EVO Minecraft mOOC: How it came about

I started this post not at this blog but on a Google Doc I was editing for a piece Jeff Kuhn was writing for the February 2015 issue of TESL-EJ, the On the Internet column which I edit. I'll link to Jeff's article here (it will be online by the end of the month). But what Jeff wrote there prompted this stream of consciousness, which I appended as a reaction to his article, not only as a response, but as a suggestion to where Jeff might then go from where he had got in his thinking at that point.

As Jeff continued to write after I had left comments in his piece, he quoted parts of what I had written. I had by then moved those remarks to my blog as an unpublished draft.

I am publishing now almost "as is" in order to give Jeff a reference link for citing me in the article we were working on, him as author, me as trying-to-be-helpful editor.

As I begin here I'm responding to Jeff's conceptions from Gee and Ito. The former is games being use not only as games in class but in a larger context (big G) Game. Jeff was using our experience in co-moderating Minecraft mOOC this past 5 weeks as an example of a Game where teachers were trying to 'learn Minecraft' by using Minecraft as the game whose affordances give us insights into and bring us closer to our learning goals and end Game. 

Ito's framework is messing around, hanging out, and geeking out. Jeff had explained these phases of coming to grips with games when I added my comments. He then went on to use me as an example of messing around with Minecraft (my longtime dabbling with the concept), then forming a community of learners and "hanging out" with them in order to see what they did and follow their lead, and eventually geeking out to the point of almost organizing an expedition to resupply Jeff with sticks when he had run short of wood in the bowels of the server he had set up for us (he alludes to this in his article). 

So here it is, my off the top of my head reactions to the first half of Jeff's article, blogged here in order to provide a linkable reference to Jeff's quoting me in his article. It's all in the Game :-)

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I want to use games in my classroom. There’s this neat game Minecraft that I've been learning a lot about - for the past several years actually -- but don’t know how to crack it (my problem was no access to a server and community. I think I was having trouble ‘getting’ it when I was playing alone  - the nature of the game changed for me once we got a community into the mix ).

So, I thought, why not start an EVO session? My take on Webheads and most other things I tackle is "let’s get it going!" like throwing a party, and invite as many people as you can, and if it’s a good concept and there are enough people, it’ll be a great party :-)  It’s a little off the wall, but if you’re going to use games in class, this is what you want to do. Hey guys, there’s this great game here, a lot of you already play it. I don’t know much about it myself (how could you possibly know as much as your students about Minecraft?) but I think we can make it fly as a substrate for our learning, so let’s give it a go and see what happens.

As with Jeff's session on Zombies, he’d have been thinking ... I want you to write about crisis management (students start getting a bit bleary eyed) but wait, we’re going to do it by experiencing a crisis. Here I’ll show you (students move to edge of their seats).

So if you expect students to get into your crazy ideas and trust you and those ideas to help facilitate their learning, why not do the same with an EVO session. Take teachers whom you expect are going to stand up in class and introduce a game they know less about than the students, show them what it feels like - no, let them experience what it feels like to be in this learning situation and then (as with crisis management and zomibies, see Kuhn 2014) RESOLVE it, feel it getting better, feel their expertise grow, as Ito says, go from messing around, like I was doing for too long with MC, to hanging out with a bunch of people there, and see what it’s like to get geeky, and what happens after that.

So this in my concept, following from Gee, starting to see the potential of Gamification (Big G fit there?) as opposed to playing the occasional game in class (little g) and feeling the difference when the game starts to kick in to guide and facilitate the learning.

And how does that happen in PD? Experientially and ineffably.  I like Jeff's idea that MC is a toy, that learning grows from how we configure and use that toy.

In 2008, as they were planning their first MOOC, and the attention it was getting was attracting participants into 4 digits, and it was obvious none of them, Stephen, George, or Dave, had anticipated the scale of what they were setting in motion, Stephen Downes was asked by a colleague in a live podcast WHY he was essentially flogging his back with this endeavor, and he replied simply, “because I’ll learn from it.” That is the answer to many questions of why we do what we do, and the justification for it, and the mindset we must inculcate in our students and other teachers we train.

And what was learned in the first MOOC was how to scale learning for thousands of participants in an academic endeavor, all of whom had as many reasons for being there, and as many take-aways in store for them as their headcount, while making the process manageable for the facilitators of the course.

So what #evomc15 did was to apply some of what was learned then about MOOCs and has been refined since to the facilitation of a course conducted itself in the manner of a game, the nature of the thing it was designed (or not designed as the case may be) to teach (or not to teach, but to help others ‘get’).

I’ve started a blog post on this topic

http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2015/01/evo-minecraft-mooc-orient-declare.html

and what I’m getting into here is the follow on to that post, a reflection on what happened, and how I see why it happened.

I think we accomplished a lot in this EVO Minecraft mOOC #evomc15 experience, or at least I did, in coming to grips with the toy and learning to appreciate how it might impact our learning and that of our students.

(As a curious footnote on the idea of big G little g; big M little m - I've been calling our MOOC a mOOC to acknowlege the fact that it is a miniscule Open Online Course, not a Massive one. There has been some question as to how massive a course has to be before it can qualify as Massive. Some have put that number around 100 at minimum, and at the time I started diminunizing the m in our mOOC we had around 30 some odd participants. We ended the course with 67 (the last two acquired on almost the last day) so we might need to look for a font that will represent something between a small m and a Massive one).

References

Kuhn, J. (2014). The world is not enough: The need for game design. IATEFL LT SIG & TESOL CALL-IS Web Conference on Gaming and Gamification – a Win-Win for Language Learning. Recording http://iatefl.adobeconnect.com/p4zf1evoz43/.

