Seminar (presence) will be held on Thursdays from 10:00-12:00 (german time), starting with April 9th to July 16th 2009

From the description:

A player is usually intrinsically motivated and angst-free to experience and practice new knowledge in a problem-oriented and highly contextualised manner, bound to fail and retry in a controlled artificial environment – and even has fun doing so.
If the factual, practical, or reflective game-knowledge could be transfered to the player’s everyday life, we’d have an ideal educational setting (or a bloody massacre) at hand.
The stunning visuals of contemporary computergames lead to a common fallacy in the understanding of play: We don’t play games because they resemble reality. We play them because they don’t.

This seminar deals with ludic simulations, known as games, from a practical, theoretical and reflective point of view. One goal is to shed light on inherent antagonistic sides of games and media in general: Rule-bound compliance and stability, as well as an appropriatable and configurable space of possibilities. Further questions concern the use of games and play for (educational) representation of complex systems or ethical behaviour.

Conceptually this seminar takes place in its second term and is related to Pedagogical Media Theory, a major of the international MA study ePedagogyDesign. Students who have visited the previous seminar “Games, Play and Education” (summer term 2008) or “Pedagogical Media Theory exemplified by Game Based Learning” (winter term 2008/09) and already know how to apply the key texts on cognition, media, games and play – i.e. learning theories, medium and form, theories of games and play – may use this lecture as project seminar and are invited to draft, design, realise and reflect on a game usable for educational purposes.

I’m still not quite sure how to manage this option parallel to the quite time consuming offline-seminar here in Hamburg; probably with an assessive colloqium as a start, loose support during the term, and an online work-in-progress presentation in the last third of the course.

This term – winter 2008 – my seminar focussed on basics of media theory and their application to the understanding, use and creation of games in an educational frame. While my last seminar dealt mainly with learning theories and motivation, the view turned to media in general, in culture, communication and creation.
Taking a closer look at ‘New Media’ – networked digital media – isn’t simply learning about new channels for educative content. It may be a change from a receptive, interpretative, centralised form of communication to a configurative, collaborative, decentralised one. Both its’ (at this time) predominant traits, digitality supporting its role as recursive media-simulating metamedium, and networking supporting its role as global social medium, may influence the way we perceive information, knowledge and learning.
This seminar had a focus on ludic simulations, known as games and toys. These share some traits with digital media, but also may shed light on two inherent antagonistic sides: Rule-bound compliance and stability, as well as an appropriatable and configurable space of possibilities.

The seminar was divided into three parts:
First, theories of media and cognition by Marshal McLuhan, Scott McCloud, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster and Bertold Brecht, spiced up by examples and questions. What defines a medium? What medium is suited for which kind of content? How does a medium influence one’s cognition and culture?
Second, theories of game, play and gamedesign by Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith, Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Gonzalo Frasca, Chris Crawford and Kurt Squire, with samples abound. Questions here are: What defines a rule based game, what free playing? What can be ‘learned’ by playing, seen from a media theoretical point of view? How can games support educational intentions?
Third, project work including the conceptualisation, realisation and reflection of an edcuational game.

Review

Participation was moderate, compared to 2008 summerterm’s “Games, Play and Education”, with about 22 students from Hamburg and one student from Helsinki (via Skype).
Since I received strong positive feedback on the project-oriented structure of the seminar, but this time also had to cover a wide range of media theory, I stocked up the amount of texts to read, often dividing the students into two groups to read – and present – two different texts each session. In hindsight this didn’t work out as planned, since many texts – like Luhmann, McLuhan or Bateson – were both important for the conceptual understanding of media, but also quite hard to grasp. Discussion among students were also hindered. Future seminars will be held with one (or less) text per session, but accompanied by a small list of questions to direct the students’ attention to core concepts. Smaller or easier texts can still be read in multiple groups, as long as the subject is closely related to provide for a lively controverse discussion.

