I am privileged to work with a host of organisations helping them develop and deliver their learning provision. One of those organisations is the United Nations and specifically the school system it runs for Palestinian children across the Near East (that’s the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria to you and me).

Here is a video of the Education Reform program I have been working on with UNRWA, Palestinian teachers and my good friend Karen Ardley over the last year.

Created by: OnlineTeachingDegree.com

As David Polinchock over at FutureLab comments, location-based stories have exists as long as people have told stories but social and mobile media have transformed traditional methods and opened up exciting new possibilities.

There are at least 3 broad categories of new location-based stories:

• Static
• Wandering
• Virtual

Static

broadcastr

Static stories are pinned to a single physical location. New York-based Broadcastr sees itself as “an answer to the transient nature of social media” by “unlocking pictures and audio relevant to where you are.”  It aims to create an historical archive of stories around the world, in addition to providing instant access to stories happening at the moment.  The site allows you to listen to stories tied to specific places as well as share you own tales.

Although you can visit Broadcastr from anywhere via the web, the real impact of it is consuming the stories in situ – the act of standing in setting of the recollections is a powerful emotional experience.

The Getting Closer app by Krissy Clark makes that process easier by automatically triggering audio replays when you arrive physically at the location.

The Street Museum app by the Museum of London does a similar thing with historical photographs linked to places in the UK capital.

Other digital artists have extended this idea to link sites together to create journeys.

Wandering

kidmapped

Tim Wright‘s ‘Kidmapped‘ is a great example of using technology to retrace some literary steps.  The project follows chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’ and the story of David Balfour running for his life across the Highlands, sometimes accompanied by tough and rebellious Alan, sometimes pursued by the English army. Tim says that it ” seemed so visceral and exciting to me that I wanted to try it for myself.”

Tim’s blog combines the retelling of the story in the original setting with his own experiences of travelling the path and an invitation to join in either in person along the route or online.  It’s a very intimate but accessible insight into the literature that provides a new way of understanding classic literature.

we tell stories - 21 steps

The We Tell Stories initiative by Penguin and Six to Start explores original digital storytelling techniques and one in particular focusses on location-based tales.  Chris Cummins’ story The 21 Steps (based on The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan) tells of Rick, a man with a checkered past who finds himself mixed up with a dangerous organization that wants him to smuggle a mysterious vial into Scotland. A blue line traces Rick’s path across satellite images from Google Maps as you work your way through the story by clicking on location markers.

The Langwitches blog has some very useful instructions on using Google Maps for digital storytelling.

Virtual

da vinci code webquest

Stories don’t have to stay in real world locations to encourage travelling: the web provides a treasure trove of places to visit.  Bernie Dodge coined the phrase “WebQuest” to describe a structured online exploration across multiple sites and it’s as good a term as any to talk about virtual location-based stories.  Although mainly used to define consciously educational activities, the framework offers an interesting way of linking virtual sites into a coherent story.  Random House’s The Da Vinci webquest is a simple example of how a multitude of websites and related activities can be tied together but still it’s more of a treasure hunt that a ‘proper’ story (that is, one that enjoys any of Aristotle’s Six Elements).  I’d love to hear of better examples.

One of the questioned raised during the session was whether placing a story in its actual setting detracts from its ability to fire the imagination.  Its an interesting thought.  All too often new technologies are used lazily as a shortcut to ‘novelty;’ we’re left feeling dissatisfied by superficial projects that haven’t undergone the rigour associated with tradition forms of ‘published’ media.  For me, the real potential for location-based stories is in their ability to make experiences deeper and more moving – and that’s worth working at.

By using and combining various definitions of game mechanics (Wikipedia, SCVNGR & Gamification.org), it is possible to map how dynamics correspond to the various learning theories.  This is not an exact science but does suggest which mechanics can be used to encourage particular ways of learning.

Of course the risk with any sort of exercise like this, is that it becomes formulaic and is wrongly perceived as a rule for creating “learning” games.  I don’t believe that is the case. Every game needs to be looked on a special case: as soon as you try to bottle the essence of play, it tends to evaporate.

farmville sheep

In this final look at how each of the major learning theories relate to games, we explore the ideas behind social learning.  In the social and contextual approach to learning, the outcome is for the learner to become socially accepted and to be an effective member within a community.  This is what is commonly referred to as learning in a community of practice (COP)[1],[2].

In the Social and Contextual approach, learning does not occur solely within the learner, but in the group and community in which they work.  Learning is a shared process which takes place through observing, working together and being part of a larger group, which includes colleagues of varying levels of experience, able to stimulate each other’s development.  In this view, rather like cognitivism, individuals only learn from more competent others but the emphasis is now on being part of a larger system.  Crucially, this system includes the learner, other people around them, the equipment they use, the technologies they work with, the procedures they work with and the overall culture of the workplace.

