For some reason this information is really hard to find through Google. Often in my work at OLT we are trying to reuse remix and redistribute a bunch static content from WordPress sites around our campus. In order to do so we need to find feeds for those sites that are just for one post or page, instead of the updating stream. Here is how to get them:
Simply append /?feed=rss&p=111 to the end of your URL. The 111 in the example should be the ID of the post that you want the feed for.
This term I took Computer Science 444 – “Advanced Methods for Human-Computer Interaction”. The main outcome of the course was to go through the process of designing a user interface and evaluating it using formal experiments, producing a paper at the end.
I had the pleasure of working with 4 absolutely fantastic team-mates, Piam Kiarostami, Gabe Silk, alexandru Totolici, and Jre Sarenac. Each of us intuitively picked a role and we worked like a well-oiled machine.
The project we worked on was a collaborative, tabletop, multi-touch diagramming tool that we dubbed “collabee”. We compared our interface to the more traditional ways of diagramming collaboratively (whiteboard and computer) then analysed our results. Below are the reports that we wrote, as well as a video on the project that we produced (it’s only 4 minutes and be sure to stick around for the surprise ending).
Milestone 2: Initial user survey
Milestone 3: Experiment Proposal
Milestone 4: Experiment Results
Final Course Grade: 85%
The idea here is that games and school have more in common than does school and life. So perhaps, instead of finding ways of engaging students by turning to real life, we should be turning to game design.
Both School and Video games are highly repetitive environments where you overcome deliberate obstacles in order to reach a goal. In both cases, you pay money in order to perform work. I’m going to use one of my favorite games of all time, Diablo 2 as an example in some direct comparisons.
Players get rewards for doing tasks:
“Andre attended all his labs and thus has a chance to pass the course” vs. “Andre cleared the Den of Evil and received an extra skill point”.
Bosses have to be overcome at the end of each quest:
“After 4 months of work, Andre’s final task in CPSC 111 is to pass an exam worth 50% of the grade” vs. “In order to complete the first Act, Andre has to defeat the demon queen Andariel”.
There are side quests:
“Andre spoke at the Student Learning Conference and received the Best Returning Presenter Award” vs. “Andre found the Smith’s hammer, as a reward she will imbue one of his items with magical properties”.
Prerequisites:
“In order to do CPSC 314 you have to have taken MATH 121″ vs. “In order to find Tal Rasha’s tomb and finish the act, you need to find the Horadric Staff in the Maggot Lair”.
Reaching final goal grants a status.
“Andre has completed a Bachelor’s of Science and will henceforth be known as Andre Malan, B.SC” vs. “Andre has just slain Diablo, lord of Terror and will henceforth be known as Patriarch Andre”.
Those are just a few examples and there are many, many others out there.
There are many things about school that make it worse than modern video game. The reason is obvious. The game of school was designed a very long time ago when there was very little research available on how to engage students. Here are a few things that makes school suck compared to games:
High cost of failure:
In School failing a course closes many doors. In most classes, if you do badly on an assignment, then you don’t have a chance to get a better grade on it. If you fail too many times, you are kicked out of the game.
In Games, if you get killed trying to complete a quest, you respawn and try again. You may have lost some gold, but if you try hard, you can still complete the quest. You do this until you succeed. You are only judged on the end result. The game doesn’t care how long it takes you to get to a certain point or level… all that matters is that you get there in the end.
Side quests can hurt your chance of success.
In school doing too many things outside may help your overall learning, but can also seriously harm your grades. You have to often choose between doing well in the main storyline and side activities.
In Diablo, side quests only ever have positive consequences. You can get more experience points, as well as cool items or rewards. You also learn more about the world. When you are done your side quest, the main storyline is waiting for you exactly where you left off. In university, why are deadline extensions only reserved for those who are sick? What about those speaking or organizing conferences, organizing food drives, or a myriad of other important learning experiences on campus that take time away from academics? Why can’t we replace assignments with appropriate other activities that still demonstrate our learning?
Bad indicators of progress:
In school, you have grades. You start off with the assumption that you can get 100% if you complete everything. For every assignment or test that you loose points on, that 100% gets reduced. Every mistake that you make will be punished.
A good game has many ways to show you how far you have got. Diablo has levels and experience points. Dragon Age has that, as well as badges. You can visibly track your progress and compare it to that of others. I myself have even gone to class, not due to the clicker points that I would get, but because going to that class would have unlocked a new badge for me on FourSquare. Yes, that may say something about my priorities, but I think it says more about the design of the two respective “games”.
