share files and links, post video and audio or post comments to others’ contributions. In short, these digital artifacts exchanged by participants are evidence of interaction. They can provide a measure of the program’s success. The following are several key concepts or cornerstones that describe ways of inviting active, participatory learning in online environments:

A. Sharing Information and Responses

When we interact with visitors in the museum, we enter into a dialogic exchange of information about our collections through questions and responses. How does the male ring-tailed lemur grip tree branches as he climbs? What do you notice about the technique used by Mark Rothko in this painting? What types of concerns did Abraham Lincoln express in his written correspondence in 1861? Both as learners and as instructors, we listen and respond, drawing upon information and personal experiences to make connections and develop ideas and arguments. We recall historical accounts and figures, we remember personal stories or exchanges that illuminate a situation and we use language, writing and gestures to demonstrate our points.



Clip 1: Video clip of a participant verbally sharing her reactions to a detail of a work of art with a group of educators during an Elluminate Live synchronous webinar. Clip taken from Face to Face: Comparing Portraits blended teacher workshop, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Clip 2: Video clip of participants using a text tool in Elluminate Live to add descriptive words that capture their reactions to an image of a work of art.

Learning in an online environment means that we are constantly connected to the largest database of information that the world has seen. Facts, dates, historical records and timelines are at our fingertips and in ever-increasing numbers. In addition to text-based information, we can access photographs, diagrams, illustrations, movies, audio files and multimedia resources that can add immeasurable value to a learning experience. While concern about the quality, scholarship, rigor and reliability of content on the Internet remains an issue, increasingly we find that Internet-based information, especially from accredited institutions such as museums, libraries, universities and archives, is an invaluable educational asset.

B. Edit, Refine and Improve: A Collaborative Effort

A central tenet of education is the spirit to improve, expand and deepen. Online learning experiences can provide an ideal moment to invite learners to edit, refine and expand their ideas because online material and information is mutable. Participants can re-type, delete, copy and paste their own contributions and collaborate with others on a single document. Group collaboration is one of the most powerful facets of online learning, as we find that the “wisdom of crowds” can be exceptionally accurate and offers a multitude of perspectives. As participants share and collaborate, the final result can be not only more comprehensive than what is typically offered by a single participant, but there is more investment in the final outcome when we invite contributions from the full group. ⁶

Collaboration can be facilitated by using a wiki, a shared document that can be edited by any number of people. The content is determined by the wiki’s creator. Participants can compile information, shift or delete what has been added and even edit another’s contribution in a spirit of improving the final outcome. The best known example of a wiki is of course Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia in which users from across the globe add information, edit refine and expand existing entries. While many have expressed concern that Wikipedia contains information that has not been verified, studies have shown that in fact its articles are overwhelmingly factual and accurate. ⁷

C. Roles and Responsibilities: Let Everyone Be an Expert in Her Own Way

In online learning environments all participants access information the same way—at a computer. While the instructor may have access to additional tools and privileges and at times may see information that is not accessible to the learners, all participants are learning and working within the same framework. Often participants in online learning cite its “democratic” nature, allowing everyone to be an equal contributor and stakeholder. Although online learning has its own system of etiquette and group dynamics, participants often mention that they feel confident in asserting their ideas and opinions. They appreciate having more time to consider their contributions before posting them, which is different from live conversation. Perhaps this happens because participants access the experience from home, a familiar and comfortable place, rather than the imposing conditions found in the public space of a museum. Educators can take advantage of this experience by inviting feedback, asking participants to share information about their own areas of expertise or to take on an assigned role that will contribute to the larger group.



Clip 3: Video clip of educator-participants imagining what a figure might be thinking in a work of art by using a text tool in Elluminate Live.

Similar to an in-person education program where the educator designates a group leader, it is possible to assign roles in the online learning environment that draw upon the expertise of the individuals. Because the participants have the ability to share information about themselves through e-profiles, e-portfolios or personal blog entries, educators often can determine how participants might lend their expertise in a particular topic. During online teacher workshops that we have conducted, we will often invite participants to serve as “Workgroup Team Leaders” to complete various tasks, given their expertise in a subject area. Or if they are particularly comfortable using technology, they might assist with compiling a document or presentation. In addition to recruiting the talents and expertise of the participants, consider your fellow staff members and how they could contribute to the success of the program. We have found it useful to have an “e-intern” work with the program. This intern of course can be from another city, state, or country. ⁸

D: Active Reflection

As mentioned earlier, in an online learning experience the interactions and exchanges among participants take some form: blog entries, wikis, or presentations that have been created by the group, pre- and post-program online surveys. This process of creating and contributing is an essential aspect of learner-centric, constructivist styles of learning. Technology can capture and archive these process-artifacts so that educators and participants may revisit, re-examine and reflect on their own learning process.

The ability to return to an educational encounter is a profoundly useful tool of online learning. This is rare or impossible in conventional in-person teaching. Not only is it useful for the educator, but participants are able to re-visit threaded conversations, watch webinar recordings, re-read blog entries and download material multiple times. Although online environments vary in terms of their accessibility to the participants, it is possible to make the educational programs and content available for a long period of time, if not indefinitely.

By inviting our visitors to become active participants in museum-based online learning experiences, we are building upon the foundations of learner-centric models of museum education that have been growing over the past half-century. Through individual and group involvement, combined with the assets and tools that online learning offers, museums can tap visitors’ expertise, curiosity and individualism in ways that are difficult or impossible to achieve in conventional in-person programs.

A Case Study: A Blended Teacher Program

Below is a case study that captures our experiences, challenges and rewards in developing our first online learning project for teachers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While this example is specific to teachers, we hope that you will find it useful as you embark on your own online learning projects.

Obstacles as Opportunities
Teacher programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) are designed to introduce K-12 educators to works of art through object-based learning, interdisciplinary integration, and inquiry. Museum educators encourage teachers to pursue further study and contemplation of works of art and direct teachers to the Museum’s website for additional research. While the online resources are extensive—images, educator guides, a Timeline of Art History, multimedia web features—they have always been seen as separate from the in-person museum experience, or as supplemental information.

However, in early 2007, the final phases of construction of the new Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education limited the number of on-site education programs, yet expanded the new technological infrastructures that would deepen the possibilities for future online educational programs. This moment of crossroads—the simultaneous physical obstacle of construction and digital opportunity of expansion—was the catalyst to investigate and eventually embrace Web 2.0 tools—blogs, wikis, threaded discussions and real-time interaction—to create an online workshop for teachers. This first MMA online teacher workshop would not replace the existing on-site encounters with works of art. Rather, it would harness these new technologies in a way that would immerse participants from many different geographic areas in the Museum’s online resources, introduce them to inquiry-based teaching methods, and encourage them to create their own classroom materials all within the museum paradigm.

An Online Encounter of a Unique Kind
From January until June 2007, William Crow and Herminia Din, both museum educators, collaborated to build the activities and frameworks for conversations that would occur during the workshop. In New York, Crow began to develop the pedagogical approach and online activities, while Din, in Alaska, began formatting and preparing the online environment and tools that would contain these elements. Two online services were employed for both the development of the workshop and its implementation—Epsilen Global Learning System⁹ (for the asynchronous interaction) and Elluminate Live¹⁰ (for synchronous webinars). This process of co-creating the learning modules progressed over several months with many collegial conversations, and this long-distance collaboration was a learning process in itself.

In early July, after receiving applications from potential teacher participants by promoting the workshop through e-mail blasts and online teacher forums, Face to Face: Comparing Portraits launched. The group consisted of 28 elementary-level educators from 16 states in the U.S., and one educator in a school in Dubai, U.A.E. During the two-week workshop, participants were engaged in a variety of experiences—synchronous and asynchronous, creative and responsive, personal and collective. Teachers wrote blog entries, contributed to threaded discussion topics, created hands-on art projects, collaborated in wikis to craft comparative questions about the works of art, gathered key pieces of information about portraits from across collection areas, and “met” one another in four live, synchronous webinar sessions. By the conclusion of the online interaction, the teachers had worked together to create several PowerPoint resources of images, inquiry-based questions and comparisons, and activities that they had adapted. All these could be used with their students and were created collaboratively by using materials, images and resources found on the Museum’s website.

A third of the participants were able to travel to the Museum on July 31 to participate in a concluding in-person workshop so that they could experience the original works of art in person. Because these teachers were familiar with the imagery and subject matter of these works, and had been immersed in information, activities, and inquiry-based questions, we immediately noticed that their conversations quickly moved to deep investigation of the objects. They noticed materials and textures, issues of size and scale, and the object’s relationship to other works in the gallery environment. The teachers also were able to draw comparisons between objects that had been explored during the online workshop, and made reference to contextual information and classroom resources that they would either incorporate or adapt for their students. Primed for their experience in the museum by having participated in the online workshop beforehand, these teachers were prepared to take the conversation to many places and to many levels.

After the intensive two weeks of online interaction and at the closure of the in-person workshop, we re-read the teachers’ blog entries and wikis, and watched recordings of the four live webinar sessions. We also spent time reviewing the classroom resources that the teachers had created. We began to see that the online workshop, with Web 2.0 tools as vehicles for our interactions, was not merely a means to create a different type of museum learning experience. It was a way to encourage reflection, collaboration and community building that could inform and even change our own museum education practice.

Blogs and Reflective Practice
A blog is unique in that unlike a personal journal, it is also open to a group of people, and can communicate reactions and experiences to a larger audience both in written and multimedia forms. As participants created entries over days and weeks, each blog provided a personal reflective space, apart from the synchronous group activity, but still connected to the Museum and its collections. This tool enabled the participants to examine their own relationship to the works of art, to the online workshop, and to the Museum. This intermingling of the personal and the public revealed the participants’ inner dialogue, as we can see in this example from an Arkansas teacher who is struggling to reconcile two very different aspects of the Gilbert Stuart painting Mathilda Stoughton de Jaudenes:

The main thing I can’t figure out about this painting is the background. The table with the books makes sense, as does the chair the lady is sitting on, but it seems the billowing curtain and blue sky are out of place. Although the blue of the sky repeats the blue of the dress and the gold in the curtain repeats the gold embroidery of the dress – both creating a certain rhythm – for such an otherwise realistic painting the background doesn’t seem to fit….
– 1-5th grade art teacher, Springdale, Arkansas

At times, blogs revealed the participants’ newfound insights about a work of art, and their process of making connections between the art object and their own daily experiences as teachers and as people. In this excerpt, a teacher considers how a room might also be seen as a portrait after she explored a web feature of the Gubbio Studiolo, an intarsia-paneled study from the Italian Renaissance:

I have never considered a room, or a picture of a room, a portrait. I have never specifically thought about what the room tells you about the person who lives there, but this is such an obvious thing when you walk into rooms. When you would walk into my classroom, you immediately know what my students are learning about, doing, and what is important to me as a teacher and them as students….
– Elementary school Deaf Education specialist, Madison, WI

Other times, the teachers’ blogs became concrete lesson ideas that illustrated how they planned to adapt a work of art for their particular group of students. Rather than submitting a typical lesson plan or outline, a teacher from Dubai brainstorms about her encounter with a work of art, the Tughra of Sűleyman the Magnificent:

Because my students either speak Arabic or are learning Arabic, there are many fun activities that could be done with this work. We could create our own portraits in this style with the students’ initials. With the help of the Arabic teacher, we could do this in English and in Arabic and then compare…this would be a great collaborative project between my classroom and the Arabic classroom.
– 2nd grade teacher, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

These blogs, which combined personal reflection and open dialogue, captured valuable information about our participants’ thought processes and questions, about their experiences, and how they might approach the works of art with their students. Further, because the blogs could be re-read or expanded, and because others could contribute comments to these blog entries, the conversations continued and deepened over days and weeks.