EVO Minecraft mOOC: Orient, declare, network

EVO Minecraft mOOC has just entered its 3rd week as I write this. There are just two or three dozen participants, so it's not a massive open online course exactly. I call it a mOOC, or minuscule open online course.

In EVO we're not supposed to call them courses. In return for nominal TESOL sponsorship, they are called sessions in order to avoid confusion with paid courses provided online by TESOL.INC. So even the course part is debatable, which is to say that despite this, it is still a course, The notion that it's not is simply Newspeak.

EVO is Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com. I have moderated many EVO sessions and this one breaks several EVO rules. First, it covers a game that is not free, and in that sense departs from traditional EVO policy and the open part of MOOC (though everything we do in this session around this game is indisputably open). Also, the course was proposed, but not really developed, until after the acceptance deadline. This is because it turns on its head yet another norm for EVO, that sessions are moderated by experts and meticulously prepared beforehand and readied for display and critique (by EVO coordinators) by the time of their acceptance at the end of November.

Whereas most EVO sessions are developed with great care by people with expertise they wish to share, this one takes a flipped approach. It was evolved over the month of December and readied just in time for the start of sessions in January, 2015. It was conceived of as a game about learning to game. The moderators would not necessarily be experts but would be gamers knowledgable about the potential of MC in language learning seeking to learn how to play and game the game for that purpose. What they are learning is how to approach a game not as an expert with global knowledge but as a co-learner with students they might introduce it to in turn. As I did with the original Webheads in Action EVO session in 2002, the moderators would model this means of learning and engage participants in sharing the responsibility for that learning. We would peer-teach, scaffold if you will, each other.

I came up with  the idea for this one when I read that there would be a Canvas MOOC, Minecraft for Educators, starting in Week 3 of the EVO 2015 sessions, and I registered that idea in a tweet last August. In a sense the tweet was the proposal, and what followed was window dressing to gain acceptance for inclusion in the EVO 2015 listing of sessions.

I accepted Marijana and Filip's offer and we went on from there

The proposal at 
http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/90096824/2015_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC starts a little facetiously; to wit:

"This session will invite interested teachers to join us in playing Minecraft, learning all we can about playing alone and together, and how Minecraft is being used effectively in language learning. We'll learn by doing and from one another. 

We'll start here: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/

Target audience: 

Teachers with a gaming problem / gamers with a teaching problem / teachers of gamers with a learning problem.

Session objectives: 

By the end of the session, participants will have:

• explored and played with Minecraft
• shared their discoveries with other participants
• created spaces in Minecraft where desired learning outcomes can be promoted
• shared what they have accomplished in MC
• curated resources related to MC

Session participants will learn about Minecraft in the same way they would expect students to figure it out and adapt it to their own learning goals; that is, we will learn by playing and sharing what we discover. We will learn, as Joel Levin puts it, how to 'limit' the game; that is how to create spaces there where we can promote desired learning outcomes. We will point each other to resources (there are thousands of them, so we'll have to curate for one another). We can create YouTube channels for our work and create videos showing what we accomplish in MC and how we might use the worlds we create with our students. Kids do it, so someone in our group might set up a server we can all play on (if not, we'll get a kid to set one up for us - there are YouTube videos to show us how)."

The starting point noted above is Using Minecraft for Learning English, in TESL-EJ August 2014–Volume 18, Number 2, by Marijana and Filip Smolčec with an introduction by Vance Stevens, http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/

In this article, 11 year-old Filip writes and dictates to his mom Marijana as they share their perceptions of how MC helps kids learn near-native levels of English. In the introduction I drew on the work not only of Seth Levin, mentioned above, but also on recorded presentations by Dave Dodgeson and Jeff Kuhn. Eventually we brought the latter two in as co-moderators.

I take a cat-herding approach to marshaling volunteers in efforts such as EVOMC15, so it is not uncommon for people I moderate with to step to the plate when they are good and ready, but the moderators who are contributing solidly at the moment are Marijana and Filip, my wife Bobbi, and Jeff Kuhn. Jeff has been particularly forthcoming, offering a video intro to Minecraft, and setting up a server for us where our most productive interaction has been taking place.

Jeff is our resident adult expert among out co-moderators, but another way EVOMC15 departs from the norm is in attracting young people like Filip to join us and tutor the adult learners. Here again we model an effective approach to the student-teacher dichotomy by obliterating the notion of age as a means of categorizing one or the other. This is how it should be in our classes. If we are hired as teachers, one effective way of doing our jobs is to let our students learn by teaching us. One salient affordance of MC is that it provides an engaging crucible for experimenting with exactly that. Filip came aboard with his mom as co-moderator, but we have also been joined by 12-year old Carlos from Spain and teenager Ian Hill from UAE. All three have contributed builds to our MC sandbox, and Filip provides us with a constant stream of pointers, and spawns rabbits and other creatures for us to cope with in amusement.

As I like to do with my writing, I like to get it out there and develop it as we go. I will go ahead and publish this and return later with more information. I need to develop this into a slide show to assist a presentation Jeff and I will give on Sunday Feb 8, and also adapt it to a presentation proposal I need to make in the next few days.

I will develop this with more information about how the course is organized on Dave Cormier's 5 stages for success in a MOOC, and explain how the third step, Networking, brings us into the Canvas MOOC on Minecraft for Educators, which is associated with MinecraftEDU, of which Seth Levin (there's that name again :-) is a founding contributor.

Also I need to explain why we have minimized spaces for interaction for this mOOC. Instead of opening several spaces, each with a different purpose, we have chosen to focus on just one, a Google+ Community at https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671.

This post, or a future one, will discuss how that has been working out.