Bad storyline:
In school, the storyline is as follows: You are one of thousands of students with nothing special about you. Complete this numbers of classes, some of them requiring other classes. In each class, your mission is to go to class, hand in the assignments and pass the exam. When you’re done, you get your certificate.
In Diablo, you are a hero travelling around the land trying to stop the demon lord Diablo from freeing his brothers and reigning terror over the whole world. There are hundreds of thousands of heroes at different levels, all working together on this. a Along the way you meet many people who you have to save from situations that Diablo has put them in. Each quest is explicitly linked to this storyline.
This isn’t hard in school. UBC’s vision is a great starting example:
“As one of the world’s leading universities, The University of British Columbia creates an exceptional learning environment that fosters global citizenship, advances a civil and sustainable society,and supports outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada and the world.”
Our mission as a student is to become a global citizen that advances a civil and sustainable society. We are all individuals who have an opportunity to make a difference. That’s a much better mission that the mission we all think we are on… take X number of courses and get a degree. I know that UBC would like us to consider our mission the mission statement, but there is nothing in the system that makes that happen. Here is a perfect example of a game designer would approach showing students what their mission is:
What’s my mission? from Alchemy on Vimeo.
In the end, video game companies have spent billions in money and in man-hours in order to find ways of keeping people engaged in highly repetitive tasks. I think educators should be looking at how they can rework some of the success that game developers have had into the classroom.
The two videos below are what inspired this line of thinking. Both of them are about making life more like a game, but I see more merit in applying them to school, as school is already a game. Applying their line of thinking is easier when thinking about school than real life. Both are quite mind-blowing and will open minds about the value that games play in our society.
This year I am participating in the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK09) course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. I was considering taking it for credit, but ran out of time and energy to jump through the hoops needed to make that happen. So instead I am doing it for fun, learning for the sake of learning, because it is a topic that really interests me (I will have to put some of the principles from my very first blog post into practice).
So what is Connectivism anyway? After reading and watching much of the first week’s content here is my interpretation:
Connectivism is a new learning theory that was developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. It basically states that knowledge “is” connections. It rejects the notion of knowledge as a physical entity (that can be passed from one person to another), but more as something that grows as we create more connections.
According to Siemens and Downes, this type of knowing exists on three (and perhaps more) levels:
Now, of course, this is my gross oversimplification. For more thorough insights into the topic here are some links to read:
The unique idea of connectivism
So here are my questions concerns and thoughts after 1 week:
At OpenEd09 I was part of a very necessary conversation. We were talking about different ways in which our respective universities use WordPress MU. The consensus was that in order for us to be truly successful we need to be sharing much more. Sharing our frameworks, sharing our plugins and sharing our hacks. Boone Gorges frames the conversation nicely here and talks about what is needed from developers. Enej and others responded by reviving the OLT Dev blog. However, Matthew Gold rightly said this:
But we need to build more lasting channels of communication soon, lest we miss some important connections
So here is my attempt to provide those connections:
The basic idea is an aggregation blog for “WPMU for education” developers. Jim Groom provided a blog from his WPMUEd domain so that a new channel, dev.wpmued could be created. I used the Add Link Widget with FeedWordPress to turn this blog into an aggregation of content from developers who are working on developing WPMU in education using the method that Jim and I came up with. I seeded it with a few of my often read WordPress MU in education blogs (myself, Jim, D’Arcy, Boone, OLT and CUNY Dev).
But we need more, much more. If you know of any other blogs that write on this subject, please add their feed to the site. Here is the current master list of institutions that are using WordPress MU. If you have any connections to any of them help the community out by contacting them and asking them to share what they are doing. Also, before you add your feed remember to turn the number of posts up (if you have more than 10 feeds to contribute). If you use WordPress you can include a mutli-tag feed by going “your-url/tag/tag1,tag2,tag3/feed”.
This can be a powerful way to boost our combined development prowess as well as a fantastic demonstration of the power of WordPress to support a community.
the actual conversation happening (photo credit Michelle Lamberson)
Adding your feed is as simple as dropping the URL into the text box on the left sidebar. Add the password (wpmued) and you are done. I’ll be checking for new feeds periodically but you can give me a shout and I’ll activate it ASAP.