Wikis and Real-Time Interaction: Collaboration and Community Building
In our hyperlinked world there are many ways to connect visitors to the museum and to each other—social networking sites, e-newsletters, e-mail lists, and list-servs. Although these can be useful ways of maintaining communication, we found that the process of collaboration, and even conflict, builds community. During the workshop, as teachers worked in wikis to compile information, edited inquiry-based questions and jointly built a PowerPoint classroom resource, we found that they had interest and investment in the final outcome. The wiki tool allowed participants to constantly build upon each others’ contributions in the spirit of improvement, and bonded group members despite geographic distance or other differences. They communicated with one another—even beyond the final date of the workshop—in order to share additional information or ideas, and the Museum and its collections were centerpieces of those conversations. Since the community of the workshop was not bounded by the Museum’s walls, it was possible for the learning to sustain itself over a long period of time.



Image 2: Example of a wiki area in the Epsilen Global Learning System

Perhaps the strongest demonstration that the participants felt connected to a community of learners despite their geographic distance was a “virtual class reunion” that took place in the evening of November 14, 2007—three and a half months after the conclusion of the online workshop. During this live webinar session, participants were invited to create short PowerPoint presentations that showcased an activity that they had developed and completed with their students based on a work of art that had been explored during the summer workshop. It became a type of self-motivated and open-ended assessment that provided us with concrete examples of how teachers and students are using MMA-produced resources in their classrooms. Using synchronous webinar tools, the participants could instantly be brought back together regardless of their physical locations to demonstrate how they used our online museum resources.



Clip 4: Video clip of the virtual class reunion live webinar session in Elluminate Live, Nov. 14, 2007.

Learning from Learners

The interactive qualities of blogs, wikis and real-time online communication have caused us to consider the impact of Web 2.0 on our in-person teacher workshops. Could these tools be employed to create a more blended (online and in-person) experience for our teachers, rather than isolating the museum-based and web-based interactions? Could the reflective practice of blogging, collaborative wiki tools and live webinars expand and deepen the encounters that occur between teachers, museum educators, and our collections? Further, noting that these processes unfold over days, weeks or months, should the format of our teacher programs change?

The process of creating and implementing the online teacher workshop has helped us see value in the multiplicity of museum experiences that may occur: online and in-person, synchronous and asynchronous, personal and public, individual and collective. We see the direction toward the learner-centric approach in museum education and the user-centric development of the web as very compatible trends. As museum education has embraced interactive conversations with visitors, so has technology changed from web “browsing” to the participatory culture of Web 2.0. As user-generated content expands to become the engine that powers the web and as interactivity becomes the core of communication and education, we must consider how museums through their online resources and perhaps through a renewed approach to in-person programs can create deeper and more meaningful experiences with visitors.

Conclusion

Museum visitors are already making meaning of both collections and institutions in new ways using online interaction and tools. Through direct encounters onsite with museum staff, or through informal and collaborative exchanges with their peers online, these visitors select from the resources and tools of the Internet, combine them with their own ideas and experiences, and create a different type of ownership of the museum. We must use our institutional resources and pedagogical talents to shape and inform these experiences. In the end, tools are tools. Hardware and software change. Websites come and go. Whatever we learn, whatever we experience, we consistently find that it too changes and evolves, and our relationship to it changes. What is constant is the dedication and commitment that we as museum professionals have to our teaching, our learning, and our visitors.

* This article includes excerpts from the AAM book Unbound by Place or Time: Museums and Online Learning by William B. Crow and Herminia Din.

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¹ See Falk and Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning, AltaMira Press, 2000, chapter 3.
²See Stephen Weil, “From Being About Something to Being for Somebody,” Making Museums Matter. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2002.
³ Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a pioneering developmental psychologist who studied child development and its relationship to cultural mediation and interpersonal communication, among other areas. Among his best-known works is Mind and Society (1930). John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer known for his writings about the importance of educative experience. Among his many works is a key essay on aesthetics, Art and Experience (1934). Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and development theorist, well known for his work studying children and cognitive development. Among his major works is The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1953).
⁴Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
⁵ See details in Open Source, Open Access: New Models for Museums, in The Digital Museum, edited by Herminia Din and Phyllis Hecht, 2007.
⁶ For an interesting exploration of the power of groups, see James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.
⁷ Giles, Jim. Special Report: Internet encyclopedias go head to head, Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) Published online 14 December 2005
⁸ We have been fortunate to work with several “e-interns” both from area universities and abroad, including Chelsea Kelly from Vassar College (NY) and Mercedes Colombo, an educator from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/online-teaching-in-museums/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/the-virtual-audience/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/the-virtual-audience/#comments Thu, 27 May 2010 23:10:56 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=571 Abstract

Originally conceived to help music students conquer stage fright, the virtual audience — a life-sized video audience — is a unique combination of webcam technology, artificial intelligence and Flash streaming video. The virtual audience listens, watches and reacts to students as they perform music or drama, or give speeches. This presentation, which includes a demonstration, will focus on the tool’s simple construction and the outcome of the first semester of real-use and future implementations. For more information and a free download of the Virtual Audience, please visit my blog: http://learningactivities.wordpress.com/.



A still image of the Virtual Audience reacting to a student’s performance.

The Problem: Stage Fright

I was first approached by Dr. Harvey Thurmer and Professor Michele Gingras, two faculty members in the Miami University’s Department of Music, about making a digital audience for their students. Both were in a Faculty Learning Community, and both were looking to further integrate technology into their teaching. They both had also witnessed the phenomenon of their students suffering from crippling stage fright, even when well-practiced and prepared for performances. They were looking for a way to combat the problem digitally.

As explained to me by Professor Gingras, some music students suffer from well-established glossophobia (performance anxiety). They may have practiced their musical piece a thousand times, knowing it so well that they could carry-on a conversation with a close friend while performing. They can simply relax and let their mind wander while their muscles replay the piece when they are in the privacy of a practice studio, in their room, or at home.

However, once students perform, problems arise. While on stage and very self-aware, students try to allow muscle memory, breathing, fingertips, and/or lips to work in synchrony, and replicate all that they practiced. But once an audience member moves or sneezes or coughs, performers lose their concentration and a world of self-consciousness takes over. Performers realize that the audience is there, watching them. Rather than relaxing and letting the body carry out its assigned duties, musicians (or actors or speakers) may begin to over-think and become hyper-focused on their behavior or appearance. Worse, individuals with stage fright commonly start imagining how the audience is judging their abilities.

Gingras and Thurmer’s goal was to use technology to help students overcome this kind of anxiety by helping students avoid becoming distracted. Essentially, they were trying to find ways to desensitize performers to the things that commonly occur during a performance so that they would not be thrown off balance.

As a performer myself, I am familiar with these distractions. On several occasions, my train of thought has been derailed (usually during a conference presentation) by someone’s persistent cough, or worse, hearing a person’s cell phone launch into the first verse of Sir Mix-a-lot’s “Baby Got Back!” They MUST have forgotten to turn it off. Ummm. So where was I?

To help students learn to avoid losing focus during a performance, Thurmer and Gingras suggested that it would be useful to videotape an audience acting out a number of “distractions.” Initially, we discussed creating a DVD that would loop endlessly. Performers, in this case, music performance students, could watch the DVD on a TV at home, or on a computer or laptop, and have a full audience at their disposal, complete with a number of distracting mannerisms, at any time.

I had two immediate concerns about using DVD as the primary medium for delivery.

First, a television or laptop screen is too limiting. For performance students, the Virtual Audience (VA) would be more realistic if the viewing size was much larger, or at least somewhat close to life-size. I suggested that projecting it on a wall would be a nicer option.

Second and more importantly, the static nature of a looping DVD is problematic. Although a DVD can play for an infinite amount of time (or as long as the performance requires) the audience distractions occur in the same order every time. So, as students practice performing with the DVD, they would begin to memorize and anticipate what the audience would do next. For example, a student may notice that a person in the third row is sneezing at a particular point in the DVD, which is followed soon after by someone in the first row turning his head and whispering to his neighbor. Students would learn to anticipate these distractions, which would greatly diminish the effectiveness of the learning tool.

Randomization for Mastery

After some reflection on these concerns, I decided I’d like to try to create a version of the Virtual Audience that was large and dynamic.

During the course of my work creating learning objects, I developed what I refer to as “randomization theory.” This theory is based on the assumption that randomization helps with mastery of a topic. In the context of this learning object, randomization serves as a constant series of unpredictable distractions.

In the DVD version of the Virtual Audience, the audience performs the same distractions in the same order. Humans learn by recognizing the patterns in a given situation. When information is no longer novel, it is expected or taken for granted.

When new information is introduced, the brain has to reanalyze the situation to determine the differences. In a dynamic version of the VA, randomizing the distraction clips will serve this purpose by mimicking real situations that occur in an audience setting. This forces a performer to refocus during each distraction, or eventually, learn to ignore them.

To re-create an audience in as realistic a fashion as possible, I decided it was necessary to mix up the different distractions. This could be done rather easily using Adobe Flash’s ActionScript to programmatically assign numbers to video clips of distractions, then shuffle those numbers in a random order, and load the associated video clip when it is chosen.

V-ROOM

After discussing my idea of a larger, more dynamic version of the Virtual Audience, Professor Gingras decided to add the VA to a practice room the school of Music was currently upgrading with technology. The room, eight feet square, would house a computer with piano accompanist software and an effects-processing system used to amplify a student’s instrument with the ambience of a variety of performance spaces. A student could choose “Carnegie Hall” or any other large (or small) venue on the effects processor and it would virtually give the practice room the acoustics of that performance hall.

The addition involved simply installing the Virtual Audience software on the practice room’s computer, and adding a ceiling-mounted projector that displays the VA on one full wall of the room. All of these things combined (including the heat from the projector bulb simulating the warmth of stage lights) helps give the feel of a live performance setting.