What I deemed quite successful for the topic of media theory was the example of diverse non-mainstream-media to represent strengths and weaknesses of media, like micro-content-videos (commoncraft-show), comics (McCloud), common seminar situations, and (digital) game examples. Translating educational content into an unfamiliar form provided by game requirements also proved inspirational for the students, who came up with six quite diverse projects, ranging from dedicated analog card-games to shooter-modifications to design-concepts.
Remarkable: Last term there were only digital game projects (one excellent one lost due to HD-crash!)of mostly analytical or conceptual nature; this time there was a dominance of analog game projects, which, due to their nature as handicraft-projects, got finished, and were testplayed by the seminar. I hope I can put them up in our Wiki.

There was also the experiment to use a shared wiki, with Ralf and Christina working on related or quite disparate topics. Creating (an, any) order to prevent the wiki slipping into chaos is quite the challenge, especially if the scrutiny of order and categorisation themselves is one of the main topics of the seminars. We’ll see how this’ll turn out over the next terms.

Anyone can start a Twine about anything, and invite members. Members can post things there: essays, but also urls, media, and anything that can be stored on the web. Each post can be tagged, shared and commented on. Even better there is a Firefox bookmarklet that you can use to post any web page you are reading to the Twine of your choice, tagging it and adding a comment as you go.

This means that groups like ours can create shared libraries of interesting online material, and then link it through posting essays of our own that draw threads between various posted links and media.

Obviously I managed to get an invitation, and I have just invited everyone whose email address I had to hand. If you have not been invited (Wey hasn’t for one because I didn’t have his email address in Airset for some reason) then email me and I will invite you. This also applies to all the new students. Mail me at owen@owenkelly.net with the subject Twine ePed and I will invite you straight away.

It seems much neater in lots of ways than other attempts to create such an online shared library, and I think that we should try it to see what use we can make of it.

Web 2.0 and onwards!

The goal was to give a theoretical and practical insight into games and play both in general, and more specific as means for learning within and about rule systems. Games and toys as interactive and changeable microcosms of rules, of perpetuation, variation and transgression, may deliver interesting insights into basically similar systems which are harder to access, change, or understand – like education or media.

The seminar started with about 50 students (mostly teachers-to-be) crammed into an ICT-seminar room laid out for about 20 people; and it was meant to work with an additional five online students from Finland and Spain. As communication platform I planned to use Skype-Video and/or Adobe Connect, as presentation and collaboration plattform there was a smartboard and ten Macintosh-computers in the room, with access to the faculty’s online communciation system ‘EduCommSy’ with a dedicated project room for announcements, links, reading materials, tasks, discussions, attached Wiki etc.

The second session showed that I was too optimistic in trying to attend to the needs and questions of a mixed presence and online audience that big and diverse, while at the same time handle, maintain and troubleshoot the technic, and also verbally and medially deliver coherent content and suggestions. The Skype-connections and Adobe Connect tended to break down or froze, the webcam had to be directed to the speaker in the seminar. During the third session, my Apple MacBook Pro with iSight Webcam I was using as communication-interface suffered a fatal hardware crash, taking texts and drafts with it. Bad Karma.
From that point, I decided to split the seminar into an asynchronous online and offline seminar; not in the spirit of the game, but at least technically reliable, and, though requiring a higher workload, better to manage for me.

The interests and preconceptions shown by the students in games in general were – to speak mildly – very diverse, from students who hadn’t played at all (not even board- or cardgames) to professional working with commercial games. The approach of integrating all these different takes later on showed to be a mistake, it heightened the burden for me to dig for relevant questions, tasks and source texts, and irritated many students, who were longing for a clear, strong lead and a coherent linear path through the seminar.
Interestingly many students in the beginning complained about the high amount of theoretical texts I uploaded to the Community System (though they liked the ease of access to the texts), while the remaining students later on, in the feedback session, expressed the wish for more theoretical texts and sessions.
This was probably due to the functional split of the seminar, which combined a theoretical foundation in the first eight session with a practical project group approach in the remaining six sessions. After the first theoretical half of the seminar, the number of students was down to about 18, but kept stable and highly motivated till the end of the seminar.
This is – and will be – a problem for me: How to downsize a seminar to a workable groupsize without explicit exclusions? How to integrate the students’ diverse interests in a topic without losing coherence and thus foster disorientation?

