Multi-touch Collaborative Diagramming

Posted on May 13, 2010 by admin

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 1: Project Proposal

Milestone 2: Initial user survey

Milestone 3: Experiment Proposal

Milestone 4: Experiment Results

Final Course Grade: 85%

School is just a game… let's make it a better game.

Posted on March 21, 2010 by admin

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.

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.

PC Games – E3 2010 – Guitar Hero 5

Personal Learning Network Presentations

Posted on January 30, 2010 by admin

Over the last 6 months I have given two presentations on the ideas of Personal Learning Environments/Networks. The first one was in late August for UBC Jump Start, a 2 week orientation program for students that I attended in my first year at UBC and that provided me with great friends and learning experiences. The second presentation was give at the 2010 UBC Student Leadership Conference, a conference that I have been heavily involved with over the past few years and this year was co-chaired by two good friends of mine, June Lam and Robert Winson. I had some technical difficulties with the first presentation, but the second one went really well, I even won the “best returning presenter” award for it. Although neither of the presentations were recorded, I have both of the presentations on Prezi.

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

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.

Connectivism and Connected Knowledge – The first post

Posted on September 21, 2009 by admin

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:

The brain: our brains store memories and “knowledge” as a set of distributed pathways and connections.
Concepts: We can only know concepts by drawing connections between different nodes.
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:

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?
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?
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?

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

Personal Learning Environments

Posted on June 26, 2009 by admin

From sonson on Flickr... click on image to go to source

At CELC 2009 I was part of a panel of students that tried to answer the question: Personal Learning Environments. What do students think? The other students on the panel were Angeli and Zack. Cindy Underhill was the mastermind that brought us all together and did a superb job of directing things.

So what did us, the students have to say about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)? I don’t know how much I can speak for Zack and Angeli (although we did agree on the majority of things), but here are my (heavily supplemented) answers to the core questions that Cindy asked:

1) What do we know about how students define personal learning environments?

For this question I avoided the (arguably defunct) definition of PLEs as an environment that educational technologists create for students to learn in (nobody even brought it up in the session). Instead, I defined it as “the environment in which I learn” (I think a lot of people are starting to agree with this definition as well). This includes a bunch of distributed technologies (a topic that I regularly blog about), but it also includes other things, like my classmates, my roommates and very big pieces of paper. This is important, so everybody in ed-tech listen up: you cannot create an entire PERSONAL learning environment for students! It is impossible. Every student has their own way of learning, every student evolves their environment continuously (look at how my tools have changed) and any one tool will be obsolete as quickly as any other piece of technology. Don’t despair though… there is still plenty of work for you to do. What students really need are small, lightweight tools to help them learn. The process should be as follows:

Find out where the gaps are in the student’s learning
Fill the gap with an easy to use tool.
Let them know it exists and show them how to use it (the part, in my opinion, that professors and educational technologists are worst at).

I didn’t get a chance in the session to really flesh that out… but there you have it. Give me the tools and let me use them to build my own environment.

2) How do PLEs contribute to the development of learning competencies?

With my definition above, this question doesn’t make too much sense. The reality is, that a PLE only really contributes to the development of a student’s “learning competencies” when they know what the hell that means. Or when they care. Students don’t often take the time to think about how their current study techniques are actually helping them to learn. They just study and pray that they pass the exams… which brings me to the next question…

3) Are PLEs effective without educational reform?

: Image via Wikipedia

The answer is… only a tiny bit. My PLE is helping me to get good grades… not to learn. In fact, because of how education works, most students don’t have PLEs… they have “PGGEs” (Personal Grade Getting Environments)! At the end of the day, that is what most students really care about. Why shouldn’t they? As Cindy said in her follow-up post “We’ve structured the education system this way, it’s not their fault”. I am often way too busy memorizing things to actually learn them. Learning takes time and effort… it also takes practice and conversation, it is much more efficient to get good grades by memorizing the textbook. This is not only a curriculum problem, it also has to do with the whole way degrees are structured. A Small anecdote for a recent event in my life:

After speaking to someone in Science advising I realized that I will not graduate from University if I do not take the second introductory (1st year) Physics course. I took the honours version of the first course and scored 87%. I would dearly love to take a 4th year Psychology course on human behaviour instead… but if I do take it, I won’t graduate. The irony is that for me, the Physics course will be a breeze, I will ace it easily. I find it so easy that it doesn’t interest me at all. If I took the Psychology course I would enjoy it a lot more. It would also be a lot more difficult and I would actually learn something new. It would contribute far more to my plans for the future than the Physics course.

Seems wrong doesn’t it? That same story is being told by countless times hundreds of thousands of students all around the world. Then professors complain that the students are not interested in the stuff they teach. If you give students the freedom to choose what they will learn and emphasize through proper assessment that they are there to learn and not just there to get good grades, then students will be interested. I would bet my life on it.

Conclusion to that long-winded rant: Without educational reform students don’t care about learning, therefore their “learning environment” is severely neglected, making it ineffective.