Whether they are conscious of it or not, groups, and individuals within them, learn mainly through social interaction.  This happens through discussion, observing and sharing.  Again, the role of the practitioner is one of facilitator who needs to help focus discussion to maximise key learning points rather than just letting a group tell irrelevant anecdotes.

Vygotsky in his Social Development Theory[3] coined the term “scaffolding” to describe the various forms of support that educational providers can offer learners.  It might include verbal assistance, questioning, suggestions and directions all aimed at extending a learner’s activities where the learner cannot accomplish this alone.

For Vygotsky, learning from others more competent in culturally appropriate skills and technologies was the capstone to his educational theory.  Vygotsky suggests that children or students can be guided by explanation, demonstration, and work, and can attain to higher levels of thinking if they are guided by someone who is more capable and competent – a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO). This conception is better known as The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).  The Zone of Proximal Development is the gap between what the learner can achieve on his own and what he can achieve with the support of others. The ability to attain higher levels of knowledge and understanding depends upon interaction with other, more advanced, peers.  This unequal interaction facilitates and encourages learning.  Through increased interaction and involvement, students are able to extend themselves to higher levels of cognition. Vygotsky defined the Zone of Proximal Development as,

“the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under the guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”

The ZPD is the difference between what students can accomplish independently and what they can achieve in conjunction or in collaboration with another, more competent person.  The Zone is created in the course of social interaction.

The term “social game” has become very popular of late.  Farmville is perhaps the commonly thought of social game (although many don’t think it is a game at all) because to succeed requires the active participation of other players: collaboration is essential to progress (that or using real-world payments to short-circuit the process).

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORGs) like World of Warcraft are better examples of social and contextual games because they are dependent on multi-layered teamwork.  In these circumstances, players improve their performance through the observation, imitation and modelling of others.

Social learning also occurs outside the game world but in related ‘spaces’ such as forums.  The associated activity of leader tables, message boards, hints, tips and cheats all represent instances of social encouragement, support and scaffolding.

Helping young people to critically “read” the news is crucial if we are to develop a society that can make sense of unfolding events.  Increasingly, children are disengaged from “reliable” mainstream news organisation and instead use partisan or unsubstantiated sources for their information about current affairs and the world around them.

The News that Defined Us, a website that I produced for Tyneside Cinema, unlocks the process of making the news and allows young people to interrogate the production behind the stories.  By providing first-hand access to the media ‘machine’, the project helps to re-engage young people in this crucial form of communication.

The strength of News that Defined Us is the personal and intimate experiences associated with news production.  The project brings together broadcast journalists, eyewitnesses and schoolchildren from Whickam School in plenary sessions where the young people can quiz the adults.  Taking recent stories as a starting point, the makers and subjects of the news talk to students about their experiences and implicitly reveal the effects of representation, censorship and bias.

Danny Savage speaking to students at Whickam School

The opportunity to question professionals is enormously valuable but difficult to scale.  The News that Defined Us project captures the experience of the school question-and-answer sessions and disaggregates them to create a rich interactive library.  The shared legacy is a website where guest sessions are organised according to curriculum subject and theme.  The site provides archived copies of related broadcast material and interactive questions to recreate the school events.  By organising the content into themes, it provides a lasting resource that powerfully illustrates the principles and issues in topics such as conflict, culture and human rights.

Renowned BBC broadcasters such as Kate Adie and Alistair Leithead spoke of their experiences in the UK, Washington, China and Afghanistan.  Their experiences were complemented by visitors such as Private Scott Cooper (a teenage soldier who lost his leg by stepping on an IED), PC David Rathband (a police officer blinded by the killer Raoul Moat) and Councillor Stephen Bridget (a local politician).

From twenty sessions, the project run by Tyneside Cinema created over 200 interactive questions to support thirty hours of broadcast news footage.  The site provides a unique resource both for teachers and students.  Its structure helps educators include this rich media into their lessons while the design encourages young people to explore issues more deeply.

Today the project is launched at the Houses of Parliament in the illustrious company of Tom Watson MP, the terrier-like politician who has pursued the immoral journalists and corrupt management of the British Press, his fellow committee member Damian Collins, Blaydon MP Dave Anderson and our Bridget Phillipson MP.  It is an auspicious start to website that I hope helps young people think more critically about the news that defines them.

