EVO Minecraft MOOC travels to WorldCALL 5 in Concepción, Chile

I'm in Concepción, Chile, for my 3rd WorldCALL conference. They happen every five years. I was at the first one in Melbourne, Australia in 1998. I met Jeong Bae Son there and was asked to join him on the executive committee at APACALL (http://www.apacall.org/) shortly after that, and have been active in that organization ever since. I believe JB, as he likes to be called, will be in Concepción this year.

I missed the second WorldCALL in Banff in 2003 but went to Fukuoka in 2008. I was not able to attend Glasgow in 2013 but it looks like I'm consistently attending every other one. This one November 13 to 16, 2018, is only the 5th WorldCALL conference ever, http://worldcall5.org/.

EVO Minecraft MOOC at WorldCALL 5 in Concepción

My talk at WorldCALL 5 will be on Gamifying teacher professional development through Minecraft MOOC

Abstract

EVO Minecraft MOOC is an ongoing community of practice of language teaching practitioners which invites newcomers to join in every January / February and then continues throughout the year with a dedicated group of teaching peers who have been interacting online in Minecraft for the past 4 years. This presentation explains how the group was formed, how it functions, and what we have learned about gamifying learning by experiencing it ourselves when playing the game Minecraft with one another. More importantly we reflect continually on how this informs our approach to teaching and learning. This presentation shares our insights and perspectives with our audience and invites them to join us online if they wish to learn more about what gamification feels like as a learning experience.

Summary

Electronic Village Online is an annual teacher training event run under the auspices of TESOL CALL-IS. EVO Minecraft MOOC is a 5-week session that has taken place in Minecraft, a wiki, and Google+ Community space each Jan / Feb since 2015. The presenter conceived the idea for EVO Minecraft MOOC as a way that he himself could develop expertise in the game and thereby use it with students. Other teachers were attracted to the concept, including some who had some experience in the game. Participants were attracted to the session for the same reasons — not that their learning paths had been prescribed for them in a neatly pre-set syllabus but that by entering the “game” or session, learning would happen for them in a way that participants would come to understand by experiencing the process that Ito et al (2010) characterize as “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.”

We have found that Minecraft is capable of reversing the normal student teacher dichotomy whereby teachers traditionally are assumed to know more than their students. We have found through the experience of participants in our EVO session that that participants tend to take charge of their learning by guiding one another in the vagaries of the game.

This presentation explains what teachers (who are learning about the game through the experience of playing it as learners) are learning about designing worlds within the game context that will meet their curriculum objectives and create an engaging and enjoyable experience and task-based environment for learners. But above all, the paper explores how teachers can be made aware of the affordances of Minecraft by creating such spaces for one another and interacting in those spaces. It also serves as an example of how we teachers can use what we have learned through our experience with MOOCs to form communities of practice to reboot our own learning, using the community as curriculum model (Cormier, 2008).

A trailer for my presentation in Concepción appears here

I blogged how this came about at my more frequently updated podcast blog here,

https://learning2gether.net/2018/11/01/vance-stevens-presents-lightning-talk-on-engaging-students-in-gamified-classrooms-using-minecraft/

The video was the result of a concatenation of events. I was taking an iTDi Teaching Online course facilitated by Heike Philp and one of the projects was to produce a video teaching something to an imaginary class of online learners. Meanwhile I had been asked to prepare a "lightning talk" of 5 or 6 minutes explaining EVO Minecraft MOOC for the Games and Learning Community Group session at EDUCAUSE in Denver and have it ready for their face-to-face session on November 1
https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/2018/agenda/games-and-learning-community-group-session-open-to-all

The YouTube video is online here, https://youtu.be/aKzE43EsPsk. It is a quick run-through of the slides accompanying my WorldCALL 5 presentation, which I have placed online here:
https://tinyurl.com/vance2018worldcall



So that is the flipped learning side of my presentation in Concepción. Having done all this preparation, and as the slides are online, I plan to simply talk about them in the 30 minutes I have available to me at WorldCALL.

One thing I would like to emphasize in my presentation is something that Yuko Kato, one of my colleagues in the iTDi course, asked me: What is the language purpose of this? This is a question that is quite critical to keep in mind at a WordlCALL conference on computer assisted language learning.

I co-wrote an article which might be a good starting point, Smolčec, M., Smolčec, F. and Stevens, V. (2014). Using Minecraft for Learning English. TESL-EJ 18, 2. Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/. This gives many examples of students using MC to practice and improve learning a FL.

Several of the colleagues who appear in this article have formed a community of practice called EVO Minecraft MOOC. The purpose of this community is to help teachers experience the affordances of MC for communication, critical thinking, problem solving ... all elements underpinning real communication i.e. the desire to learn and use a language. The following article explains how EVO Minecraft MOOC helps teachers to understand the participatory culture which players enter and how to apply the affordances of the game to language learning contexts, Stevens, V. (2017). Gamifying Teacher Professional Development through Minecraft MOOC. In Zoghbor, W., Coombe, C., Al Alami, S. & Abu-Rmaileh, S. (Eds.). Language Culture Communication: Transformations in Intercultural Contexts. The Proceedings of the 22nd TESOL Arabia Conference. Dubai: TESOL Arabia. Pages 75-92. Available: http://vancestevens.com/papers/evomcmooc_TACON2016.pdf

I'm trying to get Flipgrid to work. The following is experimental ...