Schematic of the V-Room (click to see full size image)

Analyzing Audience Behavior

To determine how a digital audience might be assembled, I started by analyzing audience behavior. I watched a number of online and in-person performances to research how audiences act. I determined that making a dynamic audience required more than just throwing together random clips. After all, some behavior is expected and does happen in a consistent fashion. In a performance situation, especially a music recital, there are standard phases the audience assumes:

1. Waiting Phase.:Audience sits and talks while they wait for the performer to take the stage.
2. Welcoming Phase. Audience claps when performer comes out on stage (about 8 seconds, unless the performer is a pop icon, or person of notoriety).
3. Watching Phase. Audience watches performance (this is where distractions occur) and waits for a visual and/or audible cue when the performer is done (usually the musician will stop playing, put an instrument down, or step away from the podium or microphone).
4. Clapping Phase. Depending upon the mood of the collective, there is a polite clap, a partial ovation, or a complete standing ovation.


Phases of Audience Behavior

The Inspiration

About a year before Thurmer and Gingras approached me about this project, I had been awestruck by an interactive advertising campaign designed to sell software. It was called “Studio 8: Meet Your Match”. The ad took a user’s information and played back video in different sequences depending upon how the user clicked through the information.

Just a few months later, I became inspired by Guy Watson’s work with Flash’s “bitmapData()” method as a motion detection system.

Here’s how it works. A webcam takes 15-30 digital pictures per second. Flash analyzes each picture’s digital data as a series of numbers. Simply put, if the data is different from one picture to the next, the program interprets that there must be movement in front of the camera, and a different action is required.

It occurred to me that if a webcam can help function as the sensory ‘eyes and ears,’ ActionScript could be the ‘brain’ to help the VA come to life and be the dynamic, video solution I was hoping for. A webcam can watch and listen to the performer, and as the performer starts or stops playing, the program can detect changes in the performance and move the audience into a different phase. For example, when the webcam sees a performer step in front of the computer, it can tell the audience to clap, to welcome the performer. Likewise, when the webcam hears the music stop, it can tell the audience to clap.

Recording Audience Behavior

While watching a number of different audiences in different situations, I noted that phases 1, 2 and 4 (“waiting,” “welcome clapping,” and “end clapping”) occur with more consistent behavior, and the greatest number of distractions typically occurs during the “watching phase” of a performance. To capture these patterns, we recorded a real audience acting out these phases.

Michele Gingras assembled roughly 120 students in an open recital hall. We set a video camera center-stage, and I picked audience members willing to participate as actors for the distracting behavior. We shot the basic phases first.

• Talking (waiting)
• Obligatory Welcome Clap
• Watching (being still, but not frozen, but not distracting)
• Obligatory End Clap (the audience is not impressed, but polite)
• Partial Standing Ovation (Some of the audience is very impressed)
• Full Standing Ovation (All of the audience is very impressed)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After the basic phases were completed, using a list of distractions, I would call out the scene, and have a random volunteer actor do the distraction, while others sat still. The distracting behaviors to be taped included:

• Coming in late
• Leaving early
• Cell phone ringing and an actor trying to stop it
• Whispering
• Laughing
• Falling asleep
• Sneezing
• Coughing
• Crossing legs
• Clapping out of turn**

** As someone who doesn’t always know the proper etiquette of a music recital, I have on numerous occasions clapped during the break in between movements of a piece, thinking that the piece was over, and trying to show my support. Usually, I was the only one who did, and very quickly realized that I needed to wait.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Assembling the Phases and Distractions as the Virtual Audience

After taping the audience performing different phases and distractions, we used Flash’s ActionScript to “move” the VA form phase to phase.

We used the webcam to trigger the audience so that it would transition automatically from the first phase, waiting, to welcoming the subject. The webcam sees the performer “take the stage” by walking in front of the webcam (motion detection). After the obligatory eight second clap, the audience settles into phase three: watching mode.

For the watching phase, we begin calling up random clips, and let them play for random amounts of time while the audience “listens” to the subject perform (through the webcam’s microphone). This continues infinitely, or until the performer stops playing. The audience continues doing distracting things such as coughing, sleeping, or sneezing, until the program senses 2.5 seconds of silence.

When Flash detects the absence of sound for more than the allotted time, a random ending clip is loaded, which initiates the “clapping phase.” Here, three alternate endings were taped. The first option is obligatory clapping. The audience is polite, but not too generous. The second option is a partial ovation. Some people in the audience are moved to the point of standing up to show their support for the performer. The third option is a total standing ovation. Everyone in the audience is awestruck and stands and gives an extended applause.



Assembling the phases and distractions

Issues and Challenges and Solutions

Conceptualizing which pieces needed to exist and imagining how all of these pieces would work together seemed fairly intuitive. However, once the project was assembled we began to encounter a few barriers that kept it from feeling polished.

After some reflection, I was able to determine an easy fix for most of the issues we encountered. Here are the issues we faced and the solutions that helped to make the VA more realistic:

Issue: Counting Movements: In a lot of recital instances, songs have more than one movement and there is usually a break between movements.

Solution: An interface element was added to allow the subject to specify how many movements exist in the piece of music being performed. Logic needed to be added to count those breaks as movements and to trigger the clapping once the final movement had finished.

Issue: Some clips should only play once: Like the movement counts, some distractions should only happen once. If an audience member leaves early, or comes in late, those particular distractions shouldn’t play again. Likewise, the “first-movement clapper” usually learns from the mistake the first embarrassing time around, and waits for others to start clapping first, the next time.

Solution: After these mentioned clips play, they are removed from the shuffled stack of available clips, to ensure they only play once.

Issue: Visual Continuity: Drastic visual changes occur as audience movie clips switch from distraction to distraction. Referred to as jump cuts, these are caused by audience members not being in the same precise location from clip to clip.




The above Flash file shows the visual discontinuity of two various scenes. Click and release the mouse to view.

Two partial solutions, when applied together, can help solve this problem:

1. Loading the new clip in underneath the existing clip, then fading the existing clip out (a dissolve) makes the switch more gradual, and less apparent.

2. Aligning audience members at the beginning and end of each clip. Using the Snap-Cap tool (a custom-built Flash Application that takes a picture as I yell “Cut!” to the audience) allows them to reposition themselves with reasonable accuracy to the place they were in as the shot ended.




Click the flash movie above, then move, and try to re-align yourself. Click again! Note: This interactive tool requires a web cam.

Looking Ahead

The original prototype was shot in standard 4:3 NTSC video at a resolution of 720×480 — standard television resolution. When the image is projected to fill an 8’x8’ area, artifacts in the digital video are apparent. Re-shooting in HD will help improve the clarity when projected at such a large size.

Use of the Snap-Cap tool during shooting will help with audience alignment and soften the visual transition between clips.

Some usability improvements are necessary, such as letting the user attenuate their instrument for loud and soft sounds, and room acoustics. Currently the VA works best in a quiet setting.

An optimized version for online delivery will allow the VA to be used in a wider variety of settings. Miami University’s Speech Communication program uses a tool that helps students practice delivering speeches (The Impromptu Speech Widget). Currently, students see a mirrored image of themselves when practicing a speech. Future versions of the VA would allow students to give their speech to a “live” distance audience.

Other Uses

In addition to music, it occurred to me that this application could be used in almost any situation where public performance could be the outcome. Among those:

• Theatre – soliloquy
• Forensics and Debate
• Marketing Presentations
• Speech Pathology and Audiology

It was also suggested by audience members at the 2009 NMC Summer Conference to let new faculty or Teacher Ed students use this as a tool to help them focus on lecturing. Additional features such as allowing a faculty member to control the distractions at will were also suggested.

Conclusion

The Virtual Audience’s planned deployment date was mid-February 2009. Due to some administrative hurdles, the opening of the practice room housing the Virtual Audience was delayed until fall 2009.

Since the initial blog posts and presentations, I have been contacted by two independent psychologists who sought permission to use it with their patients. To accommodate these and similar requests, I offer a free download of the Virtual Audience through my blog. In return, I ask for end-user feedback and research results, if there are any.

Acknowledgements:

Programming and ActionScript Development: Ryan Davidson
Video Editing and Encoding: Adam Baumgartner
Videography: Craig Rouse
V-Room Graphic Design: Yvonne Yau

Contact Information:

Britt Carr
carrbc@muohio.edu
AIR File: http://www.academic.muohio.edu/virtualaudience
Blog: http://learningactivities.wordpress.com

]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/the-virtual-audience/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/beyond-fear/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/beyond-fear/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 04:16:06 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=461 Shuttering the factory

Historians often point to prisons, hospitals, factories, museums, and universities as key institutions arising from modern and industrial impulses. It makes sense, then, that higher education would share some characteristics with its modernist siblings. Increasingly, however, education in the U.S. looks and feels like one of these institutions: the factories, mills and processing plants that were once a symbol of economic promise in American economy as they provided generations of jobs for its workers. The downfall of these industries resulted from poor financing and financial mismanagement, inflated salaries for administrators, and a disregard for the realities of the rapidly changing world markets. The parallels to the current realities of the U.S. public school system—which is crumbling under the bureaucratic imperatives of a professional management class, misguided investments in technologies of control instead of innovation, and the restrictions imposed by No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—are remarkable.

Current practices of higher education in the U.S. result from Fordist processes, in that the vast majority of children who will go to college have arrived there after years of standardized and regimented assessments, each marked now by what industry might term a “quality assurance process,” but which in education has come to be known as high-stakes testing. The result is that students come to college, and particularly to large state universities, with a keenly honed ability to absorb—but not necessarily digest and thereby make their own—facts and basic skills like grammar, arithmetic, and algebra. Faculty frequently complain that students lack the ability to think critically or creatively, to analyze scenarios or synthesize information.

Faculty, too, are products of this system and often perpetuate it, either because it’s what they know from their own education or out of necessity. Class sizes are skyrocketing—at UC Davis, for example, there is a bioscience course that enrolls more than 900 students—which leads faculty to see themselves as having few options beyond this same kind of bubble-form, high-stakes testing, where students’ “learning” is measured by their performance on three or four multiple-choice or short-answer exams over the course of a quarter or semester.

Despite what the media might tell us about the fearlessness of the Millennial generation, our students misunderstand and fear both the responsibilities society places upon them and the opportunities available to them. “Gen Y” students enter institutions of higher education after having spent years in an industrial model of education that has not challenged them to learn for themselves. In this increasingly complex world, the ability to learn independently is perhaps the most important skill to have, yet the educational industry still functions as if we live in a world where people graduate from high school or college, head off to their company job a line worker or middle management, and stay there a lifetime.

It’s time to close this widget factory.

After years of observing various kinds of resistance to social media from faculty and students, the three of us realized that much of their reluctance is rooted in fear and anxiety. That’s understandable, as these technologies challenge the status quo in many ways and raise, albeit unconvincingly, the specter of faculty irrelevance. Although student-centered learning is not a new concept, the web, and especially social software, has made it increasingly simple for students to shape their own learning. In this article we offer some anecdotes, alternatives, and—we hope—some inspiration for those willing to embrace a recontextualization of learning in U.S. universities.

