A Language of Play

 Raul sent this to me the other day. Grading right now, so no time to pick up something at random to read. I'll put it here and come back to it later.

"A Language of Play: New Media’s Possibility Spaces." Joshua Daniel-Wariya. Computers and Composition 40 (2016) 32–47. The link below will take you to the abstract on Science Direct, which seems to think we're willing to pay 31 dollars for a journal article. Many university libraries carry Computers and Composition on a database. If not, inter-library loan is always an option. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2016.03.011

The MIT Online Educational Policy Initiative

Anyone who taught in a computer classroom in the 90s remembers how those classrooms always seemed to be made for doing something other than teaching. They were designed by technicians ostensibly for teachers. Unfortunately, most of the time, those technicians had never themselves taught, so their designs often didn't fit our needs. As often happens in academia, the designs fit the dimensions of some room in the basement where the computer lab was--right next to the Writing Center, and just as difficult to find.

For those of us who taught writing, the layout was even more foreign, since those rooms always seemed to be set up like a lecture, something we'd long since moved away from. We couldn't rearrange those computer desks in a circle for class discussion or in multiple circles for group work. I remember asking all the students to pull their chairs up to the front of the room and squeeze together. Thank goodness the chairs all had wheels.

So, it's no surprise to me that the MIT study came to the conclusion that we should, "focus on people and process, not technology" (IHE). In other words, teaching should guide technology, not technology guide teaching. Surprise.


MIT Online Education Policy Initiative: https://oepi.mit.edu/final-report

Summary in Inside Higher Education (if you don't have time to read the whole report): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/20/mit-online-learning-report-notes-importance-teachers-instructional-designers?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f4741c5510-DNU20160420&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f4741c5510-197508093

Drive By Book Review: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson.

With it's bright orange cover, The State of Play immediately announces that overly subtle academiceze will not be in play--though insight and intelligence is widely displayed. This little book contains 13 diverse essays that, as the title suggests, explores video game culture from the inside. 

Forget Fox Channel clichés about video games causing violence. This issue isn’t ignored; it’s handled in a sophisticated enough way that, as Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh write in “The Joy of Virtual Violence,” “It's the rest of the world that needs to catch up” (155).

Essays range from straight on commentaries on gender discrimination—a more critical issue than violence for most gamers—representation of race and ethnicity, to esoteric explorations of identity, as in Ola Wikander’s “The God in the Machine”:  

“There is an interesting relationship that can be imagined between this type of Gnostic mythology and the role of the video game player in relation to the character he or she plays. Just like the fallen human soul described by Gnostic religions, the video game player steps into a false world that only exists for as long as one believes in it” (246).

Twine: an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

I've been playing with Twine (http://twinery.org/).

From their website:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.


I found the stories I was most attracted to were the nonlinear (not necessarily plot-based) stories that explicitly took advantage of the format. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

http://www.fahlstaff.com/

https://sub-q.com/play-a-man-in-his-life/

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/the-arboretum
I'm playing round with the possibility of using Twine to deliver instruction online. Could lecture notes, even lectures, become interactive using Twine. I'll play with the possibilities this summer.  

10 Rules of Etiquette for Video Conferencing

That Wall Street Journal. They've got rules for everything.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ten-rules-of-etiquette-for-videoconferencing-1457921535

Of course, Blast From the Past already covered everything we need to know in a 49 second scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP-rXX6MICE

Snapchat as Flash Cards

Here's a guy using Snapchat as a means to reinforce the major points in his lectures. He gets a lot of grief in the comments. I wanted to post a comment at the end of this article, but NPR never sent me a confirmation of registration e-mail, so I was unable to. Simply put, all he's doing is sending his students the equivalent of 3X5 flashcards, something some of them will doubtless do with their lecture notes anyway, to refresh their memory. What a great idea.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/29/467091289/how-teachers-are-using-snapchat?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=thirteenseven&utm_term=artsculture&utm_content=20160330

Digital Course Materials--Yet Another Survey

I wonder how much laziness feeds this attitude. After all, if you go digital, you often have to develop your own materials out of that unsorted information base called the Internet. Isn't it easier just to pick something that's been packaged and tied up with a bow?


https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/22/study-faculty-members-skeptical-digital-course-materials-unfamiliar-oer?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=194526da11-DNU20160222&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-194526da11-197508093

FREE WEBINAR: USING ROBOTIC TELEPRESENCE TO IMPROVE LEARNING IN HYBRID CLASSES

At first I laughed:

I actually got an e-mail this weekend advertising this webinar. I’m thinking about signing up and turning it into a drinking game. Anyone want to join me? Thursday 2:00 at University Draft House. We can ask them to put it on the TV over the bar.  