View my Flipboard Magazine.

Writingmatrix at WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka

I preserved the following notes from WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka in 2008

At the August 6-9, 2008 WorldCALL congress in Fukuoka, Japan, http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/, my 45 min. session on Engaging collaborative writing through social networking was listed in the program at http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/docs/Web_20080728.htm in the Aug 6 time slot from 17:25 to 18:10 Tokyo time. Nelba Quintana, a collaborator on the Writingmatrix project I was reporting on, joined me at the podium for the presentation.

Nelba Quintana and I after we gave our presentation - photo by Joseph Dias

• The presentation is based at http://www.wix.com/vances/worldcall08 (this was my handout; it is still online but requires Flash to be fully appreciated).
• The slides are at https://www.slideshare.net/vances/worldcall-fukuoka-2008
• An Elluminate recording of the live session was made, following the slides, here: https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2008-08-06.0111.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr
  (you need to have Bb Collaborate installed to view this, but you can still listen to the recording, next bullet).
• I made an mp3 file from the presentation recording and podcast it here: http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2008-08-12T06_24_26-07_00 or http://tinyurl.com/worldcall08vance

As mentioned, Nelba Quintana, one of the original Writingmatrix teachers, joined me at my session, and Rita Zeinstejer and Sasa Sirk joined in online, as you can hear in the recording.

Several Webheads (http://webheads.info) attended this conference. Some are shown in the photo above, taken by Tom Robb (also a Webhead). They might have been about to listen to Vera Menezes give an interesting plenary address on CALL development in the context of chaos theory and how strange attractors create butterfly effects impacting subsequent development of a field like CALL felt all around the world. For example ... imagine huge auditorium, huge screen dwarfing tiny podium with speaker on stage, who clicked on a slide on ... Webheads in Action, and another slide on Writingmatrix. Erika Cruvinel was also mentioned in one of Vera's slides where she talked about Erika's model project sharing with Claudia's class in La Plata. 

I found this picture at the Webheads Posterous blog which was moved (when Posterous shut down) here http://webheadsinfukuoka.wordpress.com/.

I wrote up my talk for the conference proceedings

Stevens, Vance. (2009 July 15). Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking. In Koyama, Toshiko; Noguchi, Judy; Yoshinari,Yuichiro; and Iwasaki, Akio (Eds.). Proceedings of the WorldCALL 2008 Conference. The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology (LET). ISBN: 978-4-9904807-0-7, http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/proceedings.pdf pp.68-71.

My paper Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking appears in the online version of the WorldCALL 2008 proceedings http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd12/index.php?id=5. The paper linked from those proceeds is available here http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/d-052.pdf, while a proof version can be found here http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/WorldCALL2008_proceedings_vancestevens.pdf) 

Networking, and playing the Big G Game of EVO Minecraft MOOC

By Vance Stevens

English Faculty, HCT / CERT / KBZAC, Al Ain UAE

Abstract:

This post relates how #evomc16 co-moderators are using Minecraft to help teachers understand how gamification might work for them in their classrooms by giving all concerned the experience of interacting in the game.

But Minecraft turns out to be only a vehicle for understanding the wider concept of gamification. By building elements of gamification into EVO Minecraft MOOC, this session becomes a Big G game space where participants can meet other educators to learn how their students can benefit from gamified environments. So participants here (as well as moderators) are developing their understanding of gamification while enjoying playing in the little g game of Minecraft.

Gamification is modeled in the Big G Game space through creation of a Google+ community "gameboard" and having participants figure out from there what they have to do to play the game. Eventually they end up in Minecraft in creative mode. They then graduate to coping with survival in the more challenging game environment, and through that experience learn that gamification is all about teamwork, mutual support, meeting challenges, and achieving goals, whatever they are, and however they themselves define them. 

The ‘aha’ moment occurs when the players succeed in both the upper and lowercase games and realize that, if what they were trying to teach were placed in such a context, it would not only become more engaging to the learners, but their students would be taking their own learning into their own hands. This can create a powerful learning environment, but educators need to experience it for themselves in order to understand it.

Electronic Village Online (EVO, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) takes place every year (since 2001) and this year runs from January 10 to February 13, 2016. EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC16) is now in its second year as one of these sessions, http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/103533067/2016_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC .

There are 185 people enrolled in the Google+ community that serves as the base for EVOMC16, https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671, but far fewer actively engaged participants. For this small coterie, it seems to be going well. They have found in the Google+ community page the link to the syllabus, http://tinyurl.com/evomc16-syllabus, which points to a set of missions here: http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/. The missions are pretty straightforward -- or, they must be, as participants seem to be finding them and doing them without asking too many questions, and when they do ask and the moderators respond, the response seems to get them on task.