Future plans:
I plan to use Wiki Append to pull important content from the wordcamped wiki into pages (it would be done already but wiki-append is having some problems). I think the wiki can act as a second channel of communication. I will post again as soon as all of that is set up. In the mean time, edit the wiki, give it some much needed love!
I’ve also been playing with a branding idea. A year ago I came up with the idea for the UBC BlogSquad of having badges for contributors. It has worked really well as it reminds everyone of the existence of the aggregated blog (including the blogger themselves). It also immediately identifies you as part of the community. Of course, these were all first and second year students and I am not sure if seasoned bloggers want to pollute their blog with badges. If you do, feel free to grab one below. If you don’t like the design feel free to take your own shot at it (icon design is definitely not my strong suit). If you think the idea is stupid and that something else would work better, let me know in the comments below.
Clint Lalonde recently wrote about using Wordle as a reflective tool in order to decide whether the blog posts that he wrote for class were on topic. I like that idea a lot. It also reminded me of thoughts that opened09 had circling in my head. Over time, a writer’s skill and focus changes, that is a given. But how to monitor this? I think Wordle provides a visual representation that is simple and powerful. I will try and take wordle snapshots of this blog every few months and compare them, mostly out of interest, but also as a way of reflecting on my own constantly changing passions and motivations.
So here it is, 17 August 2009, the Wordle for all my content is:
my Wordle
I don’t know about you, but I am terrible at organizing my email. I didn’t realize that “archiving” was something that somebody should do with email until I had thousands of unarchived emails and decided to come up with a different way of doing things. This is what I do:
I treat unread email as to do items. When I check my email I respond to the things I have time to respond to and the rest I mark as unread so that I can respond to them later. This is a very hassle free system. Except, there is one big problem. Gmail does not have a default “show all unread mail” button. This means that it is hard for me to compare my unread mail (to do items) and prioritize this means that some big tasks end up being buried under pages and pages of emails. Of course, with Gmail’s new addons this is very easy to do. Here is how:
enable the add links in settings
search box
add quick link
And there we have it, now your Gmail is set up to list all of your unread mail without the interference of stuff that you have already dealt with.
Here is an anecdote (it happened to me today) outlining just one of the many things that is wrong with closed class websites and LMS in general:
I am currently working at a software company as an intern, writing a program. Now of course, as anybody who has taken Software Engineering knows (don’t worry readers who are not in Computer Science, I promise I will not lose you), when you make software you have to provide different types of documentation about it. Things like, why you made it, how it works, how to use it, who is going to use it… all these things and many more have to be written down formally and saved somewhere in order for your software to live a long and happy life.
Now, Software engineering (CPSC 310) is a class that in part teaches you how to write all of this essential documentation. I took this course with Meghan Allen, one of my favorite professors simply for the fact that she teaches like a human being and not an automaton. This is post is no reflection on her, just on the system that she is pushed into using by those above her . Anyway, in the course she would explain why this documentation was needed and how to do it. She would then provide us with careful examples of what it should look like. We were asked to use her examples as reference when creating our own documentation for our class project.
So far so good, pretty normal learning experience. But, we skip ahead to right now. My little program that I am writing for this big software company needs documentation. I remember why, but am very fuzzy on how. What to do? Of course, I can just go back to the example from class an… but wait. The examples were posted in Blackboard. I can’t see them anymore. They were a great resource… utterly useless as I have no way of applying it to a real life situation.
Ok, Well, not utterly useless. I still have the assignment that I handed in (thanks Google Docs for keeping it safe for me). I could still google the type of documentation and find other examples online, which works, although it takes time (less time of course than writing this post). The thing is, I know that the document is a fantastic resource, why should I have to go and search for others? Shouldn’t the university-provided example be better than most things I can find online anyway? Isn’t that the point of somone spending time writing it up in the first place? Money was used to create that example (mine and the government’s) so why should it be a one-time deal used only to help me complete an assignment? Can anybody come up with a sane reason why it should not be available to me always? I feel ripped off, because I had a resource and it was snatched away from me. If it had been given to me in good old-fashioned paper handouts, I would still have it.
This is just one example amongst a sea of them that I am sure most students experience often. I guess most don’t even realize that they are getting a raw deal for the time effort and money they put into the classroom. In three years of university I have taken well over 10 courses with Blackboard components. What do I have to show for it? See for yourself. Below is my list of blackboard courses. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?