4) What’s your role in supporting the development of personal learning environments?

This was kind of a double-edged question… one for us to throw back at the audience. My comment that I threw back out to the audience was this:

You cannot expect students to think about and improve on their learning if you are not modeling the behavior and seeing what works and what does not.

They may all have finished formal education, but in this information age we all have to continually learn and the better we are at it, the more successful we will be. My challenge then, to anyone who reads this post is:

Think about your own personal learning environment. Really dig deep and figure out what contributes most to how you learn. What distracts from that learning? Now, patch, build and experiment with your own environment to try and improve it. You will find yourself much better off for doing it.

If you are involved in education at any level and you cannot do what I have asked above… then you are really incapable of helping students do it as well.

e-Learning and 21st century skills and competences (downes.ca)
7 Things You Should Know About Personal Learning Environments (downes.ca)
Joel Klein: Transforming the Teaching Profession (huffingtonpost.com)

A problem with learning outcomes… and mayby curriculum in general

Posted on March 7, 2009 by admin

: Image via Wikipedia

Having clear learning goals in a course has been a great step forward for education. In courses where this practise is used (and used well) students know exactly what they will be able to do if they successfully learn the material in the course. There is also a clearer view of what the practical requirements are for what they have to do to prove that they have learnt what they are supposed to learn.

The problem comes when you don’t really agree with the learning outcomes of a course. Now, I know that any course contains core material, but at the same time students should have the freedom to decide what they concentrate on. For example:

I am currently taking a course called “Numerical Approximation and Discretization”. The learning goals boil down to “understanding, selecting, utilizing, assessing and creating” different Numerical Approximation techniques. studying

Now, I will never have a career in numerical approximation. However, I might find it useful to understand and select techniques of numerical approximation in some future research that I do. I will probably never have to create my own technique so why should I learn how to do it? Or even more importantly, why should I be assessed on my ability to do that? Would it not be possible for us to be provided with a range of possible learning outcomes for a course and let us choose the ones that we want to pursue? Those can then be tested more rigorously. We would still be exposed to the other things, but will be allowed to concentrate on that which we are passionate about. I don’t think that this is that far fetched, for instance I already get to choose the courses in the program that interest me, why not have a choice over the goals within those courses?

I know that any form of granularity makes a professor or curriculum committee’s job much harder. However, in courses where assessment is already based around certain outcomes I feel it would not be too difficult to weight assessments based on the student’s preference in outcomes.

It all really boils down to this: Should students have some kind of input on their goals learning goals for a specific subject, or is that something that should only be decided by a curriculum committee?

The “A” Word (takepart.com)
Hacking Education (continued) (avc.com)

The problem with grades

Posted on February 6, 2009 by admin

Yesterday I followed a link from D’Arcy Norman to this article in the Globe and Mail about a professor who was fired because he gave all of his students A+ grades so that they could focus on the learning instead of worrying about grades. While reading the very humorous comments I stumbled across a reference to this Calvin and Hobbes comic:

It highlights what I hate most about the way the world conducts education.

Learning tools for 2008/2009… revised!

Posted on September 25, 2008 by admin

So my last post was a bit premature. Here are some of the revisons to the plan:

1) OneNote has failed me. It worked so well in my previous classes, but I am finding it useless at the moment. Why? Well the lectures are carried out differently. In my previous classes the PDFs required a lot of diagrams and annotations… OneNote handled that perfectly. However, at the moment all the PDFs that I get are pretty self-contained, the only thing I need to do is summarize and organize the material in them.

2) So in order to replace OneNote, I am using FreeMind again. I think the reason that I didn’t enjoy FreeMind when I used it last year was that I didn’t have a system for icons and decoration. Now that I have a system (and another mindmap to remind me what my system is)! I am really enjoying taking notes on FreeMind. Below are some pictures of the start of my maps:

Here is my “cheatsheet” map telling what all the icons mean (as I come accross a new type of content I just choose and icon and add it to this sheet so that don’t forget the mapping).

3)I’m probably not going to use the map on my wall, just due to the fact that I have the FreeMInd maps now. I might start printing them though and stick them up!

Fickle… I know. But hey, in order to succeed we need to try new things!

My learning tools for 2008/2009

Posted on September 8, 2008 by admin

So I’ve now had a week of classes. It feels great to be learning again after 8 months of solid work. Since I last wrote a similar post to this I have a gained a much better perspective on all the tools out there and know what works for me and what doesn’t. So, here goes my big bad list of learning tools for university:

Microsoft Office OneNote:

I cannot find any note-taking software that comes even close to OneNote’s ability to keep notes for school. The three levels of navigation and ease of printing PDFs straight to OneNote (seeing as almost all professors insist on delivering their notes in PDF and note HTML) puts OneNote ahead of everything else. I would desperately like to use EverNote (because I can use it from more places than my personal computers with OneNote installed), but it doesn’t let me scribble all over course PDFs like OneNote does.