Gee (2008, p.24) distinguishes the little ‘g’ game, the software comprising a game such as Minecraft, and the Big ‘G’ game or "social setting" that the little ‘g’ game helps to gamify. Going to the Google+ community page and figuring out where the session components are and what you are supposed to do with them is how you play the Big G Game of EVO Minecraft MOOC. Completing the 10 missions (or a to-be determined number) leads to the awarding of an EVOMC16 survivors badge. Evidence of completion of the required missions is recorded in a Google spreadsheet which is in turn linked from a click on the badge. The badge is awarded through Credly. The Credly system validates awards through specification of criteria needed to earn a badge. A link from the badge awarded directs anyone who clicks on your award to an open document displaying verifiable evidence of what was accomplishment.

The missions are, for weeks 1 and 2:

1. Introduce yourself on our Google+ Community  
2. Install and enter our voice tool so we can communicate in VoIP while in-world
3. Fill in the Google Registration form
4. Reflect on your activities for Weeks 1-2
5. Join the Missions Accomplished Google sheet
6. Join us in Minecraft

These missions have provided our demographics for this session and shown us who we are likely to be working with through to the end of the session. As things stand midway through the session:

• Although we have 185 members on our Google+ Community, this doesn’t give us much of an indication of who is with us in 2016 because we are continuing a community that we started last year. 
• But from Mission 3, we see that around 30 participants have filled in the Google form “enrolling” them in the session.
• Of these, 21 provided Minecraft usernames, which are needed to whitelist them on the server. So at this point in the session, we have around 21 participants with access to our server, plus 7 active moderators, and a few others besides.
• Our most rigorous test of commitment is completion of Mission 5, where participants must request access to our Google Sheet in order to track their ten missions accomplished. Midway through the session, a little over half a dozen participants had joined that document, but this number is likely to increase as the session goes on, since completion of missions leads to awarding of badges.

What our participants lack in number they have been making up for in energy. Our server in creative mode has been attracting some impressive builds. Here are a few who have posted their achievements on our Google+ Community page.  

1. Yvonne Harrison has documented some incredible structures on her Flickr feed, linked from here http://yvonneh.edublogs.org/2016/01/26/evo_mooc-minecraft-server-5/.
2. Thorsten Gross has posted pictures of his builds here https://paradigmagnus.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/minecraft-mooc-tumbling-down-the-world-of-cubes/, and of a project he was involved with at Ricarda-Huch-Schule in Dreieich, Germany, here, https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/QoNJNUKbwkG
3. Kathleen Kerney created a lovely garden, https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG
4. Beth Evans is prepping for survival, https://eslbeth.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/prepping-for-survival/
5. Beth O’Connell has created a library house, http://booklady9.edublogs.org/2016/01/24/inworld-maps-in-minecraft/
6. Ellen Clegg made a good start on her house, https://mcecsite.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/finally-getting-to-play-around-woo-hoooo/
7. Moderators Jeff Kuhn and Aaron Schwartz have been busy creating whimsical structures such as a towering Sargon’s castle, and a zombie pit where buttons summon monsters (so participants can practice dispatching them) https://plus.google.com/+AaronSchwartz_oh/posts/TUqjApWXHZ2
8. Micea Patrascu has been making some phenomenal builds with secret mechanisms and logic gates, and putting train tracks through tunnels around the server connecting them. I made a video of one of the train rides: https://youtu.be/nL02Sh-rmss which you can find embedded in my blog post at Stevens (2016).

Mircea Patrascu shows where this train ride ends up, at his subway stop, in his post here: https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/

Mircea shows where this train ride ends up, at his subway stop, in his post here: https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/. Mircea's post to the EVO Minecraft MOOC Google+ Community gives his incredible video overview of the roller coaster at the train station end of the ride, which as you can see in the comments to that post, he created with his son:
https://plus.google.com/+MirceaPATRASCU/posts/hekx7koKFW6.

In order to access the roller coaster, you have to answer three questions about Minecraft. When the switches with the answers are correctly set, a door opens, and you can push a button to set the train in motion. Enjoy this ride!

It looks like the participants mentioned above are well on their way to earning their badges, and there are only a few missions left to accomplish. These are set in weeks 3 and 4 of the session, with week 5 being set aside for consolidation, learning from one another, helping others who might be inspired to catch up, and of course helping each other stay alive in survival mode. The transition to survival mode is planned for week 4, and will continue for as long as the server stays alive and properly maintained in Aaron’s office at Ohio University.

The focus of Week 3 has been Networking, finding out what’s available in the wider world of Minecraft.

For week 3 the missions are to

1. Explore other networks in Minecraft
2. Build something in creative mode on our server

and for week 4 to

1. Create pictures or video of you in survival mode
2. Reflect on your experiences in survival mode

Each set of missions is described in a page at our missions wiki; for example this one for week 3, on networking: http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/103905655/2016_Week3_Network

Apart from the several networks of educators using Minecraft mentioned there, networking activities in our group included:

• Bron Stuckey’s online presentation in Week 3 where she filled us in on how others were incorporating Minecraft in promoting learning from among her extensive network of connected educators, http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/24/bron-stuckey-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-projects-and-challenges-designing-and-building/
• Yvonne Harrison posted about what she is learning about the wider Minecraft networks https://plus.google.com/115571422706001108741/posts/9ram2vWXVo4 
• On Sunday Jan 31 Thorsten Groß has arranged for his students at Ricarda-Huch-Schule to show us around an elaborate build they created there, an instantiation of Bron Stuckey's advice that Minecraft helps us turn learning over to the students. Thorsten and his students will conduct a tour through the world of their school reconstructed in Minecraft, as shown in this post, https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/6MuW3CP1Pmb.
  They started to do this at a BarCamp about games, where the idea of reconstructing their whole school was planned and later on finished by students themselves. This event is scheduled for January 31, 2016, and is one of several events we hope to arrange to showcase the accomplishments of participants in our own extended network.