My blackboard welcome screen
The short explanation (for those who have difficulty reading more than a paragraph):
What is it?
It’s that simple.
Why do it?
So come on, go to Kiva and just try it, I promise you that you will not be disappointed.
Now the long explanation (for those of you who want some in-depth explanation).
When it comes to aid of any kind, I am a very big skeptic. Too often have I witnessed well meaning money being squandered on useless development projects. My favorite dumb project is one that I learned about one night in Ghana when I was at a bar with some friends. We met some volunteers and after a while they started to describe their project. Basically, they had been sent from Britain to teach computer literacy to people in Ghana. However, they had been assigned to a village that had no electricity, so they had to charge the laptops with car batteries (this was before the days of one laptop per child which can be charged by batteries). The project was laughably unsustainable.
Not only are there dumb projects out there, but there are so many competing theories about development aid. Some say we should donate no-strings attached money, some say we should just leave the poor to develop on their own because it provides the right incentive. There is also the consideration (the one that stops me from giving most) of “where will my money be most effective?” I would like to maximize the impact of my (very limited) funds and doing so is very hard. I am currently reading different development economic works (currently on the End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs) and will keep on reading until I have a thorough understanding of what I can actually do to maximize my ability to relieve my home continent of the poverty and despair that it faces.
Kiva sidesteps all of these considerations. Who cares if it is not the most efficient way to end poverty? It costs me nothing. The money is not aid, it is simply a capital loan. I have the capacity to give unlimited funds and if I decide one day that micro-lending does more harm than good (unlikely) then I simply have to wait a few months and I will not have wasted any money as I will have it all back again. From all the famous developmental economists that I have read or listened to: Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, Jeffery Sachs and Stephen Lewis (many of whom as a group contradict each other on most points) none of them say that micro-finance is a bad idea. some argue as to how effective it can be, but none say that it has negative impacts. Until I figure things out I am going to continue to lend on Kiva… it is simply the safest way to go if you want to make a difference.
Finally, for anyone who made their Twitter profile pictures green in support of the Iranians (and do not currently contribute in any other way to those less privileged than themselves), this is one big step up into doing something that can make an actual measurable difference (still at no cost to yourself). Seeing as the action of making your profile green has shown a will to help others, not doing as little as lending money to someone who really needs it shows that you lack any real moral capacity to put that will into action and validates every single sarcastic remark that I and some others have made about the “People’s Twitter Front”.
As for who to loan to, I prefer to loan to Women in Africa, more specifically Women in Ghana. I also like loaning to groups as there is more security. But the nice thing about Kiva is that you have choice. Find someone who’s region/plight/plans strikes a chord in you and help them out. It becomes very personal.
So go ahead, make me, yourself and most importantly a desperately struggling businessperson happy by signing up to Kiva and giving just one loan. As I said above, let me know and I will loan $25 in response.
The Social Media Classroom is a web service created by Howard Rheingold that provides a space for students to engage in many of the most popular social networking activities out there. It includes blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarks, user profiles and chat. The goal is to provide a very low threshold environment for students and faculty to learn about and to use social media as a way of augmenting the classroom.
Scott Leslie set up an installation of Social Media Classroom the other day and offered for others to take it for a spin. I gave it a try and here is what I think.
The Social Media Classroom does exactly what it says that it will do. The user interface is quite impressive, making thing really easy to jump into. Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb said that “its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it”. I think she would be right, if it were not for some big obstacles that the platform faces. These are:
The bright side is that these are relatively easy things for the social media classroom to fix. Jim Groom is already taking care of the training wheel problem at UMW blogs with his BuddyPress, FeedWordPress, WordPress and mediaWiki experiments. UBC’s OLT also has some of this in the works. I’m sure that Drupal is powerful enough to do the same for the Social Media Classroom. The network part simply takes adding some features and making it open… well that should be just flicking a switch.
The Social Media Classroom is a good service and I really wish that more people had taken Scott Leslie up on his offer of trying it out on his hosted server. If you are in education, check out Social Media Classroom. Despite all of my complaints above, I would still far rather use it than any course website that I have ever used (Blackboard or otherwise). With a few simple, yet fundamental changes, it could just be a game changer yet.
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/08/20/social-media-classroom/
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=45674
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_social_media_classroom_a_new_platform_for_education.php
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