On the other hand I was surprised how inventive and motivated some groups tackled their projects, and how much dedication flowed into games and programs. Although some groups restrained themselves to the ’safer’ approach of analysing existing games or genres, there were also some highly ambitious goals I hope will stand out as ‘work in progress’ in the end, due to the sheer amount of technical, creative and theoretical expertise it will probably cost to finalise them ‘for real’.

There is a Wiki as virtual collaborative workspace/showroom attached to the seminar’s online EduCommSy-project room, where you can browse notes on the seminar and the groups’ projects. The projects will (hopefully) be finalised in September:
http://www.commsywiki.uni-hamburg.de/wikis/197543/1186929/

——–

Last year I began to explore the consequences of combining a blog and a wiki. This project initially seemed to consist of two related problems: one conceptual and one technical. It soon became clear, howeer, that they were simply two approaches to the same problem.

Both blogs and wikis were created by individuals wanting to answer a personal need, and only later spread across the web and became standard methods for organising and presenting information. Blogs were created out of a desire to keep a journal online, and to make it easy to add entries to the journal from anywhere with web access, and to read the entries back in a way that made sense. Wikis were created as a way of making notes that linked together. The original wiki was created to make it possible to add notes on a topic in any order; to link them as easily as possible; and to have those links appear within the individual notes so that a trail could be followed later by a reader.

Now that both of these formats have become quasi-standards, and are quoted approvingly in documents about education and pedagogy, my problem was to work out what advantage, if any, would accrue from combining blogs and wikis into a single piece of software. This meant finding out what they actually did, as opposed to what there were often discussed as doing. This meant looking at how they actually worked. The technical issues were simply manifestations of the conceptual assumptions that the programmers had made.

Received wisdom suggests that the difference is that blogs are sorted choronologicaly and reflect one point of view, usually passionate; and that wikis are sorted by topic or category and are designed to allow whole communities to work together on building knowledge. If this was ever true, then it is ceetainly not now.

There are, of course, many blogs where passionate individuals write chronological journals in which they assume the role of committed expert within their chosen field. There are also many group blogs, however, in which communities of interest document their progress towards goals. Some of these are official documents, used by companies to present themselves to their customers. Yahoo and Google both have many official blogs in which various teams within the companies keep users up to date on developments. Linden Labs use their company blog as the only official way in which they communicate about developments, upgrades and technical issues in the virtual world Second Life.

There are many wikis that followed the much-discussed path of Wikipedia and seek to become self-correcting repositories of group knowledge. There are also many individual wikis, where people gather togather material they may want to use later, just as there are company wikis which serve as online manuals and instruction guides.

Ralf suggested that one crucial difference between the two was the way that they pointed. Links in blogs tend to point outwards to other blogs, and other websites. Links in wikis tend to point inwards to other pages in the same wiki. In other words, blogs tend to be seen by their authors as nodes in a much larger network, and it is this network (the so-called blogosphere) that gives individual blogs their importance. Wikis tend to be seen as complete documents: everything you want to know about Subject X in one place. These differences are as much decisions of choice as technical constraints. It is perfectly possible to place lots of internal links into a blog, and there is absolutely nothing to prevent a wiki being filled to the brim with external entries.

The question of what benefit we could derive from combining the two cannot, then, be answered by simply trying to combine the current uses, for then we would simply have something with links that pointed inwards and links that pointed outwards: a standard website in other words. I would sugest that the question needs to be rephrased: what activity can we imagine undertaking that would require both a blog and a wiki to be successful, and how can we realise it. To ask this is to move beyond “blikis” (hybrids built to deomonstrate that we can build them) to human activity – business, learning, entertainment – and to ask how activity can be enhanced.

One answer to this question is the central subject of Beyond the Electonic Portfolio: a lifetime personal web space, a paper by Ellen R Cohn and Bernard J Hibbitts. Their arguments provide a concise summary of my own thinking, in that they address the issue of what people want and what tool they could have to help them meet that need.