The networking aspect is what we focus on in this and other sessions like it. Most participants are starting to figure out that effectively networking is the key to success in the Big G game. This is modeled in the design of the EVO session, and in how the session is conducted. Not only are participants learning a lot about about Minecraft but they are starting to find their way about the EVO session itself. They're figuring out that the session is itself set up itself like a game.

Why is it like a game? There are two answers to the question. 

• The first answer is that it was designed that way. It was designed to inculcate for teachers what gamification actually feels like. 
• The second answer to the question of why EVOMC16 is like a game is because it is. By that I mean, the Big G Game of Minecraft MOOC has some rules with flexibility, goals and challenges, and awards in the form of badges. It's also much like a game because participants have to figure out these rules, it's designed to let them to figure it out as a built-in part of the game, and as in any game, it it's more fun if it doesn't play out the way anyone especially anticipated. 

This is normal for the app culture. When you go to Facebook and Google+, you don't get clear instructions. You're thrown into an interface and you see what's there and work out what you're supposed to do and how it will benefit you. So for participants who want to play the Big G game of EVOMC16, they go to our Google+ page where they find a sidebar with links they can click on. One of the links is to a syllabus, an outline of what they'll be doing each week during the session. The weeks are themed on Cormier's (2010) well-known five phases of coping in MOOCs, i.e. orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus (see Stevens, 2015, for elaborated explanation).

The syllabus alludes to missions that must be accomplished each week, and links point participants to the wiki where there is more information about each of the missions. The missions have participants do basic things like purchase Minecraft, get a username, introduce themselves to the community, join us in-world in creative mode in order to practice for our shift to survival, and fill in the Google sheet where participants will track their missions accomplished in pursuit of the one badge on offer at the moment. 

As of now we have just completed Week 3 on networks of educators using Minecraft. One aspect of networking is reaching out to the community within. We are hoping to arrange other tours with members of our community, such as the one by Thorsten Gross mentioned above, as our participants are turning out to be a rich source of modeling for all of us

I laid out our Big G goals in response to this post to our Google+ community by Kathleen Kearney, https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG.

We are all learning about gamification here, it's not so much about Minecraft. Minecraft is the little g game, the enabler of our emerging knowledge of gamification. When you enter survival mode you'll find that you are assisted by others in world. With their help you stay alive and learn. So gamification turns out to be learning through teamwork and mutual support and meeting challenges and achieving your goal, whatever it is. In this game you set your own goals. By achieving your goals in the game light bulbs go off in your head and light your way to some realization of how what you are learning in EVOMC16 might work to meet your real world challenges. 

The 'aha' moment occurs when the players succeed and realize that if what they were trying to teach were placed in such a context, it would not only become more engaging to the learners, but their students would be taking their own learning into their own hands. This can create a powerful learning environment, and educators need to experience it for themselves in order to understand its implications.

References

Cormier, D. (2010). Success in a MOOC. YouTube. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0.

Gee, J.P. (2008) “Learning and games.” The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (pp. 21-40). Available: 
http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/courses/readings/Gee_Learning_and_Games_2008.pdf

 

Stevens, V. (2015). Dreams, inspiration, and challenge: Writing in voice to articulate a way forward for EVO Minecraft MOOC 2016. AdVancEducation. Available: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html.

Stevens, V. (2016). Week 3 - Networking, and playing the Big G Game of EVO Minecraft MOOC. AdVancEducation. Available: http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html.

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The above citation is for this post. This post was updated on Jan 31, 2016 and submitted to the Connecting Online 2016 (CO16) WizIQ blog. That post was rejected by the staff keeping the blog at WizIQ because it did not promote the session itself. However, I gave my presentation on this topic at CO16 on Feb 7, 2016 and blogged the archive of the recording here:
http://learning2gether.net/2016/02/07/vance-stevens-at-co16-evo-minecraft-mooc-and-gamification-of-teacher-professional-development/

I published the video of the recording on YouTube

Interview with Alex Hayes from EDUPOV

On  September 15, 2010, the combination TESOL pp107 Multiliteracies course, TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG professional development series, and the regular Webheads meeting each Sunday noon GMT conducted an interview with Alex Hayes.  Alex is the CEO of EDUPOV (http://www.edupov.com/), a company that sells wearable technology for education.  Because it's wearable, it presents itself from the wearer's point of view, or POV. 