Is this the wave of the future?

Student: “Hello? Is this the robot who is supposed to look over my paper and correct my grammar errors?
Robotutor:  “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”

Student: “Who’s Dave? Can you help me or not? Is there some problem with my paper?”

Robotutor: “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Student: “What are you talking about?

Robotutor: “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”  

Student: “What mission? I just want help with my grammar.”  

Robotutor: “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.”

Student: “What? Who’s Frank? Is he that guy in the Writing Center who said they shut down the OWL and I should call you if I needed help after five? I should have just asked my aunt who teaches second grade.” Click.  

Then, I googled robotic telepresence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI5fryQMGss  

 

Now I want one for Christmas. 

"Plato's Wiki: the Possibility of Digital Dialectic."

Link to "Plato's Wiki: the Possibility of Digital Dialectic," my take on the intersection between between wikis and classroom discussion, and which we can most readily label "dialectic."


http://qudoublehelixjournal.org/index.php/dh/article/view/50/242

OER and Competency-based Learning Webinar

Dec 2: OER and Competency-based Learning Webinar

Please join the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) for a free and open webinar on how OER is being used to design and offer low-cost competency-based certificates and degrees.  Competency-based degrees can offer a shorter path to a degree because students advance as soon as they master the subject matter. Students work at their own pace and move as far and fast as their proven knowledge takes them. With competencies that are clearly aligned to career skills, graduates are more employable.

Washington community colleges launched their first competency based degree with an online business transfer degree that uses only open educational resources and no commercial textbooks.  The program has been in pilot mode at single college since summer 2015 but will be expanding to 7 more colleges in Winter 2016.  Students in this particular competency-based program are taught by highly qualified instructors and receive guidance from completion coaches.

Lord Fairfax Community College (LFCC) launched competency-based education this fall with their Knowledge to Work program. With approval from its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, LFCC becomes the first institution in the region to offer 100% direct assessment, competency-based education. Direct assessment does not involve counting hours in the classroom. Instead, the focus shifts to documenting learning and the attainment of competencies using OER and low cost curriculum which makes college both more affordable and accelerated.

Date: Wed, December 2, 
Time: 10 am PST, 1:00 pm EST


Featured Speakers:

• Mark Jenkins, Director of eLearning & Open Education, State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, Washington State
• Kiri Johnson, Digital Librarian, Knowledge to Work, Lord Fairfax Community College, Virginia

Participant Login Information:

No pre-registration is necessary.  Please use the link below on the day of the webinar to login and listen.

http://www.cccconfer.org/MyConfer/GoToMeetingAnonymousely.aspx?MeetingSeriesID=0b39cf48-aa30-4bc6-bb9d-cbecc9256384

READ THIS PRIOR TO YOUR FIRST CCC CONFER MEETING TO ENSURE YOUR COMPUTER IS READY!

FOR ASSISTANCE: CCC Confer Client Services – Monday – Friday between 8:00 am – 4:00 pm
Telephone: 760-744-1150 ext 1537, 1554 or 1542 
Email: clientservices@cccconfer.org

If you need dial-in access, you may use the following number:
1-888-886-3951 (passcode: 781859)

Food for Fines

This has little to do directly with online education, but it's a cool idea, and it does illustrate creative thinking to solve campus problems.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/18/food-fines-elizabethtown

OER Zero Cost Textbooks for Core Courses

From Inside Higher Ed

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 - 3:00am

Northern Virginia Community College's zero-textbook-cost degree programs are going open source. The community college, with help from open-courseware provider Lumen Learning, on Monday made nine of its courses available under a Creative Commons license, meaning instructors at other institutions are free to reuse and repurpose the content. The courses, which use free open educational resources instead of textbooks, satisfy requirements in NOVA's associate degree programs in general studies and social sciences. Lumen Learning and NOVA plan to release a total of 24 courses.

http://lumenlearning.com/partner-nova-zeli/