Liquid Learning

InFocus 2015: Games, gamification and games-based learning

The 'InFocus' symposium has become one of the annual events now run by the Centre for Distance Education. This is the third event that I have helped organise and chair and I am really pleased to be sharing this event with my invited co-chair Alex Moseley who is a National Teaching Fellow, Educational Designer and Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester. We have a really exciting programme (see below) planned with the added fun of a lunchtime boardgaming session with a selection of carefully chosen games. I love boardgames and this will be one of the many highlights of the day :)

 

InFocus 2015: Games, gamification and game-based learning from Steven Warburton

 

Further reading: Whitton, N. & Moseley, A. (eds) (2012) Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching: A Beginner's Guide. New York: Routledge

Translating a digital competence framework into a blended course fro care workers

It was a pleasure to return to the EDEN conference after a few years of absence and catch up with people I had not seen for some time. The trip to Zagreb was the perfect opportunity  to disseminate the recent accomplishments of the CarerPlus project in translating a digital competence framework for the domiciliary care worker sector into a blended  mobile learning programme.

 

From Carer to Carerplus: Developing Digital Skills in Care Workers from Steven Warburton

 

Further reading:

Warburton, S., Hatzipanagos, S. and Valenta, L.  (2014). From Carer to Carer+: The translation of a digital competence framewwork into a blended mobile learning programme for the domiciliary care sector. Proceedings of the European Distance and E-Learning Network 2014 Annual Conference, Zagreb, 11-13 June, 2014.

Innovation versus control

Working in the field of distance education is a challenging one. Not simply because we are now debating the nature of what DL means or has to offer in a highly connected world where open access to a variety of rich data sources are available but also in terms of the kinds of business models we deploy. Being innovative in curriculum design is important yet this does not mean that we need to lose control of development and delivery costs. A lean business model approach that lets the users pull value from the system requires a backend development process that is flexible and agile. In this presentation - from the EADTU conference 2011 - I explore some of the features of the University of London International Programmes' response to these contradicting forces.

Innovation vs. Control

View more PowerPoint from Steven Warburton

 

 

Related links:
Lean business models http://www.slideshare.net/PeterHines/the-principles-of-the-lean-business-system

OERs and Academic Capacity Building

Slides from my presentation at the 24th ICDE Conference held in Bali Indonesia. The talk outlined the University of London International Programmes' approach to capacity building in the area of academic/teaching practice and how we are using a combination of workshops and OERs as a vehicle for change and transformation.  The project is scheduled to run until December 2012 and will also embrace some of the work that has been carried out elsewhere in the area of Open Educational Practice as part of the scaffolding necessary to sustain OER use.

Academic Capacity Building through the Development of OERs for Enhancing Academic Practice

View more presentations from Steven Warburton

Six barriers to innovation in learning and teaching in MUVEs

Preparing to give a conference talk at 6am on a Monday morning is possibly not the most appetizing of thoughts. But when you are speaking to an audience in Kuala Lumpur and you are still in London then the delivery times become somewhat constrained.  The symposium on Second Life was a session scheduled as part of the LYICT conference held a couple of weeks ago and I admit if it hadn't been for the Elluminate video feed and my fashion reputation I would have been tempted to to remain in my dressing gown for the whole thing. There were four of us on the UK end of the panel (Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell and David White) with a jet lagged Steve Wheeler fronting the show in  Malaysia. Technically a risky venture but it worked, just.

With only had 10 minutes to fill I wanted to keep the presentation short and simple. After some last minute dithering I decided to tackle one of the recurring criticisms of Second Life - the perceived lack of innovation in many  in-world learning and teaching activities. The result was an identification of six barriers:

1. Technical - machine and human related [and standards related]
2. Identity - the tension between playfulness and professionalism
3. Culture - reading the codes and etiquette of SL
4. Collaboration - building trust
5. Time - even simple things take time
6. Economic - nothing is for free

These are expanded in the slideshare presentation (which has been updated since the original talk) and feel comprehensive - there are probably more I agree but that depends on the level of granularity one wants to go into:

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

view presentation (tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict)

Update (28/10/08): There is also I feel a seventh barrier and that is "Design" - perhaps this is a meta-barrier but SL does offer up very particular design challenges.