Alex left us his PhD proposal to read in preparation for his talk:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_TGVgWsJjbx5f0wxLQPSSjdsAluvF2Bgpnk9XMw1K4Q

In reading this over, if I were a Wordle, the word I would make most prominent in Alex's proposal is CONNECTIVISM. On p.8/16 of his proposal Alex mentions the role of connectivism in networked learning to be one where participants build "a living literacy that embodies electronic connections amongst all other human considerations," which seems quite relevant to the topic of the Multiliteracies course. He says also that his proposed research "posits a Connectivist theoretical framework as most suited to examining  the risks inherent with adding more veillance to flexible education settings." Wearable POV technology is as rich with affordances (for vocational training, for example) as it is fraught with potential for invasion of privacy, especially when the technology is geo-locatable, contains photographs of others, etc.  These latter issues conjure a world of veillances: sousveillance, uberveillance, and of course surveillance, which we already (think we) know about (http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/187/).

This word 'connectivism' stood out for me because although Alex and I have never met in person, we have interacted on numerous occasions.  Alex and some friends of his held a relaxed chat for example as a keynote address at the 2009 WiAOC convergence, which I moderated (http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/AlexHayes; I haven't located recording yet). Apart from that I have occasionally crossed paths online with Alex sometimes socially but always in connection with some learning event.  This is not surprising because connectivism is how we both learn best (Siemens, 2005: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Quite a lot of what I know about Alex I acquired not live but asynchronously, through podcasts (http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/, for example).  He is an organizer of conferences in Australia (e.g.http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/). Because Australia is a big country with huge distances separating learners from places they would previously have had to go in order to learn, their educational system tends to be strong on distance learning innovation, and the conferences Alex organizes feature speakers discussing how POV technologies help trainers overcome some problems inherent in those distances. Having had this wider context in which to understand Alex's work, I realize that participants in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching might, without this perspective, be wondering what connection his work has with them. 

Thus the frameworks underpinning Alex's work are not so apparent when Alex discusses the products of his work; however, I hope that we are modeling here with one another new insights into connected learning. One good example of connected learning was reported just the other day when a teacher in Brazil had her students blog and then requested comments on their posts through the Webheads list. This message reveals the serendipitous outcome of that:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/26545

Another practical intersection of Alex's work and pedagogy is where Alex mentions in his proposal the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report.  The NMC's annual reports of what's new on the near and distant horizon in educational technology make interesting assessments of trends for the near and far future: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/. For example, this trend: "People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope," http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/ helps explain the prediction that "On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content." http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/technologies/

So I invited Alex to talk with us because I too feel that mobile technologies are crucial to the near future, if not the present, of connected learning, which is in essence the field that Alex is working in. I think mobile technology is moving faster than teachers are at this point; for example in Argentina, almost all bars and restaurants have wifi which customers frequently access through their mobiles, which they all seem to have; yet classrooms there block mobiles and seem resistant to technology of any stripe. Where I am in the UAE we are at the stage where all students have mobiles, often more than one, and bring them to class, and use them to get on the Internet, yet teachers here in the UAE are not really exploiting even computer-based internet that much in teaching (I mean, falling short of its true potential; mobile tech hardly at all: Stevens, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico). I noticed when traveling this summer that more and more travelers are carrying smart phone and using them in conjunction with Facebook for what they used to do in Internet cafes.

This question of how what Alex talked about is relevant to teachers touches on the issue of cohesion, which has been raised in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching. There is some suggestion that cohesion could best be achieved if we worked from one learning platform (Desire to Learn, for example) rather than spreading ourselves thin on the Internet (wikis, blogs, Ning, YahooGroup and Grouply).

Cohesion should not be confused with simplicity. Simple things are easy to understand.  For example if I show you black and white and frame these with respect to a color scheme, this is cohesive, and easy to understand.  But if I explain that color is only one aspect of human subjectivity, and that the importance of color might depend to some extent on whether you are right or left brained, and whether your eyes can detect colors in the first place, whether you have a prior schema based on racial prejudices or the color of hats in early cowboy movies, then you might feel that this topic is not so simplistic, though we might be able still to supply cohesion to our discussion.

We would have to provide a platform for our discussion.  If I chose just one then this might simplify our task of discussing the topic, but when the topic itself is multiliteracies and connectivism and how cohesion is achieved when people try to learn and disseminate knowledge on the Internet, then not modeling how that works through some sort of emulation of real life in choice of learning management system could in the long run be detrimental, like presenting simplified native-language based language learning materials as opposed to exposing students to authentically communicative situations.  Of course if the students know nothing of the language then some simplification is in order, but if the topic is multiliteracies and connectivism and new ways of learning and knowing via networked learning environments, rank beginners are becoming fewer and farther between.  Some degree of immersion is appropriate.

One way to draw a distinction between beginner and experienced learners of a topic is to ask whether they are ready to learn on their own.  If they need guidance at the start of their learning path, then the teacher can consider simplifying both the material to be learned and the platform for delivery. But if the learners are capable of driving their own learning, then a real-world simulation might be the best platform for them.

This what I was hoping to discuss with Alex, some of the connections between his work and new literacies, and how we achieve connected knowledge by mobilizing that!

MobilizeThis! and StreamFolio are two initiatives of Alex's I also hoped to get him to talk more about.