The topic of fear is a complex one. A couple of years ago, when we first started talking about the fear of web 2.0 technologies in the academy, we were able to fill pages and pages with sources of fear. Our first presentation, at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference in 2008 with Barbara Ganley (then of Middlebury College, and now Digital Explorations) and Martha Burtis (of the University of Mary Washington), articulated several fears: the faculty’s fear of tripping up or relinquishing control; students’ fear of being asked to take on more responsibility for their own learning; the administration’s fear of letting faculty and students use tools that weren’t tested, that were open source and lacked an official online help desk, or whose content was viewable by the web-browsing public; and the more heartening, and also more overarching, fear felt by growing numbers of people within the academy that if we don’t change and embrace these new tools, American higher education will become an analog relic in a digital age. At that first presentation, we invited the audience to share their own fears and brainstorm how to overcome the many fears that arose. Some of the fears they expressed and solutions they generated are archived in this set of Flickr photos. We’re still seeing many of those same fears, though we’re also seeing novel solutions.

In the spirit of the collaboration of our ELI and NMC presentations, instead of this article being a tightly conceived thought-piece on our topic, we’ve tried to capture the back-and-forth style we deploy in teaching and learning, as well as the insights our audience shared with us.

Methods to our madness: modeling our teaching and learning at NMC, and the audience’s response

Barbara: I think it is important to note a few things about the way we chose to present this topic to our audience. To those who do not know us, or what we write about in our blogs—and this certainly pertains to the couple of folks who wandered into the room and then promptly left upon seeing participants scribbling on large sheets of paper—our presentation style is a bit out-there, seemingly devil-may-care and weird. But I assure you, there is a purpose and an intentionality to our perceived madness.

Over the past few years at our respective academic institutions, we independently developed a concern for what we felt was a growing trend to create a one-size-fits-all form of technology for teaching and learning. In talking to each other, we realized that our institutions’ desire to purchase course management systems that touted efficiency, one-stop-shopping, centralization, security, and control was actually our schools’ way of manifesting their collective fear of the changes in technology, learning, and teaching that were erupting around them. Curiously, the very technologies that we see generating fear in our institutions’ teaching and learning has brought us together as friends, collaborators, and co-presenters.

This form of collaboration carried over into our NMC session. We have learned that by “presenting”—a term that is awkward for us, as it suggests material moving in a single direction—in a more inclusive style, we can effectively model the kind of classroom we feel best supports and encourages learning. If you watch the video of the session, you’ll notice that we never stood still; there was always a give-and-take among us and our audience. We even let them create the visuals. :-)

Our presentation philosophy is this: since web 2.0 tools create a student-centered environment, the teacher/student relationship must shift to accommodate those changes inside and outside the classroom. As she teaches with learner-centric, community-creating tools, the teacher has to let go, to take a chance, to model and to trust. This is unnerving for both the teacher and the student (and in our case, the unsuspecting audience). But the underlying principle behind these tools and the pedagogy they encourage is that our classes are no longer about the teaching; rather, they are about the learning they promote.

Laura: We immediately put our participants in the mind of contributing to the session by asking them to draw pictures that were metaphors for what education is today. This was a little like a magician’s card force because we hoped certain images would arise out of this exercise. Specifically, we hoped that someone would draw a factory model of education, a model that, despite the decline of manufacturing jobs, is still with us and still informs the learning practices of the students and the teaching practices of many faculty.



Factory Model of Education

Barbara: We got one! Smokestacks, conveyor belts, mass production. . .the whole nine yards.

Laura: Like people who know nothing but the manufacturing world, both teachers and students have a hard time imagining something else—or they can see that there’s another way and aren’t sure how to get there. Yes, we did get a drawing of a factory, but we got many others that equally articulated the problems facing higher education and its struggle to deal with the influx of new technologies.



The Ivory Tower

Laura: My favorite drawing was the first drawing that we discussed. It was an image of the ivory tower, which looked a little like a wedding cake. There were people standing on the top, but there also were people climbing up the sides, many of them falling off. On another side, towards the bottom, there were people chipping away at the tower, trying to bring it down. The woman who made this drawing explained that the people at the top were completely oblivious to the people climbing or the people chipping away at the tower. I thought this was an apt representation of how higher education is often perceived by the general public. They view faculty as being in this higher plane, unaware of the world around them, studying completely impractical topics. Some students aspire to be like their faculty and therefore begin the long climb to the top, but many fall off at different stages in their academic careers. The people chipping away on the side, the woman explained, were people trying to change the ivory tower, trying to bring it down to earth, to level the playing field. Outside the drawing, these efforts are represented by resources such as OpenCourseWare or Academic Earth (a video site that hosts academic lectures), but it’s also represented by open access journals, open educational resources, and calls for greater transparency. These latter projects threaten the modus operandi of higher ed, but many people, the very people in fact on top of the tower, are oblivious to these pressures.



Ivory Tower or Cake?

Barbara: I like that one, and this one as well. It reminds me of one of those great Busby Berkeley dance routines. I also like the symbolism of the sunny (and apparently lucrative) skies up above and the cloudy, dreary conditions for the apparent underlings that dwell below. One of the things that came through in a lot of these pictures was a sense of inaccessible verticality. People seem to have set places or roles, and the possibility of moving up is impossible. Many of these drawings portrayed the academy as made up of impenetrable and rigid tiers, with people stuck in the lower levels and far away from the upper tiers.

Leslie: Many of the tower images, and particularly the drawing of the the pink, tiered tower above, reminded me of paintings of the Tower of Babel:



The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)

Babel is a rich metaphor for higher education and our discussion here, but possibly in a different way from what our participants depicted. Imagining one intepretation of Babel, we might reconceptualize the Ivory Tower as a collaborative effort rather than an exclusionary institution. Sure, we might eventually be smote by God and scattered over the face of the earth, but the initial rewards of such collaboration have been huge; as but one example, consider the scholarly social software and platforms being developed by hands-on technology thinktanks like the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Increasingly, taking their place alongside English as the language of the academic commons are JavaScript and PHP.

Faculty, Teaching, and Fear 2.0



The Wheel- Teacher at the Hub?

Barbara: This is an interesting image too. The teacher appears to be the hub and the technologies and tasks are the spokes with the students are on the outside. It looks like the students are making the wheel spin, and the teacher is not in control. The technology to reach the students seems to be in fact turning on the teacher. Looks like the teacher is losing control of the tools and the students and ultimately the creation of knowledge.

This reminds me a lot of the fear and the pushback I sometimes get from faculty when I talk with them about incorporating technologies into their teaching. I have to frame that conversation, and often calm their nerves, with the caveat that technology is not a panacea and I am not suggesting that it will cure all of their teaching ills. When used effectively, technology helps augment the learning experience in the classroom. It takes time, sometimes lots of it, and persistence, to figure out what area of the curriculum could be improved through technology. . .and sometimes faculty just do not have that kind of time. In some schools, technology integration is perceived to be a kind of litmus test; it is another obligation, another task, something that has to be mastered (controlled) before they can use it in class, lest any mistakes they might make be reflected poorly in the dreaded student teaching evaluations. Alas, the teacher, according to the models passed down through the years, is meant to feel he is supposed to master and convey knowledge, not create it alongside and with his students, which, ironically, is specifically what these new tools allow us and want us to do.

Leslie: I wholeheartedly agree. I have observed, and experienced as an instructor, that faculty lack the time to learn new technologies that could usher in an era of new ways of teaching, learning, thinking, and collaborating. The initial investment in these technologies may actually save faculty time spent preparing for class and grading papers, but three primary factors keep faculty from exploring these largely social technologies:

• Faculty are swamped by teaching responsibilities (at small colleges and four-year state universities) and by research requirements (at research universities).
• By the very fact of their reaching the top of the academic hierarchy (i.e. being professors), faculty have demonstrated that as students they learned in ways traditionally expected and rewarded by the system, for example by listening to lectures, or by writing up lab reports and essays on their own. Accordingly, many of them assume that their students learn in these same ways: through listening to lectures, taking notes, completing exams, and authoring papers without assistance from their peers. (In fact, some colleges have honor codes that ask students to pledge on their papers that they have neither given nor received assistance from their peers. Frankly, I find that horrifying.)
• Social technologies suggest a loss of control on the part of the faculty member and a decentralizing of her authority. If students are collaborating on a project—for example, by creating a wiki-based textbook for chemistry courses at the university (an actual project being undertaken at the University of California, Davis), what is the role of the traditional collector of knowledge, the degreed professional who will pour out his knowledge into the vessels of the students? Social technologies can completely rewrite—fruitfully, if they are used well—the role of the instructor.

All of this adds up to fear and anxiety on the part of faculty—but also on the part of students, who may use these technologies to make personal connections but are wary of using, or not savvy enough to employ, these technologies for learning and collaboration.

Making the situation worse are academic institutions themselves, which must defend their network infrastructures from attacks by hackers, careless authorized users who inadvertently download and disseminate viruses, and corporate entities who expect institutions to be vigilant about the use of corporate intellectual property. Faced with these challenges, all of which seem to call for greater control rather than more openness, institutions are reluctant to experiment with new social software that promotes sharing and collaboration. Thus are born lists of approved software and web sites that the campus community can’t access because they have been deemed too dangerous by network administrators or copyright compliance officers, or too unproductive for staff to use during the workday. Institutions, like faculty, fear losing control.

Laura: There are a lot of things working against faculty (and students), for sure. And these issues came up a lot from the audience in our session. Certainly, there are things institutions can do to alleviate these problems. They can support faculty in their explorations of new technology for teaching. They might provide monetary compensation, or just the time and space to work in. Faculty can consult with teaching and learning center staff, people like Leslie, or with instructional technologists to discuss the pros and cons of different tools. And faculty should be advocates for themselves, promoting the responsible use of technology that enhances learning. Figuring out the security issues should come second. They can almost always be worked out. Much as I know faculty hate more service work, faculty should put themselves on technology committees or make one if there isn’t one (and there often isn’t) and always approach decisions about technology in ways that are about teaching, learning, and research. Don’t let the IT people always control the conversation.

Leslie: Amen. There are some brilliant IT folks out there, and their insights shouldn’t be discounted, but faculty should be driving this process.

Barbara: I don’t think more committees or more service work are the answer, actually. I think schools of all sizes have to figure out how to promote exploration, experimentation, questioning, curiosity in ALL forms of learning but especially when it comes to exploring new ways of teaching. We have to be able to model those things for our students, and we simply can’t do that if we are fearful that one slip-up will lead to a pink slip.

The students we teach: They are more like us than we realize

Laura: Faculty have been saying for years that students aren’t as prepared as they should be, usually in terms of typical academic skills such as writing or research. When it comes to technology, though, many faculty have gone the other way and assumed that the students know everything there is to know about technology. It’s funny because I don’t think that 20 years ago faculty were saying that since most students could program a VCR, they can program a computer. But that’s where we are now. Faculty believe that if students can use Facebook, they can use the web for effective research. I tell most faculty that a majority of their students will need help with the basics of using many of the tools out there, from blogs to Blackboard. More importantly, they need help thinking critically about the way they use these tools, about all the content they’re experiencing on the web, and they need help moving from consumers of that content to creators of it. I think once faculty realize that they have an important role to play in student use of technology and that students are not the computer geniuses they think they are, they will feel more comfortable trying new technology. It’s important, I think, to feel that it’s okay to learn the technology with your students.