One of the interesting points that came out of this whole exercise was choice of technology. Originally we had planned to deliver the session from Second Life but the advance testing revealed what a challenge it would be. Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate - an audiographic video conferencing tool. But what really tipped it for me was the lack of tools in SL for getting feedback from the audience. How do I know I am being heard - do I need to adjust volume, where is the back channel for people to participate, ask questions  ... and so on? Status indicators are key. I think using SL for conferencing requires caution ... think about the value-added, why make life difficult when it is not necessary? As a final thought, translated into pictures, here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel - perfect:

MUVEs and Second Lives

This was a presentation given at the annual King's [College London] Institute of  Learning and Teaching conference, a mainly internal affair aimed at highlighting current educational research within the institution and disseminating good practice. The talk itself formed a general, if critical, introduction to Second Life as a social virtual world and articulated the abundant issues that make SL a challenging yet compelling arena for teaching activities. What was noticeable when putting together these slides was just how *much* is going on in SL, to the extent it was difficult to capture the richness in a short session like this. One of the key threads that ran through the talk considered how the first phase of simply diving in-world and trying things out is being extended by a second phase of serious research activity - evidenced by the number of grants that have been  secured by new projects such as MUVEnation, (Open)Habitat and LLL3D. Some of the early empirical data gathering that I have carried out with fellow researcher Margarita Perez-Garcia has been a study of the non-formal learning opportunities made available to SL citizens in the form of hands-on workshops. The emphasis in this work has been to explore how teachers in short duration SL competency building classes have appropriated virtual spaces and have made use of tools and techniques that may be valuable in understanding what good practice is in MUVE-based teaching. The slides show the culmination of the preliminary data analysis in the form of a taxonomy of practices and a matrix that elaborates four areas of teaching that are formed by axes addressing control of the environment and pedagogical approach. The conclusions are that good practice in these workshops is exemplified by maintaining a close control over the teaching space combined with a reflective and  process orientated  teaching approach.

MUVEs and second lives: exploring education in second life from Steven Warburton

Visualising a 3D matrix

What is the best way to represent 3D in 2D? This was one of the difficulties expressed in feedback from the Stockholm workshop where the 'interpreting technologies in use' diagram was presented: an analytical matrix comprising x,y, and z axes and offering descriptors that span active to passive, isolated to social and formal to informal. It is not a simple process to create a legible and visually attractive representation of a 3D matrix on a flat page. This is probably why in my original working of this diagram the formal to informal polarity was not included as an axes even though it is more than ever a vital part of how we interpret our use of technologies - as a brief aside I feel this dimension to be particularly relevant when we consider how emerging  Web 2.0 technologies, that are in their wider internet usage largely informal, change in style and nature of their usage pattern when placed in more formal settings ... such as education ... a good example being the institutional deployment of blogging tools.

With the three axes to deal with during the workshop one of the participants, Per Filipsson from the Nationellt Centrum för Flexibelt Lärande put  forward some rough sketches and in a series of emails since the Open Classroom Conference he has kindly sent me the digital versions which are both excellent and engaging representations, thanks Per:

Vision one: 3D matrix for 'interpreting technologies in use'

Vision two: 3D box for 'interpreting technologies in use'

 

Making the right MUVE

After a squeezing a few free minutes this morning I have found found time to publish the first set of slides from the Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm held in October 2007. The workshop itself focussed on using the tools that I have described in my previous two posts and included work on identifying critical factors impacting on the introduction of ICTs into educational settings that has been initially presented here by Margarita Perez-Garcia on her personal site, 'espheres identitaires'.

Workshop presentation: Making the right MUVE:

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