• http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/
• http://www.streamfolio.com/

Also, Alex and I had both reviewed the slide show here
http://smarterware.org/6561/what-to-expect-from-google-me?
which I intended to ask about with respect to a podcast Alex left online recently at the Australian eLearning09 conference: http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/2009/12/elearning09-alex-hayes-streamfolio.html

This would have been a discussion of interface vis a vis what people actually do when using social networks online. The issue of privacy would have come up (veillance and uberveillance, and Adams's thoughts on distinguishing your networks by strength of ties, and preventing items meant for one set of ties, close friends for example, from getting out into another, a professional network for example). You can judge how closely we came to these goals when you listen to the recording of the interview in Elluminate at: http://tinyurl.com/150910alexhayes.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/evomlit100915hayes


One further comment, and thanks for this one, not sure I deserve it but I am humbled

Nurturing your PLN for everyone’s ongoing professional development

This is the blog post I intended to fire off after the last TESOL Arabia conference March 11-13 at Zayed University in Dubai.  I made a presentation there that I did not complete.  The part I gave was recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/100312vance-dubai.  The slides of all I had intended to say are here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/nurturing-your-pln-for-everyones-ongoing-professional-development. Since they were posted online they have been favorited by a number of people :-)

 

http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10410955223 shows the above Twitpic of Gavin Dudeney presenting at TESOL Arabia, Dubai, March 13, 2010.  I took the pic on my iPhone during his presentation, Twitpic'd it, and Gavin showed it to his audience when he checked his Twitter feed 5 minutes later in his presentation.

TESOL Arabia conferences in the UAE have not historically been well connected.  Often they are held in hotels where there may be wireless only in the lobby, or perhaps even in some of the presentation rooms, but in all venues presenters could expect connectivity to be patchy to non-existent.  Certainly you wouldn't plan to rely on an internet connection under such conditions, and so I arrived at TESOL Arabia this year with a PowerPoint presentation safely stored on my laptop and backed up to a flash drive, having made no preparation for delivering it to anyone beyond the brick and mortar campus at ZU apart from a mere mention on my PLN that I might try to webcast from there.

The part of the presentation that I didn't give because I ran out of time was to be a complaint against conferences which forced participants to remove themselves from their networks (fortunately, not an issue at this happily interconnected conference in Dubai - the only issue was that hardly anyone was using the connectivity; but that's the next step beyond the scope of this post, and something I hope to address in a TESOL Arabia chapter presentation from Abu Dhabi April 10, 2010; preliminary info at: http://bit.ly/Apr10_prez_TA_Auh).

As I ran out of time, I was leading to the question of what TESOL Arabia, or any viable configuration of practitioners interested in futhering their professional development, is or should be.  To arrive at what I was leading up to I had presented a distinction between groups, communities, and networks, and was showing how knowledge resides in networks and is passed around the network through modeling and demonstrating practical applications of knowledge applied to practice. In this model of how knowledge is disseminated in the 21st century, I suggest that it is never appropriate to cut anyone, at any time, students in class, participants at a conference, or knowledge workers attending meetings, off from their networks.

As a result of this trend, professional development less and less happens mainly at conferences. For many professionals, development happens every day in the course of using Skype, Twitter, or Facebook, reading blogs and wikis, or viewing and sharing tutorials and presentations on YouTube, TeacherTube, Drop.io, uStream, TED Talks, etc. etc.  This means that for many professionals, face-to-face conferences are of decreasing importance.

As most of us agree that learning is mainly social, such conferences seem most appreciated for their networking potentials rather than for the papers presented there, which more and more often can be read or their recordings viewed online, as archives of such materials become more and more widely distributed. Travel to distant cities to participate on site in conferences has become inefficient and less necessary than before, and is less crucial for gaining knowledge than opportunities available in cyberspaces dedicated to education.  Accordingly, one can argue that face-to-face meetings (in the workplace) risk a similar obsolescence, or that the notion of forcing students to attend classes is becoming archaic when podcasts of lectures are available, and indeed interaction around their subject matter can be made more rewarding using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online resources.

In other words, to face-to-face gatherings, add a networked dimension.  Hold the meeting, or conference, or class in a brick and mortar edifice as usual, but configure the space so that it lets in the network. Now you have the best of all worlds that blended learning has to offer.  Participants in the physical spaces are able to look each other in the eye and benefit from each other's company, but they can share what they are doing with the wider world, or draw in people and resources from their PLNs or personal learning networks. In this way consumers of content at a face-to-face gathering can generate content online, and as this content is reflected on, remixed, and recycled, and filtered back to participants either physically at or virtually enjoying the live event, everyone involved would be learning more than they possibly could if the event were cut off from the networks of those who participated.

There is opposition to this notion. Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls is an interesting article, recently discussed on the Webheads list, about how PLN's can be distracting, but I think this will continue to be a problem only in the short term.  This article calls attention to how inappropriate use of PLNs in contexts where greater focus is called for can be detrimental to the individuals who engage in such behaviors.  With greater experience and sophistication, such behavior is likely to dissipate, as people come to distinguish the affordances of network enhancements to how they learn in face-to-face situations from uses of networks that are decidedly unprofessional in such contexts.