Barbara: The funny thing is that even as adults, we also need help maneuvering the endless sea of information that now awaits us every time we open a browser. The more you find, the more you realize how much there still is yet to be found. This can be very perplexing to a recently minted Ph.D., now a professor, who has just spent the last several years mastering and defending his or her knowledge about one specific thing. To be thrust now into a college classroom where information comes hurtling from a variety of sources, and filtered through a multitude of personal lenses, is problematic. Learning to parse, weigh, and reflect upon that information is a skill the teacher must acquire in areas other than his or her “area of expertise.” There is an important opportunity here and that is the chance to model the discomfort, the feeling of being overwhelmed, and the process of seeking answers. That is one of the fundamental shifts that these tools create: that we find ourselves modeling the best practices—and sometimes some exquisite failures, too—alongside our students. Through these tools there is a great leveling of hierarchies, and as such we learn together, and together we discover how much more there is to learn.

Laura: Our NMC audience came up with lots of great ideas for learning about and also through the tools. One great one I think was to make technology and education an area of intellectual pursuit. I’ve personally had a lot of success with that. There’s a lot of potential there, from looking at YouTube as a political tool to examining the effects of Facebook on social relationships. Professors can certainly use their own discipline as a lens through which to examine technology. The audience also discussed the fact that our students are not necessarily ill prepared. They’re just in a different place. As Barbara pointed out at the beginning and as the pictures that our participants drew show, students have been enculturated into a factory model of education. They expect their learning—and the teaching—to happen a certain way. When it doesn’t, and it usually doesn’t, even in courses that don’t make heavy use of technology, they get scared and often stumble quite a bit. They’re going to struggle. Teachers need to help them with that struggle and technology can be a part of that assistance. Teachers can encourage blogging their learning, taking assessments online, looking up new materials, and generally showing them how to use tools to support their learning.

Is there an ideal model for education?



Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iagoarchangel/3736799233/ (CC licensed)

Towards the end of our session at the NMC summer conference, Bryan Alexander, director of research for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), said he feared that higher education might become irrelevant if it remains stuck in the technological past. Is higher education going the way of travel agents? Our anachronistic approach to teaching and learning and our refusal to break with some apocryphal glorious past, Bryan suggested with his usual wit, renders our campuses akin to Renaissance fairs, where players reenact the most pleasant aspects of how we imagine Renaissance-era life to have been. But although Renaissance fairs are born out of passion for a bygone era, their portrayal of it is superficial and commercial. And so is much of the “learning” taking place in overflowing classrooms. It’s time for faculty to acknowledge that their colleagues in schools of education and elsewhere have undertaken decades of excellent research on learning in higher education, research that suggests interaction and collaboration—yes, the kind that can be facilitated by social media—are far more effective methods for promoting learning than lecture, multiple-choice exams, and PowerPoint slides posted online.

Leslie: At the same time, I find social media incredibly useful and I value the almost monastic-retreat atmosphere of some of the small, elite liberal arts colleges in this country. I graduated from Grinnell College in 1997, and there’s something to be said for establishing a learning community in what most folks would call the middle of nowhere. That said, the retreat model relies on privilege—having the resources, time, and space in one’s life to spend four years immersed in learning, with regular excursions to provide the service to community, country, and world that was so strongly encouraged by Grinnell. Finding this balance between retreat from the world and engagement with it can be difficult, but I think this can only be aided by a judicial use of social media in learning, research, and collaboration.

Any instructor incorporating social media in her classes will likely need to lead a discussion on information overload. Such a discussion would complement naturally, I think, a discussion about identifying reliable and useful sources online. We need to help students determine where and how to spend their time when they’re undertaking virtual research and collaboration.

A metaphor for learning at the intersection of the bricks-and-mortar world and networked spaces is, for me, the classic small-town downtown. I know this is a well-worn metaphor, used explicitly by online communities like Apple’s eWorld, but there’s something to be said for being able to walk or browse easily from library to newsstand, from bookstore to coffeehouse, from copy center to post office. Bringing in a big-box store like Wal-Mart—the virtual corollary might be Blackboard or another learning management system—might kill the diversity and social serendipity of this pleasant small downtown life. Where’s the arts district, for example, in Blackboard? Outside of Blackboard or Wal-Mart, one can skip from Twitter to Ravelry, from favorite forums and blogs to Powell’s Books. But big-box, closed-down systems curb creativity and serendipity, replacing it with centralization and control.

Laura: That idea of diversity and serendipity was something our participants touted during the discussion about ideal education. As Leslie says, the possibility for a small-town atmosphere, or commons if you will, is certainly available online. But she’s right that students will need help in finding or creating that atmosphere. It’s easy to be superficial about what one does online, but with a little work, one can have more substantial experiences. As someone else in the audience said, it’s about building a network, and like a small town, that network will include people, not just locations. Sure, Wal-Mart and its equivalent online are convenient and on occasion necessary, but they’re often missing the point.

Barbara: Ah, serendipity. It is what makes education and the act of teaching such a wonderful thing. There is a certain sense of serendipity that comes from trying something new, and that needs to have a place in the academy. Serendipity is key, as is letting go. Our role as educators is to prepare our students for the world outside of the academy. It is not about us, and it has never been about us. But it is and always has been about them.

Our job is to prepare our students to launch into the world and to make sense of that world with the skills we helped them develop.

Leslie: Who was it who said that education—and I’m paraphrasing here—is what remains when you’ve forgotten everything you were taught in school? I think that’s key here. Ideally what remains after we’ve forgotten, for example, that a sea anemone has a hydrostatic skeleton, is the ability to think critically and creatively about the utility of collapsible structures and about how adaptations drive the natural world, to analyze and synthesize. A colleague told me today that best practices for teaching in the sciences are shifting slowly from the assumption that students need to know all kinds of facts before they can become practicing scientists to the belief that students first need to learn to think like scientists so that they have a framework for understanding and using all those facts. Social media, I think, can aid us in developing a broad spectrum of intellectual skills that are useful across the disciplines.

Barbara: As a language teacher, I am reminded constantly that the true measure of my success as an educator is not what my students can do in the classroom, but what they do with the knowledge they gain in my classroom in the world beyond the classroom.

The way social software connects us to each other and to so many rich resources that allow that serendipity to happen reminds us, sometimes far too well, that we are all learners and that our learning will never end. In fact, teaching and learning are journeys that are meant to lead to even grander journeys and adventures. In some ways that seems overwhelming, even fearsome. . .but in many ways that is what makes education and being open to learning new things so critical in our society today. We can’t let fear keep us from setting out on that journey.

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NMC session video: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1641117
]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/beyond-fear/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/teaching-new-media-literacy/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/teaching-new-media-literacy/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 04:15:32 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=271 Introduction

This article is intended to be an in-depth description of the New Media Literacy course I designed and instructed for 2009 spring semester at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Teaching this course was a real adventure. Even though I had carefully pre-planned the course I still tweaked and modified things from week to week. In fact, writing this article proved to be a challenge, as I wanted it to accurately reflect what the students actually read and did. The course has been renewed for the 2010 spring semester and this article will address some of the planned changes.

Several years ago CWRU implemented SAGES – the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship. This program is designed to give 1st and 2nd year students seminar-based courses on a variety of topics. Seminars are limited to 16 students and have a strong emphasis on writing – as the SAGES program replaced the Freshman English Composition requirement.

Students are required to take 3 SAGES courses and with only 16 students per class the University requires that each academic department offer a certain number of SAGES courses. The SAGES program also awards fellowships that allow community members to propose and instruct a SAGES course. My primary affiliation at the university is as Creative Director of New Media for the Freedman Center, though I also hold an adjunct appointment teaching Multimedia and Digital Color Photography for the Department of Art Education/Art Studio Department. While I am also working on a Ph.D. in Museum Studies, it is considered independent to my course offerings at the university.

During the pilot phase of the SAGES program I co-instructed a seminar entitled “Widsom: An Introduction” with Peter Whitehouse and contributed to “Visualizing Information in a Digital Age” co-instructed with Lev Gonick, Wendy Shapiro, and Roger Bielefeld.

I proposed a course called “The Halls of Time” based on the “Millennium Time Tapestry” Project. The idea of the course would be to take an iconic approach to the telling of history, bringing together a timeline that was created exclusively by the students. The course would very direct. Each week the course would cover a century of history and each student would be responsible to discover, research, and share a single topic from a checklist of possible categories. Only those topics would be discovered and added to our own timeline of history. The overarching concept was to take an iconic or bite-size approach to a topic and learn about the ways we gather and disseminate information in a modern new-media age. The intention was that each semester the timeline would build on that of the previous semester.

While the format was well received by the SAGES program, especially the idea that the students drove the content and the instructor served more as a moderator of the ideas, we did run into one problem. There was some concern as to why I would be teaching a history course without working with a faculty member from the History Department. While I was focusing on the method, the topic was indeed history and in the History Department’s domain.

So I asked myself: “What topic could I teach, that if someone else would propose the topic, that they would be stepping on MY toes?” And the answer was clear – New Media Literacy. For many years I have been giving talks at NMC conferences on the need for New Media Literacy (and Design Literacy and Media Ethics) and I figured a course might be an opportunity to incorporate these types of discussions at the undergraduate level. I based the course on a talk I gave at The NMC Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media called “The Unexpected Artist & Critic.” The course was formally titled “The Unexpected Artist & Critic: 21st Century New Media Literacy,” which the registrar found a little long, and which we informally called “New Media Literacy”.

The fun part about designing a course from scratch is that you pretty much can do anything. The core requirement for a SAGES course is that it be held as a seminar, favoring critical reading and writing over lectures. While some SAGES courses have included production such as PowerPoint or filmmaking, I decided to focus soley on reading and writing because I didn’t want to suffer through mediocre but well-intentioned projects. This is not to say that I don’t respect student work or enjoy teaching, but too often media projects require more attention, time, and revision than students are allowed to do. For more on this see my talk “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’Cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” from The NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For topics and readings, I went to my personal bookshelf and reviewed past NMC conferences and Horizon Reports. I wanted to create a survey that was fun and exciting but that could also show the students that much of what we do is much older than they realize. I do not subscribe to the notion of digital natives and digital immigrants and wanted the students to connect their personal experiences with topics and readings that ranged over 100 years.

I want to reiterate that the course was not designed to be definitive. Instead I wanted this to be a fun survey course that would open the minds of the students who participated.

Course Description

From the Syllabus:

To navigate the ocean of media that is the modern world we have created many tools. These tools help us choose ‘where’ and ‘what’ we watch but not always ‘how’ or’ why.’ Everyday we add to this ocean of media. To survive we need a vocabulary of criticism and authorship, a “new media literacy,” so we may effectively and efficiently embrace our roles as both artist and critic. This course will explore a wide variety of new media themes in both contemporary and historic contexts. Students in the course will analyze their ever-evolving relationship as both viewer and creator.

