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.

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 1: Project Proposal

Milestone 2: Initial user survey

Milestone 3: Experiment Proposal

Milestone 4: Experiment Results

Final Course Grade: 85%

How is school like a game?

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.

So why is school a crappy game?

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.

My prize for best returning presentation

The first presentation:

I started by defining a personal learning environment, very much the same way as I did in this post here, as “everything around you that helps you to learn”. I went on to talk about how you can change your environment in order to change your learning. I then went on to spend a little under half the talk dedicated to different tools that one can add to their learning environment to make it more effective.

The second presentation:

This one was titled “Use your leadership skills to create a personal learning network”.  The idea was that leadership skills are great and all for leading people, but they can also be put to work for enhancing your learning. This time I spent far more time focusing on the network and personal aspects of learning, a good representation of my own learning and growth that has been going on in the last 6 months. The idea was that you can only learn better through hard, personal change, drawing the analogy between what it takes to be a good learner and a good Ice Hockey player (these Canadians are converting me pretty quickly eh?) The second thread was that we are able to be much more effective if we use other people, yet the only way to use people is to not use them. In order to gather an effective network you need to be selfless and compassionate, only then will people offer their help.

I also promised the participants a list of resources which I will publish below.

Resources:

Improving study skills:

Reading speed/comprehension/retention:

Breakthrough Rapid Reading

Memory:
The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, at School, and at Play

General Study Skills

How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less

Time Management/Productivity:

Getting Things Done

The Power Of Less

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Peace of mind:

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Relationships:

Tribes

That’s just a few, if there is anything anybody would like to know more about, or any other resources someone things may be handy let me know in the comments below.

Why:

Ironically, the catalyst for this change of heart was my blog post on CCK09.Jeff Fong left a comment on that post pointing me to Scott Young’s post on studying. Reading that post (and subsequent posts) sparked something in my mind. It was the created a connection between several recent things that I had learned and not connected before. I decided to do something that was new and exciting for myself, figuring that the concepts and connections in CCK will still be there in a year.

Basically, the ideas boiled down to the feasibility of personal development. Although I have seen enough crazy “self-help” ideas, money making schemes and development training programs to make me very skeptical of any personal development literature, while reading Scott’s post something clicked. An idea that I can indeed (despite the fact that 22 years of new-years resolutions have proven otherwise) change the things that I do not like about my life. The idea was that finding a way to enact constant improvement would allow me to be far more prepared for school when it starts in January as well as for helping me get my head around the crazy world of ed-tech.

Of course, I am not silly enough to believe that a few months of concentrated effort can “fix” my life, but I thought that maybe I could start to structure things in a way that kick starts a continuous “self-repair mechanism” and enables lifelong learning and improvement. Now of course, to make things work, I came up with a system (seeing as coming up with systems is one of the things I seem to do best). Part of it is explained below:

Planning:

I sat down and brainstormed areas of my life that I wanted to improve. I then categorized those into three categories:

• Quick fixes
• Habits
• Lifelong learning goals

For example, quick fixes included rearranging my Google Reader to make it work better. Habits included keeping my room tidy (the nemesis habit of many university students). Lifelong learning goals included things like learning to read quicker.

Although I did not do it originally, I have since added end points to every learning goal, some way of saying “I’m done”. I know that learning is never over, but there has to be some point where you can switch your main focus to something else and keep whatever you are doing on the periphery.

Preparation:

Now that I had lists of things I wanted to change, I needed to integrate them into my life somehow. To do that, I used the one thing that I check every day, my iGoogle homepage. I deleted everything else off of my homepage. I added a sticky note widget, a Google Calendar widget and then a bunch of Google Tasks widgets (I use Google Tasks because of how quick it is to add emails to tasks and tasks to my calendar). I set each widget to contain a different list (GTD style) and included the lists of the three areas that I outlined above.

In the sticky note I highlight things that I want to concentrate on / accomplish for that work.

Here is what it looks like (quick fixes became merged into projects):

Implementation:

Now that I have my lists, what is the implementation?

Firstly (and this is the first habit I had to learn) is to take 2 minutes to look over the iGoogle page every morning. I look at the weekly goals in my sticky note to make sure that I am still on track to accomplish them.

Every week I take 10 minutes to review my progress and set new goals for the next week.

On a monthly basis, I choose one habit that I want to work on. In that month I move mountains to make sure that I stick to that habit. I add a date to it to say when it should end. If I slip up, I move the date back to 30 days from the slip up.

I choose one lifelong learning goal that I want to concentrate on. I set the goal for when I have acquired that skill/knowledge. Once one goal is completed, I move on to the next one.

Results:

Now, of course I have only been using this system for just over 2 months so I can not say it works completely just yet. What I can say, is that I have definitely had a lot of progress.

The two habits that I have focused on so far (keeping my room tidy and going to the gym regularly) are now firmly ingrained in my life. My current learning goal is also coming along, my reading speed has tripled since I started. I will probably blog my current successes pretty soon.

I also feel like I have so much more control over my environment than I ever had before. When school starts again in January I will be able to tackle the term with far more confidence than ever before and I will also (hopefully) be able to use much of the improvements that I make to myself as a way to develop my ability to learn (both in school and in my goal of helping to fix education).

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:

1. The brain: our brains store memories and “knowledge” as a set of distributed pathways and connections.
2. Concepts: We can only know concepts by drawing connections between different nodes.
3. Society: The knowledge that a society has exists in the links between different nodes (people, databases, books, etc).

Now, of course, this is my gross oversimplification. For more thorough insights into the topic here are some links to read:

What connectivism is

The unique idea of connectivism

So here are my questions concerns and thoughts after 1 week:

1. I understand and accept the neurological principle (modern neuroscience has accepted that what we know is stored in the connections between neurons). The question then is: Can we abstract that one level up for our learning in higher level concepts, or should this thinking stay at a neurological level?
2. Even if we can represent learning in the same way our brain stores things, is that the best way to do it? Our brain is a result of evolution and we know, as fundamental as evolution is, it tends to follow the principle of “just good enough”. If our brain’s method of storing information is “just good enough” could we not have developed better ways of doing things? I would argue that even the fact that society is “connectivist” in its knowledge is a result of “just good enough” as the system is too large for a more efficient method to have evolved. Are we smart enough to come up with something better?
3. Assuming I get to the point where I believe fully in connectivism as a learning theory, what technology needs to be created to support it? 3D networking maps? A personal learning framework that allows you to visualise the framework of your connections? How can I apply the principles of connectivism to come up with brilliant pedagogy and the tools needed to support that?

Some related links:

• Learning Leaders Fieldbook (downes.ca)
• Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009 (downes.ca)

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:

WPMU For Education blog

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.

So here it is, 17 August 2009, the Wordle for all my content is:

my Wordle

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:

1. Go to “settings” then “labs” on the top right menu bar.
2. Scroll down and enable the quick links addon.
   

   enable the add links in settings

3. in the search box type in the following: in:inbox in:unread. Click search mail
   

   search box

4. In the quick links box (middle left of your screen) click “add quick link”.
   

   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.

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

Related articles on other sites:

• The LMS is So Web 1.5 (ezrasf.com)
• Shall we call it Blackangel? Or Angelboard? (castingoutnines.wordpress.com)