I had meant to suggest in my presentation (as I did in the slides) that in future, successful conferences and professional organizations will have to combine opportunities for face-to-face interpersonal connection with the connectivity to allow seamless interaction with distributed personal learning networks. Those that do not will become decreasingly relevant I am aware that not all agree that this should be the case. As the article indicates, not everyone sees networks intrusion as a positive force in the dynamics of face-to-face interaction.  So I was hoping to raise the question, if conferences are networked, who benefits? who loses?

I argued this point February 20, 2009 at the AACE's Spaces of Interaction online conversation on improving traditional conferences, http://aace.org/globalu/. The last slide posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences has the dinosaur image, and the talk itself was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

At that event, George Siemens agreed that conferences that do not provide and encourage networking are "unacceptable" but this is what one expects at annual TESOL conferences, for example, which are always held in corporate convention centers, and where getting computers inside and setting them up and networking them is done by unionized labor, and any bandwidth provided is done at a surcharge that prices it beyond the range of most individual educators.  Even to get a data show to make a presentation there, the presenter has to pay an inflated fee to the convention center to cover the costs of union wages and to line the pockets of the shareholders investing in the convention center, a mindset quite at odds with that of most educators who pay so much of their limited resources to attend those conferences.

The CALL-IS (interest section) in TESOL has done a remarkable job of gaming this system so that a room full of Internet ready computers has been available for presentations at all TESOL conferences since the mid-80's, and I've made a number of presentations at TESOL-sponsored events where thanks to TESOL subsidy for its own sponsored events, Internet was provided.  

One of the most memorable of these was at an academic session CALL-IS put on in Salt Lake City in 2002 http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/academic.htm.  Each interest section has the right to place its academic session in the program and as the event is TESOL-sponsored it is possible to request an Internet connection.  Thus the panelists at this event were asked if they NEEDED an internet connection. Bearing in mind that this would be expensive, and even when Internet is expected, experienced presenters always prepare a backup slideshow that can be delivered unplugged if needed, and so as not to waste precious resources, every panelist but me said, no, they didn't need it.

What would I need it for?  I wasn't exactly sure, but I had the notion to stream the session live. The year before I had been asked to give a plenary address at an IATEFL conference in Nicosia, and we had streamed that along with several other of the talks at that event http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/index.html.  This had come about because on a mailing list, Neteach or TESLCAL, someone had mentioned they wanted to do a voice hookup for educational purposes and Eric Baber had replied that he had an underutilized streaming server which he was using to deliver live voice and video language courses from NetLearn Languages that he would be willing to offer as a solution to what the lady wanted to do.  

I twigged immediately to the potential of what Eric was offering the community.  I wrote him and asked if I could use it to stream from Cyprus.  I don't remember how it came about, but Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, who was in charge of the conference, was so keen on the idea that eventually all conference presenters were asked if they would consent to be streamed, and for all those who replied affirmative, Eric set up web pages where each presentation could be accessed live, and where the recording could later be replayed.  He did this all for free, and the conference was a great success especially due to this remarkable commitment and innovation.

Curious footnotes:

• I was the first presenter at the conference, the first to be streamed, and the first to be recorded.  When the second plenary was streamed and recorded, the person managing the stream at our end, unfamiliar with the process, over-wrote my file with the recording of the second presentation, and my talk was forever lost to posterity.
• Michael Coghlan, another visionary as ahead of his time as I, was the only presenter at the conference who had offered to be streamed IN.  That is, whereas a dozen presentations were streamed worldwide FROM the conference, only Michael had realized he could take advantage of the option of making a talk at the conference from a remote location, in his case Adelaide, Australia.  Michael's session was a concurrent one.  All the presentations took place in good sized auditoriums, in which Michael's talk only had a few attendees.  I was managing the stream in from the podium, Michael asked me more than once how many people were in the audience, and more than once I evaded the question, not having the heart to tell him only three or four people.  Not only that but one lady in the audience was a fan of Michael's and had come to the presentation specifically to meet him.  When it became obvious that he wasn't actually there, she complained loudly how cheated she felt when in fact she was witnessing a pioneering event illustrating how we were on the verge of realizing grand potentials for global collaboration in independent learning and ongoing professional development.

This audience reaction to our early online adventures was nothing unusual.  Later in our collaborations together, Michael and Buthaina Alothman both flew in to Abu Dhabi to present with me live and in person from the main auditorium at the Petroleum Institute as a part of a virtual event: one of John Hibbs's last epic 24-hour Global Learn Days http://bfranklin.edu/gld/.  I had announced the event to my colleagues at the PI but unbeknownst to me there was an important rugby match on at the time and I was later told that that event was well attended.  Michael and Buth and I presented from the stage of a 100 seat auditorium, which was packed during our presentation with three or at the most maybe 4 people, but, get this, we counted at least 60 in the synchronous online chat.  Buthaina archived the event here:  http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm.

Although the concept has been slow to take off, it's getting these days more common for there to be strong online components at on-site conferences.  I can think of numerous examples: Shanghai 2.0, NECC, Educon 2.0 etc etc.  IATEFL has been expanding its online events; for example at Harrogate this year: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/, and CALL-IS has made a major effort to announce a series of streamed events from the Eletronic Village, Boston TESOL 2010, http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/TESOL/2010/Webcasts/Sessions-Schedule.htm.