Learning Objectives

• Research, analyze, and question new-media issues
• Develop writing skills with an emphasis on critical and personal reflection
• Develop a voice with a focus on moving form writing to authoring
• Express ideas through icons and images

Writing in the Seminar

This course will explore complex themes of today’s new-nedia issues within a cultural and historic context. Each week we will explore a different aspect of new media in which students will be required to read, research, write, experience, and share. Essays will be 2-3 pages and will include researched information as well as personal reflections on how new media impacts your world. The final paper will be 10-12 pages in length and should develop a thesis that combines several topics explored in the class.

Weekly Format

I am a big fan of a regular schedule in a course. I think nothing is more crucial to know from day to day than what is expected of you, and so I put together a regular schedule of activity.

The course was offered on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:30-1:15pm (as it was lunch time students were encouraged to bring their food to class).

Each week students were given a series of readings, which I assigned on Wednesday. For each reading the students were required to write a series of talking points that were due on the following Monday. Talking points were used to seed discussions and to make sure that students were doing the reading. The talking points for each reading included two ideas that the student likes or agrees with and two ideas that the student dislikes or disagrees with. They could be handwritten or typed and each point was simply a bullet or a sentence. On Mondays we discussed the readings, using the talking points as necessary. On Mondays there was often a short assignment or task that was due on Wednesday. On Wednesdays we had an in-class activity based on the Monday assignment and continued the Monday discussion. On Wednesdays the students were assigned the weekly 2-3 page writing assignment, due the following Monday, as well as the readings for the following week.

While it seems like a lot, the readings were often light in nature and the idea was to encourage a rhythm that would discourage cramming or skipping.

Monday:

Talking Points Due, Paper Due, In-Class Discussion, Short Assignment for Wednesday

Wednesday:

In-Class Activity, Short Assignment Due, Readings Assigned, Paper Assigned for Monday

Grading

Essays  		___ % 	(Due Mondays)
Talking Points  	___ % 	(Due Mondays)
Short Assignment 	___ % 	(Due Wednesdays)
Participation	 	___ % 	(Daily)
Final Paper    		___ %	(Due Finals Week)

Attendance was mandatory and part of the In-Class Participation grade.

The Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education, Mano Singham, often talks about ways of engaging the students in their education, and one of his strategies is to allow the students to have a hand in creating the class syllabus. Following his advice, we spend the first 30 minutes of the first day of class negotiating the points breakdown for the various assignments. It is a fascinating exercise that in the end gives ownership and responsibility partly to the students for the way they are graded.

In 2009 my students chose 25% for class participation, which they felt was the public side of their education, and 25% for their papers, which they felt was the private side of their education. They assigned 15% for both the Talking Points and the Short Assignments, leaving 20% for their term paper. They liked the idea that while the term paper was big, it didn’t fully dominate their grade. This was vastly different from the numbers I would have chosen myself but their logic was sound and in the end it worked out just fine.

Course Topics

The semester is 15 weeks but I use a 14-week schedule to allow for missed classes for holidays and other reasons.

• Week 1: Unexpected Artist & Critic
• Week 2: Interactivity
• Week 3: New Media & Art
• Week 4: Ethics, Copyright, Piracy & Privacy
• Week 5: People Morphology
• Week 6: Story Morphology
• Week 7: Video Games
• Week 8: Zork/Choose Your Own Adventure
• Week 9: Social Networking, Viral Video, & Mashups
• Week 10: Lies & Hoaxes
• Week 11: Virtual Reality
• Week 12: Virtual Worlds
• Week 13: Artificial Intelligence
• Week 14: Luddite & Corporeal

Writing Assignments

Students are required to write a 2-3 page paper each week. The premise is that they will become better writers if they cram 2 pages every week than if they crammed 8 pages every 4 weeks. As most students admit that they wait until the last minute to do assignments, the structure of this course is designed to discipline them in both reading and writing. The goal of the assignments is to give students a variety of writing situations (personal, critical, research) as well as to let them experience the new media topics first hand.

Software Review

Using the vocabulary and critical voice found in the week’s readings, write a software review of an application, operating system, or game (but not a web application).

Art Biography

Names of the artists/people mentioned in the readings are placed in a hat and chosen at random – students then write a brief biography of the person selected.

Privacy or Piracy

This is a personal essay and students are asked to discuss issues of privacy and/or piracy – things that affect them as well as their opinions and attitudes.

Self Reflection

Students are asked to be introspective – and try to create their own personal morphology. They are asked: What is your Learning Style and why? What is your Player Type? And in the article on Meyers Briggs – talk about the dichotomies: Extrovert vs. Introvert, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, Judging vs. Perceiving. They are asked to write on how they see themselves – how their actions and processes define them. It is a first person paper (but not informal) with no citations required.

Movie Breakdown

Paralleling the in-class activity, students choose a movie and in a list format break it down into its core elements using Propp’s morphology notation.

Zork

Paralleling the in-class activity, students play Zork and turn in their log file. I use the original (pre-commercial) version of Zork, which doesn’t match the walkthroughs that are readily found on the web. When asked how long they were to play, I told them to spend the same amount of time that they read and wrote for previous weeks. In 2009 some log files were over 100 pages in length.

Choose Your Own Adventure Book Report

Students are asked to write a book report that summarizes the events that happened and their experiences while reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. They are to read the book only one time. They are instructed as follows:

Throughout the book you will encounter choices. Your task is to write the following:

1. What happened before the choice?
2. What was the choice that you were offered? Include page numbers.
3. What was your decision and how did you make it?
4. What was the immediate result of the choice?
5. How do you feel about the choice you made?

Repeat these steps until you complete the book and Don’t Cheat!

Top Tens

Students are asked to create their “desert island” lists of popular culture, including their top ten books, movies, TV shows, games, albums, songs, celebrities, and fictional characters.

Time Capsule

Students are asked to create a list similar to their personal Top Ten but instead as a Time Capsule for future generations. This includes a 2-3 page letter justifying and explaining their choices.

Fake/Hoax Website

Students are instructed to describe in narrative form, a fake website that they might design for a person, a product, a company, etc. This is a creative writing exercise in which they discuss the content of the fake site.

Anaglyph Paper

During VR day students are given a pair of red/blue anaglyph 3D glasses and instructed to explore the web to find an image, series, or video that uses the technology. Students then write a short essay documenting what they find and what the stereoscopic effect means to their experience.

TweetMyPaper

The last two papers of the semester use a tool I developed called TweetMyPaper at http://www.TweetMyPaper.com. The website is free and open to the public and others are welcome to incorporate it into their curriculum.

The premise of the application is word processing meets text messaging. Students have to write their papers ‘one tweet at a time’ without the possibility of deleting or editing.

Students have to face the contradiction that in school they are taught to edit and revise and be very careful to craft the perfect paper, while real-life interpersonal communication has told them that it’s okay to just shout out their ideas line by line.

Not being able to edit forces the students to pay more attention to their words, and they find themselves proofing their composition line by line in a way that they normally tend not to do when word processing — the general idea being that they will go back and edit (even though they often don’t). As a teacher, I found their typos and missing periods endearing and a sign that they weren’t cheating.

The linearity of the tool also causes students to tell their papers more like stories – weaving them as they go (they are not allowed to outline or write them first in another program).

Lastly they are told that the work is going to be public and to remember that they are not writing, but authoring, so to keep in mind that anyone can see the paper.

TweetMyPaper: Virtual World

Using at least 30 tweets, students are instructed to describe their ideal virtual world. The essay should address the following questions: Who would you be? i.e. What role (if any) would you play? Where would you be? What would you be doing?

TweetMyPaper: Teddy Bear

Using at least 35 tweets, students are instructed to describe how they would integrate an AI teddy bear into their life. How would you use it? How would you train it? What would you call it? What gender might it be?

Term Paper

The term paper is a 10-12 page research paper and developed in 6 stages. Each stage represents a submitted item and a deadline.

1. Pick two of the course topics to investigate (paper can be one or both).
2. Develop a short bibliography of sources – this must include print materials.
3. Develop a thesis statement.
4. Revise thesis statement and bibliography after in-class workshop.
5. Submit rough draft of paper – at least 5 pages.
6. Submit final paper.

Workshop / In-Class Activities

The workshops and in-class activities are designed to help the students apply the reading and discussions to their personal lives, and also serve to help unite the class and get them to know each other. Many of the activities also serve as a foundation to help the students write their weekly essay, which are often directly related.

Design Elements

Terms of visual design are pulled from a hat and each student has to find an image that best demonstrates it. The images are put into a single presentation and each student explains their design element in turn.

Run Lola Run

The 75-minute movie Run Lola Run is shown in class in order to facilitate a discussion of interactive media. Afterwards, students write a 1-page reflection on how the film is related to the course.

People Sorting

As a prelude to their self-reflection paper, students physically group and regroup themselves into the categories that are defined in the text. During one of the grouping sessions in 2009, a funny moment occurred when the introverts went to one side of the room and the extroverts to the other – it was almost as if the extroverts were staring down the introverts.

5 Card Nancy

As a whole the class plays 5 Card Nancy. The cards are selected by the vote of the entire class; then, after a 5-card story is assembled, the students are divided into two teams, each of which has to present a single narrative. Those interested in repeating this exercise with their own classes might caution against the motifs of: sex, drugs, or dream sequences.

Movie Breakdown

Using the Propp morphology as a guide, the class breaks down a movie from popular culture that they all share in common. Finding a common movie is a challenge unto itself and The Dark Night is a not a movie you want to do this exercise with (the themes are too complex). Disney (and Michael Bay) movies are highly recommended as they are easy to break down and the students know them well.

Zork in Class

As a prelude to the Zork homework assignment we play Zork in class with the instructor serving as a docent. This helps give the students an idea of what game play is like.

ChooseYourOwnAdventure Breakdown

Using each of the student’s book reports of a single path journey through a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, we reconstruct the entire navigational framework of the book.

In 2009 not all endings were discovered so we completed the map in class. We also categorized the nature of the outcomes.

Viral Videos

Students are instructed to email links to their three favorite viral videos, a fun Google Map Mashup, and to create an account and complete Twenty-five Random Things, an exercise that I designed to allow students to participate in a social networking task without forcing them to become my friends on FaceBook. The website is free and open to the public and others are welcome to incorporate it into their curriculum. During the class period, we watch many of their favorite viral videos. In 2009, some submissions were too long or too adult-themed to be shown in class. Those interested in repeating this might also focus on YouTube as the only source of videos, using it to create a playlist that can be accessed in class.

Favorite Lies

Students were told to go to Snopes and to find and print out their favorite Internet hoax to discuss in class. In 2009 there was confusion on the nature of the assignment and some students printed out entire categories or articles about things that were actually true. The idea is to prepare them for their Fake Website assignment. While I will repeat the Favorite Lies assignment, in the future I will make the instructions clearer.

VR Day

I setup the classroom with many different types of VR equipment including stereoscopic projection technologies, head-mounted displays, and all sorts of 3D glasses. We finish the activity by playing with the haptic arm located in The Freedman Center. Everyone then gets to take home a pair of anaglyph glasses for their Anaglyph paper.