Mind Mapping:

Last year I tried out FreeMind as a means of organizing notes after they were taken. It was great software and worked pretty well, but I just didn’t enjoy using it. I think that the limits of current screen sizes is what makes virtual mind maps so difficult. I just felt like I could never see the full picture and the detail at the same time (which, I believe is something mind maps should let you do). So instead I went lo-tech and have taped a giant white piece of paper to my wall that I will use to map and connect all of my courses on. It is a new experiment, let’s see if it works! I might also resort to using FreeMind again especially for the guest lecturers that are going to be coming in to my Software Engineering Course as there won’t be any predefined lecture notes that I can annotate in OneNote.

To-do lists:

I tried Remember the Milk a few months ago and for some reason it just didn’t stick. I revisited it about three weeks ago and now find it invaluable. The big change I think is that you can embed your to-do lists everywhere! I have my list in my gMail, my iGoogle, my Google Calendar my iPhone and on my desktop. I can send tasks to it using Jott. I find that if my to-do lists are not in my face I forget to look at them. With Remember the Milk I can have a constant reminder.

Remember the milk lets you categorize items, add recurring items (a great one is “pay bills”) and lets you know when things are overdue. Remembering to hand in an assignment, or study for a midterm will be a whole lot easier with Remember the Milk.

Flashcards:

Most courses require some degree of memorization. Quizlet is so much better than any other online flashcard app that I have tried. It gained me plenty of marks last year and everyone that I know who uses Quizlet swears by it. It is easy and fun to use. It is collaborative. It has tests. It will soon have an iPhone app. Enough said.

Time Management:

Google Calendar is possibly the greatest tool ever. My life would be incomplete without it. I actually have over 15 calendars in there that I use to organize my life and keep track of the people around me.

Collaborative Projects:

I’m already using Google Apps for my work on the Student Leadership Conference, so I will probably use that (if my team agrees that is) in my Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interfacing projects. I’m still looking for a good collaborative way to do UML diagrams, seeing as how expensive Gliffy has become.

Pen and Paper:

For my Math courses I’m going the old fashioned notebook route. I really don’t see any other way (seeing as I don’t have a tablet PC). Hopefully the big mind map will compliment it nicely though and maybe help to make some connections between the three Math courses that I am taking.

I will monitor the effectiveness of all of these tools and update depending on what works and what doesn’t (or if I find something around the internet that blows one of these out of the water).

Three flavors of course blogs, very yummy…

Posted on February 29, 2008 by admin

In a comment on my post “who owns a class blog“ Jim Groom said:

That is the rub, when you open up a system like this, there are a number of ways of going at it, and having the ability to meet as many of them easily makes your life simpler.

I agree whole-heartedly with Jim. My judgment has been clouded lately by the Wp-o-matic’s ability lack of to update posts on the fly and the lack of a “delete all” button on any of WordPress’ pages. Today though, I saw the light. I now have a clear vision of three simple, definable, student driven course blog structures.

The ghost blog:

This blog is for the professor who doesn’t want to be confused by hundreds of student posts knocking around his/her blog. The blog simply uses BDPRSS and my add-to-BDPRSS widget (source code coming soon I promise) to populate a WordPress page with aggregated student entries. When another year of students comes, the old posts will still be there (or not, or in another blog that that the new blog links to), but as newer posts come in, the old posts will fall off of the bottom of the feed and the blog will have just new fresh content. No having to delete anything!

The Communal blog:

This blog is for the professor who wants to get stuck into the blogging experience with the students. This also probably the easiest (although I used to think it was the hardest) to implement. Jim reminded me of the “Add Sidebar Users” widget, which I will tweak slightly to make setting up this kind of blog super easy. Our new blogging service will allow students to sign up as just subscribers if they want to and with Campus Wide Login they won’t even have to remember their username. Zero work for the professor!

The spam blog:

Jim did great things with WP-o-matic. I found a tool that works even better for what we want to do (in fact, it is the one thing that I can now do better than the current incarnation of eduglu). FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson is another spamblogger that updates entries if they change in the feed. The biggest problem that I had with other versions of spam blogging tools was that they took dynamic content, republished it and then made it static. This might work for blog posts (which don’t generally change very much after they have been written)… but for something like a course syllabus or wiki feed (I’ll save that discussion for a later day) the content in the repository has to be continually updated. Otherwise we just have old junk entries lying around. FeedWordPress fixes that. FeedWordPress also has a nice “delete all” button that will get rid of feed entries that are marked for deletion. Best of all, the author has provided an excellent API and a bunch of hooks so that I can massage this plugin into doing my complete bidding.

I will be finalizing and testing these methods tomorrow and over the weekend and will hopefully have some concrete examples by early next week.

One last thing. These structures do not have to be independent. the communal blog can be combined with the spam blog (giving students the option). A ghost page can then be created in a different tab, feeding in content from other sources as examples and even points of discussion for future posts by the students. A ghost blog can be archived by simply feeding it into a spam blog and so on.

Andre

Technology, learning and trying to change the world.