But getting back to the UAE, the TESOL Arabia conference this year was at Zayed University in Dubai, a remarkably beautiful campus with ubiquitous Internet. I got to the conference in time for the plenary at 9:00 on Thursday. I saw Gavin Dudeney with a spare seat beside him, sat down and said hello, and he remarked that the wireless was working quite well there.  I pulled out my iPhone and sure enough it was.  I tweeted to my network that this was a good sign.  I might be able to present live at 11:00, as I had "mentioned" earlier on the Webheads list.

After the plenary session, I went to the room where my own session would be and half listened to the presenter at 10:00 there while firing up my laptop and connecting flawlessly to the wireless.  Elluminate came up perfectly.  I uploaded my presentation to the whiteboard in Elluminate. Elluminate is available to Webheads thanks to a grant from Learning Times, whom I can never thank enough for this remarkable service, one of many pieces loosely joined in a network of globally connected educators.  Speaking of networks, I then tweeted to my PLN that I was preparing to go live online, and I sent an email to the webheads list with the same information. When it was my turn to set up at the front of the room I had already been joined by one or two people in Elluminate.

I was easily able to record my presentation, both voice and webcam.  I turned the cam occasionally to give a sense of the surroundings, not just present a talking head.  Cristina Costa joined in and although circumstances compelled me to present somewhat didactically, I managed to engage her for a moment in reminiscence of a chat we had had the summer before with Etienne Wenger, where she had remarked that she knew she was a member of a community of practice when her practice changed. The audience, sometimes sceptical at such events, warmed to the occasion and became noticably relaxed and engaged as we went along.  Their satisfaction plus that of the online audience, plus getting everything to work and connect, all presented more than one ball to juggle.  The last ball to pull out of the air is closing the Elluminate session, then retrieving the URL of the recording minutes later, then posting the URL onto various spaces including Twitter, the webheads list, and blogs.  Later someone asked me to put it on Facebook, they could get it there.  The Twitter posting makes a particularly good link for the slides and session recording.



The point I'm making here is that this is the way conferences should be.  We shouldn't all have to leave our networks at the door, or at home, or wherever the last hotspot was.  Face-to-face conferences are augmented by connectivity and backchanneling among participants, as are our classrooms.

This is another important point: how we connect at conferences is how we connect in real life.  And that should carry over to how we connect with students and they with us and how we all connect with peers both face-to-face and online.  Conferences are places we go to network and to learn.  As I pointed out in my presentation, echoing Stephen Downes, teaching is modeling and demonstrating.  This is what we should be doing at our conferences, modeling the tools we can use with each other and YES with students.  None of this connectivity should be blocked or suppressed.  The Washington Post article referenced earlier may indicate an attention deficite disorder inherent in multitasking but it also reveals a phase through which we all must pass.

As a teenager I used to show off to peers by driving fast and irresponsibly, in an era where seatbelts were not the norm.  Now in the UAE I see much evidence of this same lack of sophistication. But we all grow out of it.  We educate one another how to maximize the potentials of the technologies we harness while avoiding the pitfalls that many of us toy with when the technlogy is new to us.  In other words, if people are checking cell phone messages in class or meetings, diverting attention from the meeting itself, they are hopefully going through a temporary phase.  In time it will become understood that there is a time and place for that.

It used to be that in my classes students would sneak onto MSN messenger.  Now they almost never do that. These days they might switch in and out of Facebook, but Facebook is less intrusive.  Use of mobiles is more of a problem now, but in time we will have learned how to use them appropriately to effectively leverage our learning by widening our networks and accessing data needed for class or workplace intelligence. (Actually I found today two of my students on MSN, but it turned out they were in communication with each other, back-channeling in the classroom. I thought that this was an appropriate use of the tool).

I remember one time Gavin mentioned in a recorded presentation his discomfort with people interacting with their media while he was presenting, but now I'm glad to see that he has his iPhone and laptop with him and happily uses them in enjoyment of always-on connectivity. The back channel at the conference was all aTwitter.  At one point Gavin asked his Twitter network for advice on what to do evenings in Dubai, and I rose to the occasion with the definitive 140-character travel guide for Dubai: "@dudeneyge in Dubai, go to the creek, cross it in an abra, walk through the souks at either end of the abra ride, Deira & Bur Dubai, & dhows" <http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10368130620>.  I don't know if Gavin ever got the chance to actually follow my itinerary, but at least he and hundreds of my followers were 140 characters wiser for what Gavin was missing.

That's how knowledge spreads throughout a network, and what we should see a lot more of at face-to-face conferences, wherever they are held, although where they are actually held is getting to be increasingly irrelevant in our increasingly networked world.

PS: I just stumbled on Terry Freedman's compilation of resources at http://www.ictineducation.org/free-stuff/ and found there an article on "What I look for in a conference". On the wish list is "#7 I wanna be connected: The best conference will have wi-fi throughout the venue, including the hotel. There must also be a conference Twitter feed, and Flickr and Technorati tags."  Indeed.


TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/230310advanced