Virtual World: Who, What, Where?

Students are asked to imagine their perfect virtual world: Who would you be? i.e. What role (if any) would you play? Where would you be? What would you be doing? For each question they are told to write a sentence and to be prepared to share with the class. The in-class discussion explores the nature of these fictional worlds.

Mashup Inventions

Students are instructed to come to class with a list of known products, tools, or devices and a separate list of generic add-on features. During class the students are divided into teams to come up with a variety of mashed-up inventions. In 2009 the highlights included: a bazooka that also made ice-cream, a self retracting hoodie, and pants that alert you when your fly is down.

Zero Sum Dodge-Ball & 5 Dot Drawing

In order to prevent the problem or solution from being published online, I am not describing the task or citation for these activities.

Student Feedback

On the last day of class I asked the students to score each of the readings, activities, and paper assignments with a value of up to 10 points. In the readings rankings, there was some — but not much — variation. For activities, it was not surprising that they liked Viral Video, 5 Card Nancy, and Mashup Invention activities the best as they were the most fun and rowdy classes of the semester.

Reading Rankings

Artificial Intelligence	7.43
Social Networking, Viral Video, & Mashups	7.21
Luddite & Corporeal	7.18
New Media & Art	7.07
Virtual Reality	7.00
Virtual Worlds	7.00
Video Games	6.93
Lies & Hoaxes	6.93
Ethics, Copyright, Piracy & Privacy	6.79
Unexpected Artist & Critic	6.43
Interactivity	6.36
People Morphology	6.14

Activity Rankings

Viral Videos	9.29
5-Card Nancy	9.08
Mashup Invention	8.07
VR Day	7.86
Titanic Breakdown	7.43
5-Dot Drawing	7.29
Zork in Class	7.29
Movie Breakdown	7.23
Zero Sum Dodge-Ball	7.21
Favorite Lies	7.21
Virtual World: Who What Where	7.14
Run Lola Run	7.00
People Sorting	6.38
Design Elements	6.21

Paper Rankings

Fake Website	7.64
Top Tens	7.29
Movie Breakdown	7.14
Privacy or Piracy	7.00
Titanic Paper	7.00
Zork	6.93
Anaglyph Paper	6.46
Time Capsule	6.43
TweetMyPaper: AI	6.43
Self Reflection	6.14
TweetMyPaper: Virtual World	6.07
Software Review	5.79
Term Paper	5.43
Art Biography	3.79

Conclusion

After I gave my talk about the course at the NMC summer conference, I had many requests to offer this as a graduate-level course for NMC members. I sat down and asked myself what I would change if I were to offer this at a higher level – and to be honest the answer is: nothing. The reading, writing, and activity assignments are just as valid for freshmen as they are for graduate students. The only difference would be the expectations of a higher level of writing and the nature of the discussions to reflect more maturity and experience. Unfortunately, Case Western Reserve University does not offer distance-learning courses, nor does it have a department from which I could teach it. I am talking to colleagues at another school to see if we can make the offering and we will let the NMC know via the mailing list if this happens.

While I realize the course is a heavy workload I feel that it made an impact. I hear from a lot of students, some whom I employ and others that I know through courses and workshops, and I found out that the students in my New Media Literacy course were talking to their friends about classroom activities as well as the course topics. If they are taking it out of the classroom then you know you are doing a good job.

There are three changes that I plan to make for the Spring 2010 semester.

1. I have been a big fan of A.K. Dewdney, who for a time wrote Scientific American’s recreational mathematics column, and include three of his readings in my course. Recently, however, I found out that he is also the author of Operation Pearl, a 2003 report purporting an alternate theory to the events of 9/11. That and his extensive work on the 9/11 conspiracy website create a conundrum for me. Should these works affect my use of his earlier writings in my course? If I decide to continue to use them, do my students deserve to know who the author is and why I still chose to use him?
2. I originally selected the Choose Your Own Adventure Terror on The Titanic for analysis because I felt its historic nature would appeal to a wider demographic of student and also because it had fewer endings so it could be more easily reconstructed. However, because the students knew what was going to happen, they too soon attempted to direct their choices in order to stay alive and I felt this unfairly motivated their actions. Also the book contained 4 different errors of navigation (turn to page 10 instead of 20) and while this has been fixed in future printings (we contacted the publisher) students might purchase older copies and I would rather not take the risk. I contacted the publisher, who suggested the book Chinese Dragons because it has fewer endings and the choices are more ethical and moral.
3. The one complaint I had from students was that I failed to return their papers in a timely fashion. This was a 100% valid complaint and while I would love to simply warn the students that not all papers will come back in a timely fashion, it really does fall on me to discipline myself with their grading. The hardest part is not to over-grade and to balance correcting every mistake with providing just enough feedback for them to learn and grow.

I conclude this article with a complete list of the readings broken down week by week and with links and page numbers as necessary. Enjoy.

New Media Literacy Readings by Jared Bendis (PDF)

]]> http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/teaching-new-media-literacy/feed/ 0 http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/computer-games-liberal-arts-world/ http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/papers/computer-games-liberal-arts-world/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 00:43:58 +0000 NMC http://wp.nmc.org/proceedings2009/?p=41 How can higher education best engage with the learning capabilities of digital gaming? This question is one of the most fascinating topics in contemporary instructional technology. In this discussion we offer a history of recent, realized projects in one corner of academia. A series of liberal arts colleges and universities have been implementing gaming on campuses in several ways, building up over time into a multi-campus collaborative. We offer a typology of these uses. The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has helped facilitate this cooperative, and we discuss its role here as well.

The past six years have seen a renaissance in connecting gaming and teaching. Games have been considered as teaching devices for centuries, as far back as seeing chess as a political or military learning tool, or the development of Kriegspiel by the Prussian military staff. Twentieth-century militaries used simulations to plan for war. Political science and other fields simultaneously developed role-playing, counterfactual, and other games to think through decisions and other affairs of state.

The digital age has continued this gaming and teaching engagement, adding many computational affordances to this theme: easy copying, networking, graphics, virtual worlds, and so on. Computer gaming first grew into an industry during the 1980s. After a crash the field rebuilt itself in the 1990s, then took off, growing into a massive global economic sector. The gaming industry persists and even grows through our current time of economic crisis.

It is to 2003 that we can trace our current pedagogical concern. James Paul Gee published What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave), sparking a wave of excitement and exploration. Gee argued that modern games are often pedagogical instruments, teaching players how to use and improve at play. The gaming field offers varied and complex teaching forms, Gee showed, identifying more than one hundred pedagogical principles at work in a variety of games: embodied action and feedback, projective identity, edging the regime of competence (in Vygotskian terms), the probe-reprobe cycle, social learning, role playing, “fish tank” tutorial structures, and even strategic self-assessment.

Other writers have followed Gee’s path, such as Marc Prensky, Henry Jenkins, Mia Consalvo, John Seely Brown, and Eric Klopfer. Academic practitioners have developed games and reflected on their practice, including Constance Steinkuhler, Kurt Squire, and Ian Bogost. Academic programs have emerged, like MIT’s Education Arcade. An annual conference is held in Wisconsin, while gaming and education tracks have become widespread across academic computing meetings. Libraries both academic and public have engaged gaming on several fronts, including collection development and community outreach.

What have these various explorers learned? Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) summarized recently that games are now viewable as platforms for learning, on several levels. First, they clearly teach a variety of skills, from improved hand-eye coordination to numeracy to teamwork. Sometimes this is the outcome of an educational game, as with math skills in DimensionM; otherwise it is the result of playing a non-educational game, as with the advanced numeracy taught by playing EVE Online, with its elaborate economic systems. In this way games serve as delivery mechanisms for desired content. Second, games are used as simulations of real-world, academic topics. For example, MIT’s Education Arcade built a simulation of 18th-century American colonial politics, called Revolution, for use in history classes. The state of California ran a major simulation exercise called The Great Shakeout, in order to teach citizens how to better respond to an earthquake.

Third, Mittell sees games for learning as serving political functions. They can be analyzed for their explicit political impact. Games with overt political content are growing in number. Examples include the Dean Game for that candidate’s 2004 presidential run, UNESCO’s FoodForce, or Molle Industries’ Oiligarchy.



Screen shot from Oiligarchy

Political games can also be used to support community engagement and activism, active citizenship being a classic goal of liberal education. Fourth, games are used in objects of study in various media studies curricula. We have seen courses about gaming under various media studies rubrics, while game content has been incorporated into classes covering non-gaming topics in fields as diverse as English literature, psychology, and cultural studies. Fifth, classes sometimes create games or game content. Consider this a constructivism form of using gaming in classes, where students construct their learning actively, under the guidance of faculty. (NITLE videoconference brownbag, January 2008)

It is important to note at this point that “gaming” is a broad and broadening field, although popularly conceived in quite narrow terms. It is easy to characterize computer gaming by the synecdoche of a single example, notably Grand Theft Auto or, for the historically inclined, Mario Brothers. In fact the industry offers a wide range not only of titles and platforms, but even genres. We can find evidence for this in the Pew Internet and American Life Project study from 2008, which surveyed United States teenagers for their preferred game types. Even a casual glance at the list reveals a series of distinct forms: puzzle games vs first-person shooters, simulations and virtual worlds, massively multiplayer social games and driving games.



Pew Internet and American Life Project 2008- Games played by teens

Game scholarship has explored this growing diversity in ever-increasing detail. Indeed, the fact that “game studies” exists is noteworthy, even essential for understanding the intersections of gaming and higher education. A body of scholarship already exists as of this writing. Titles such as Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds.; MIT Press, 2009) demonstrate a multidisciplinary approach. Scholars at traditional liberal arts campuses contribute to this field, as with Depauw University’s Harry J. Brown, and his Videogames and Education (M.E. Sharpe, 2008).

A parallel development to scholarly publication has occurred in the library world. Academic and public libraries have been pursuing games along several lines, as we first noted earlier. First, as stewards of humanity’s cultural heritage, libraries have been exploring game collection development. This involves a series of problems, such as how many game platforms (hardware) to maintain, when to use emulators, how much secondary literature to aggregate, and so on. Second, in their tradition of public outreach, a growing number of libraries host game nights, where the local community is invited to play games. Third, as librarians have historically created content (scholarship, finding guides, catalogues, etc.), some libraries have created computer games. For example, a University of Michigan group has developed (and continues to iterate) the Defense of Hidgeon, a medieval fantasy-themed game about information literacy. For all of these library-gaming connections a literature has appeared – for example, Gaming in Academic Libraries (Amy Harris and Scott E. Rice, eds.; ACRL, 2008).

Gaming and liberal education: a tentative taxonomy

So much for the big picture of higher education in general and its engagement with computer gaming. Now we turn to our narrower topic, the intersection of gaming and liberal education. In 2009 the subject has advanced enough to yield a range of examples, from which we can hazard a tentative typology, some principles, and anticipations of new developments.
How does the liberal arts campus differ from other academic institutions in this area? We would do well to note the commonalities. Liberal arts colleges and universities share concerns which should be intelligible to any campus, including concerns about best pedagogical practices, how to support gaming technologies, and how to fit gaming use into the tenure/promotion/review processes.