They suggest that in a knowledge society there is a need for an individual, networked personal harbour for everyone in which they can store both data of their own creation and links to material found elsewhere. They suggest borrowing the term memex from Vannevar Bush to describe this. I feel strongly that this is a mistake, for two reasons. Firstly it confuses the issue by making it difficult to differentiate between the hardware Bush was referring to and the software we are talking about. Secondly Bush’s project was grander than the scope of what either Cohn and Hibbitts or I have been discussing. I am therefore proposing to call my personal harbour a memexie: a cute derivative term that implies it is less than a memex and different from one. This leaves us free to discuss the differences without confusion.

A memexie can be seen as a portfolio taken to its ultimate extreme. Cohn and Hibbitts envisage it including junior school reports, high school sports certificates, class photos, every essay that author has ever written since she learned to write, an ongoing journal, and links to every online resource the author has ever used. It might be worth pointing out that Buckminster Fuller would recognise the value f this even more than Bush, since he created just such a repository for his own life. His even included every receipt for every item he bought during his lifetime.

The value of the memexie is simple: it is the externalisation of the author’s mind in a form that allows for total recall.

What was the name of the girl I met in Manchester when I was 16? Which novel of Jules Verne did I quote from in my first term at university? Questions that may now be unanswerable will become instantly acessible. There are difficulties with this approach to one’s life, though, in that it presupposes that privacy in the conventional sense is an artefact of an industrial age and will change or disappear as many other aspects of industrial life have.

To some extent this has already happened without much comment. Mobile phones have completely altered the landscape of privacy and availability. Being out of contact is now a choice people can question rather than an inevitable side effect of getting the bus tothe city centre. Arrangements are now infinitely malleable where thirty years ago a decision, once made, (to meet at the cinema at 19.30, say) might prove almost impossible to rearrange.

However the problems that might arise in redefining the notions of privacy, availability and transparency are nothing compared to the problems the use of a memexie will pose for education, training and pedagogy. These issues are raised by Chris Dede in his paper Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles, in Educause Quarterly. The arguments in this paper become more powerful once one imagines every learner and every teacher having a fully-charged, networked memexie of their own, and using it as a hub for communication of al kinds. They will become linked centres of what Dede calls “co-instruction” and a key mechanism for “infusing case-based participatory simulations into presentational/assimilative instruction”.

Once we get beyond the issues of privacy there will be no need for manufactured simulations because my life will become your case study, just as yours becomes one of mine. It is here, in truly transformative pedagogy, that e-learning starts to become a new kind of discipline, rather than simply a new way of doing what we already recognise as “education”.

What is what we do?
Everyone is having his own blog. Alex uses the whole blog for his epedagogy research, I use a category and Owen just tags his eped articels. By doing this we have three different RSS-Feeds focused on ePedagogy.
To avoid that we have to write our content in two locations we mixed it with the help of xFruits and showed the aggregated feed as a “blog” at blog.epedagogy.org.
I diont like the use of external tools and prefer a installation on own servers. Though I kept on looking around for a tool which could do the feed mash up for us and finally found it.
So that is how we offer our common “blog”-site and a common feed.
You are envited to visit us there focused on epedagogy topics.
Maybe some of these tools or even the content ist interesting for you .
Greetings from Hamburg,
Ralf

I am now happy to say that my blog/wiki thing is now almost working correctly: it has tags and tag clouds and rss feeds all over the place (including, at Ralf’s request, rss feeds for the tags). It also has a blog roll on almost every page, and there are seven SL blogs listed there, as well as some more general ones like Clickable Culture.

It seems sensible to tell everyone about it, rather than send some private emails; and then invite any comments, criticisms, suggestions concerning owenkelly.net

By the way, some of the individual entries need reformatting, and some of the links in individual entries may not work yet, because I ported them all over from WikkaWiki and the formatting and links need re-doing post by post, by hand. Since this only needs doing once then I *will* get round to it, but I haven’t had time yet.

Please have a look at our work – ideas, questions, recommondations etc. are higly welcome.

Cheers,

Christina

Other useful social software apps are del.icio.us for social bookmarking and flickr as a photo sharing platform. (We have a epedagogy group at flickr!)