Merrill suggests that the most effective learning environments have problem solving as their basis.  This trial and improvement, problem-solving covers four distinct phases of learning:

1. Activation of prior experience;
2. Demonstration of skills;
3. Application of skills; and
4. Integration of these skills into real-world application.[1]

kolb's learning cycle

One of the key theorists of experiential learning is David A. Kolb.  Kolb developed his experiential model, as opposed to a purer cognitive one, following the influence of Dewey and Piaget[2].  Kolb formally recognised that people learn from experience and described learning as following a cycle of stages:

1. Concrete experience
2. Observation and reflection
3. Abstract conceptualisation
4. Testing concepts in new situations[3]

In crude terms, learners have to do something, think about it, pull out its key points and apply them to work or life.  In the first, perceptual, half of this cycle learners sense and absorb the information coming from concrete experience and reflect on its significance.  During the processing period, learners build cognitive models that can be tested in practice.

Kolb argued that learners can enter this cycle at any point and that learning is a process of repeatedly looping about these four stages.  Feedback from the experience becomes key in the refinement of performance and the learner’s ability to apply knowledge in new circumstances.

The experiential view of learning is considered more sophisticated than pure behaviourism or constructivism because it represents a more holistic view of the learner.

However, like constructivism, experiential learning draws on the learner’s personal experience.  The role of the facilitator is to encourage learners to address the various stages of the learning cycle.

One of the implications of this is that the role for practitioners is not about teaching specific knowledge or training fixed behaviours, but is one of helping the learner discover approaches that work for them.

Facilitation is about creating and providing space for learners to try out something new, reflect on their experiences, arrive at new conclusions and think about how they would apply these conclusions in their work and life.  In this view people learn for themselves with a bit of help and assistance, rather than have it done to or for them.

As with constructivism, the learner is not a passive recipient of learning simply being fed knowledge but is active in its gathering and manipulation.

Typical experiential games include task-based simulations (such as SimCity) or role-play (e.g. The Sims) where players have a given or a chosen goal and must act consistently “in character” to achieve it.  The beauty of these “open-ended sandboxes” is that players can experiment and “fail softly.”

In physical role-play, children have been observed to use real objects to create imaginary situations in which they role-played and formulated rules that surfaced naturally during their play [4](Berk, 1995). In the same way, simulations allow for the simplification of systems: they describe manageable chunks of behaviour that learners can absorb.  The structure and simplification of environments gives users the chance to parse information more effectively.

Herz (1997: 220) suggests that the circumstances within a simulation are less important than the forces that create them [5].  The “four dimensional building blocks” of moving resources in time do not change the system they merely illustrate the way in which it operates and allowing the user to establish the rules and relationships between elements.  The simulation therefore describes environmental processes through graphics, animations and other dynamic media, portraying complex abstract relationships in a more recognisable and intuitive way.

And that is where simulations offer most education value, not product but process: the articulation of rules and relationships – the basis of experiential learning.

building blocks

Continuing my series on the relationship between the various learning theories and games, this post explores the idea of constructivism.

From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon as described by Behaviourism, rather it requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction[1]. In constructivist theory, the learner takes an active role in constructing his own understanding rather than receiving it from someone who knows.  According to constructivists, learners interpret information from the unique personal perspective of their previous experience.  They learn through observation, processing and interpretation: personalising the information into knowledge[2],[3].  As well as the recognising the cognitive aspects of learning, a major emphasis of constructivist theory is situated learning, that is contextual learning where material is placed in a recognised situation and takes account of the learner’s beliefs and conceptions of knowledge (Ernest, 1995).

Boethel and Dimock outline six assumptions of constructivism:

• Learning is an adaptive activity
• Learning is situated in the context where it occurs
• Knowledge is constructed by the learner
• Experience and prior understanding play a role in learning
• There is resistance to change
• Social interaction plays a role in learning[4]

Learning, according to Constructivist theory, takes place through stimulating one’s ideas and helping to reflect on them.  The process encourages learners to consider how new ideas, actions they take and experiences make sense of their own mental models.  The main difference between the behaviourist and constructivist approaches is that in the former, one sees the learner as a relatively passive storer of knowledge and the latter the learner is an active creator of their own knowledge.  In practice, most situations seem to involve a mixture of the two.

Constructivist games provide primary sources of information, simple elements and raw data for players to experiment with and manipulate.  Open-ended God-games (like Black and White or Spore) and simulations (like Age of Empires) typify the theory because every instance of the game is a unique creation by the player.

In an extension to constructivism, Seymour Papert recognised the potential of production as a means of learning in his work on constructionism, that is, “learning by making.”

Papert says “Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word— shares contructivism’s view of learning as “building knowledge structures” through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.[5]