Given that common background, in order to assess the differences, we need to review different models of what liberal education is. Most sound familiar, and many overlaps exist, but the differences lead to distinguishable policies and practices. Here we draw on Jo Ellen Parker’s schemata, delivered with an eye towards informatics and digital technologies (Jo Ellen Parker, Academic Commons, 2008). One such model emphasizes learning for learning’s sake. Undergraduate education may be supported to allow students and faculty to follow inquiries wherever they lead, and practical, productized outcomes deemphasized. Another, related to this, emphasizes certain forms of pedagogy, such as active learning, or close faculty/student collaboration. A third model turns outward, and focuses on preparing students for life in an energetic democracy, to be engaged citizens, and also to take up leadership roles. A fourth model focuses not on function but identity, seeing liberal education as what liberal arts institutions do.

It is not our purpose today to select one of these, nor to assess their relative merits. Instead we draw on these distinctions to suggest the conceptual and practical diversity underlying liberal education. Different implementations of gaming on campus can connect with different choices and assumptions about what that campus values in its educational mission.

Along a similarly classification-minded line, we can now offer another. We have seen enough instances of gaming in the liberal arts that cataloguing them would challenge this session’s time limit. Instead, we would be better served by developing a taxonomy of current practices. The list follows:

• Faculty research
• Faculty/staff game creation
  • Classes and learning
  • Professional games as learning objects
  • Professional games as objects of study
  • Students creating game content
  • Students creating games

These categories are determined by several conceptual assumptions. First, note the distinction between faculty research and classroom teaching. The liberal arts tradition emphasizes a continuity between the two, which we honor here by breaking down cases between those poles. At the same time research and teaching are generally distinguished in all of academia, and their respective institutional underpinnings play a key role in considering gaming.

Second, we draw on the history of academia’s use of other media to tease out different uses of content. Namely, we echo film studies’ separation of creating vs. analyzing media.

Third, different populations play varied roles in the taxonomy. Faculty are both teachers and researchers, consumers and creators. Staff here includes academic computing, librarians, and the rest of information technology.

Let us explore each category.

Faculty Research

We mentioned the growing field of academic game studies earlier. Liberal arts campus faculty have entered this field. One example comes from Harry Brown, Depauw University.



His Videogames and Education (M.E. Sharpe, 2008) explores this intersection from a humanities perspective. A quick glance at the book’s contents shows an engagement with a series of classic literary concerns, at least in its first two sections:

• Part I: Poetics
  • Chapter 1: Videogames and Storytelling
  • Chapter 2: Videogame Aesthetics
  • Chapter 3: Videogames and Film
• Part II: Rhetoric
  • Chapter 4: Politics, Persuasion, and Propaganda in Videogames
  • Chapter 5: The Ethics of Videogames
  • Chapter 6: Religion and Myth in Videogames
• Part III: Pedagogy
  • Chapter 7: Videogames, History, and Education
  • Chapter 8: Identity and Community in Virtual Worlds
  • Chapter 9: Modding, Education, and Art

The third part strikes close to this presentation’s topic. Brown grounds his discussion historically, and also draws on the rich cybercultural topic of virtual communities.

Brown’s book is one example of liberal arts campuses producing book-length scholarly work on computer games. Articles are also appearing. We should expect more.

Faculty/Staff Game Creation

A different type of campus-gaming interaction involves staff creating computer games. “Staff” here refers to a mixture drawing on faculty, librarians, and various technologists. While the prospect of building an industrial-quality game daunts many academics, especially during a major recession, there are many ways to create games without breaking one’s bank.

One such way is to build on preexisting content. For example, Christian Spielvogel (Hope College) has been building a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) about the American Civil War. This social simulation is based on primary documents already available in a digital archive, the excellent Valley of the Shadow. Student-players create character avatars based on a combination of their classroom learning and the Valley’s extensive primary source materials, trying to recapture the lives of residents from two wartime communities. They then interact with each other in character, experiencing and debating the war’s epochal events.



Valley Sim, http://www.valleysim.com/

Another example of liberal arts campus game creation comes from the Trinity University (Texas) library. Staff working on outreach and bibliographic instruction developed an alternate reality game (ARG) called Blood on the Stacks. An ARG consists of distributed pieces of content, often not labeled as being in a game, organized as a mystery, and both solved and narrated through collaborative play. The mystery plot of Blood on the Stacks revolved around a murder in the library, with clues scattered throughout its physical and information spaces. Students had to learn the library, information literacy, and some critical thinking in order to succeed.



Blood on the Tracks, Trinity University ARG

Games as Learning Objects

Another typological layer considers game content to be learning content. This draws on the long history of learning objects, dating back to the 1990s. Here games are akin to CD-ROMs, textbooks, or presentations to the campus by visitors: intellectual content to be considered, and responded to.

Examples here are widespread, and we can start with several from Dickinson College. Shalom Staub, that campus’ Assistant Provost for Academic Affairs, teaches a course on Conflict Resolution, where the game Peacemaker is used and studied. Peacemaker simulates aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, already a subject present on the course syllabus. Playing Peacemaker gives students the opportunity to observe situational dynamics. Replaying it lets students return to earlier problems, trying out different responses, along the lines of counterfactual history. Writing in response to these gaming experiences allows students the chance to integrate their curricular work.



Screen shot from Peacemaker game

Across Dickinson’s campus Todd Bryant teaches German, sometimes using games in that language. Bryant has used World of Warcraft and Bioshock, letting students learn German vocabulary and syntax through experiencing the game interface and content. Non-textual content (music, images, video) reinforces the linguistic experience.



Learning German in games

As Bryant wrote in his first published article on this pedagogy,

If the game provides authentic language content and requires communication in order to progress through the game—and our students are willing to spend hours of their time immersed in this environment— we can greatly increase not only their overall exposure to the language but their motivation to learn as well.

Back at Trinity University, Aaron Delwiche teaches an interactive multimedia course. Gaming plays an increasing role in it. For example, during the spring 2006 instance students conducted ethnographic analyses on groups within World of Warcraft.

Students Creating Game Content

A twist on game creation comes with using game platforms to produce small games. For example, Chris Fee (Gettysburg College) uses Interactive Fiction (IF) to teach medieval British literature. Students learn Inform 7, a free, open source authoring tool, then write short game-narratives about key archaeological locations or texts.



Student created game content using Inform 7

We can compare this with Second Life projects, wherein students build objects and locations in that environment. Second Life is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the comparison might prove fruitful for others.

Students Creating Games

Students are central to liberal education, and their role in gaming is often cited. Using games, for instance, is often seen as a way for older faculty and staff to connect with a younger, game-experienced generation.

A project example is Venatio Creo, built by computer science students from Ursinus College. Venatio Creo isn’t a game, but a game creation toolkit. Users can build relatively simple games with it, including platform jumpers. The intention was to lower bars to entry into game design, especially for an academic population. A 3D engine is currently being tested.



Venatio Creo - a game creation environment

The Role of NITLE

Having surveyed a typology of projects, we can now turn to the role played by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. NITLE is a nonprofit organization, working to advance technology in liberal education. We conduct research into emerging technologies, then offer professional development programs for liberal arts campuses in order to adopt those technologies most effectively and appropriately. In addition we help foster communities of interest and practice across more than one hundred such campuses, anchored on matters technological and curricular.

We have been following gaming’s use in technology for some years, researching its uses in the liberal arts world. NITLE has offered programs and presentations on gaming and learning, including cosponsoring a conference (Dickinson, 2007), workshops on campuses (Bryn Mawr, 2008), several videoconference sessions, queries and discussion on email lists, presentations to major NITLE events, presentations to other fora, publications, and blogging. We have participated in game co-creation, once through an ARG hosted by the Educause ELI conference (ELI 2009), and currently through a Web prediction markets game (NITLE prediction markets, http://markets.nitle.org/).



NITLE Prediction Markets

We have also helped facilitate a gaming and teaching network. This lives partly through peer-to-peer relationships and partly through Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, Twitter). Some post links and resources to a Diigo social bookmarking group. There are now faculty and staff involved from the following campuses:

• Albion College
• Austin College
• Depauw University
• Dickinson College
• Gettysburg College
• Hope College
• Middlebury College
• Swarthmore College
• Trinity University (Texas)
• Ursinus College
• Vassar College

Overall, NITLE has helped connect experimenters across liberal arts campuses. We are seeing the emergence of a peer group of faculty and staff, sharing knowledge and projects.

What have we learned from this combination of research and networking? First, we have seen some factors supporting intercampus collaboration, starting with strength in diversity . Multiple disciplines offer a variety of ways to use games. Multiple regions of the United States showcase diverse approaches as well. Further, the network needs “supernodes” to function. These are activists and evangelists who share their passion and energize others. For example, Todd Bryant has done yeoman’s service on his campus, Dickinson College, but also gone beyond to work with others, via presentations, publications, a conference, and unflagging collaborative energies.

Low barriers to entry are crucial. This can mean accessible games requiring little support, such as the off-the-shelf Peacemaker. It can also mean selecting tools with low difficulties, like Inform. Drawing on preexisting content helps (like using Valley of the Shadow for ValleySim).

It is also essential to have educational examples to show what can be done in this field. The growing body of game studies literature helps, but learning about liberal arts campus projects is even more inspirational. Since there is no generally accepted single directory or registry for this need, NITLE plays an important role in connecting people with projects.

What Next?

Where is this movement going? What next for the network? One sign of the future comes from CNN, actually, who posed this question last year: “Computer games as liberal arts?” That article went on to state that “educators who teach kids to make their own video games are on education’s cutting edge.” (CNN, 2008). In other words, connecting liberal education with computer gaming is becoming less strange, and might even become expected.

It is possible that these campuses will experiment with other ways to combine gaming and education. We can see such possibilities for the liberal arts in current practice in other sectors. For example, machinima may be used for video production. Information fluency and/or media fluency curricula might incorporate gaming. And modding, or modifying a game to suit another purpose, could well prove attractive during this recession.

The recession might drive liberal arts campuses to further exploring no- and low-cost games. We’ve seen this approach from other educational institutions, such as “Nanw’s Adventure,” from the National Library of Wales. Designed in Flash, a popularly available media production tool, this game teaches a combination of library skills with Welsh cultural history. It is free to access on the Web. Perhaps liberal arts libraries, or other campus units, will follow that road.

As for NITLE, we are continuing to help. We plan on continuing our current work, as the Diigo group launches, stories are being blogged, and our prediction market grows in exchanges and traders. We are reaching out to more schools and organizations to celebrate these projects and explorers, as with this very presentation.

As fall 2009 approaches, we’ve seen games play a role in summer preparation for fall classes. Interest in ARGs is growing. Mobile gaming pilots have been discussed at Vassar and elsewhere. Exchanges of ideas, inspiration, and experience are rippling across campuses and state lines. 2009-2010 looks like another promising year for the intersection of gaming and liberal education.

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