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Gallipoli: The First Day – learning in new ways about events nearly 100 years ago
This ABC Australia, award winning 3d virtual tour of the first day of Gallipoli deserves attention.
http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/gallipoli/
This is the ‘Avatar’ of production values. Sympathetic. Balanced (I hope, it includes the Turkish perspective) and compellingly engaging. It sets the benchmark for delivering this kind of content. It says something too of the blood-letting, nation-creating, soul-searching in relation to loss in this way and on this kind of scale that many European countries will need to revisit over the next few years.
A teacher will never have the budget to create this kind of content, so how do they willingly use it in their teaching?
Does it motivate someone new to this story to find out more? How does it work as education or entertainment? Where does the funding come from? As mash-ups go this is very professional. The learning design and its gamified values are second to none.
(First posted in OpenStudio in my R&R ‘concept board’ as part of the MA ODE module H818: The Networked Practitioner).
Lost in the clouds in an OLDS MOOC 2013
Fig. 1. Detail from Clouds (1812) Constable.
I’ve shared my frustrations with Cloudworks from the start of the OLDS MOOC 2013 … and had some experience a year ago so entered the cloud with a sense of dread.
I stuck at it and found some odd ways in.
What mattered was the contact with people I got to know – as they gave up it became inevitable that I would do so too, not least because I had more pressing matters. H809 a postgraduate module, partially produced by the same team as it comes from the Open University stable, but a very different beast.
More like getting on a bus with four to five stops a week.
A weekend for an assignment every five weeks and a longer sojourn to produce a short dissertation at the end. Four tutors groups each with less than sixteen people in each.
I liken my Cloudworks experience to Fresher’s Fair … every day of the week.
Every time I came in I wondered around getting interested in what other people were doing, sometimes landing their by mistake. So a Fresher’s Fair with some 12 entry doors on several floors with the people behind each stall mostly changing too. Your brain gets tired of the overload, the lack of landscape and in this sense ‘Cloudscape’ is the right term, for the wrong reasons.
I took some pictures of a Constable painting ‘Study of Clouds’ in the Ashmolean Museum when I was in Oxford on Friday.
What was I doing in Oxford. Hankering after ‘the real thing’ – a chance to meet and talk with some people in the flesh, this at an talk on Virtual Worlds in Japanese at the Centre of Social and Cultural Anthropology hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute.
After a while, all this online stuff has you eager to meet likeminds in person.
Which I guess why conferences will flourish, not die out, and then from pure e-learning vs. traditional learning the blended form might become the long term, preferred pattern. The best of all worlds, with landscapes, water courses, digital oceans and shifting clouds.
Related articles
- Olds Mooc Narratives (mymindbursts.com)
- Van Dyck painting ‘found online’ (bbc.co.uk)
- Pre-Raphaelite Conference in Oxford, September 2013 (preraphaelitesociety.wordpress.com)
- Silver haul donated to Ashmolean (bbc.co.uk)
Inter-life, Young People and Activity systems
“The Inter-Life Project: Inter-cultural Spaces for Young People to Use Creative Practices and Research to Assist with Life Changes and Transition.” (Lally and Sclater, 2012)
This paper considers the experiences of two groups of young people from quite constrasting backgrounds in their use of the online virtual world ‘Inter-life’ in which you take the name and form of an avator and role play through a game, or through reconstructions of real life. The authors, over a three year period, consider how the virtual world, mirrors, mimics, supports and even prepares the participants for the real world.
My fascination and interest is more than simply someone curious about the effectivess of such enterprises – at a web agency in 2000 these were conversations we had when and where budgets, a fraction of what was required, were made available to thinkabout, mockup and trial immersive, role-playing games in language learnign and for ‘youth awareness’ (well being, career decissions, life choices).
Fig. 1. Val Desire. My Avatar. Leaving her to be safeguard by my more able 13 year old son he decided it was perfectly OK to sell her clothes to raise some cash!!!
As a parent with two teenagers it has been a constant, tangential observation of their use of computers, games and the internet.
Born in 1996 and 1998 they have been on my knee or in front of their own screens before they could talk and have been able to touch type since they were 4/6. Until recently, the day long bable, interaction, negotiation and sharing of roles in various games has been the background to my own efforts to work online – until the age of 14 we kept computers in a communal space – a reasonable effort at parental supervision.
Is my son mentor or pupil, leader or lead in the real world as in the virtual, where he may tutor friends through battle and football scenarios, or on other occasions be the learner – with people I’ve heard, from amongst others, Germany and North America. The conversations do sometimes sound exactly as if these young people are on an exchange visit – between the ‘action’ sharing insights on language, rephrasing jokes and surely gaining insights and life-skills that they can and must apply in the real world.
Both worlds are of course ‘real’. Both are having an affect.
Were it measured activity would be recognised in the brain. Memories are being formed.
They are changed by these experiences. The mind translater or transmogrifies what goes on … even translates or superimposes virtual experiences into the real, just as one superimposes the unconscious. (I need to add a psychology degree to the others at some stage).
To understand how Activity Theory (AT) is used I personally need to see the diagrams, each separate activity system and the interaction in the ‘third generation’.
I find annotated notes at each of the nodes (see above) , or explaining problems within the activity system enlightening.
I may try and recreate the above from your paper, either on a scroll of wallpaper backing paper, or with chess pieces on a very large (door sized) piece of MDF with some marker pens. Ideally I might even want to see an Activity System in an historic form, so have five or six in an animation ‘movie’ to show that it is a ‘snap shot’, a kind of audit of a moment in a live, shifting, potentially volatile scenario. This can reveal itself in video and transcripts of meetings.
I’ve toyed with Engestrom’s imagery (OU Student Blog Post) of this all being some kind of living organism a lichen – Mycorrhizea – but assume that to be a metaphor.
Diagrams for me start to bring the model out of the abstract.
To see tools, object, subject and division of labour etc: as people, concepts, guidelines, artefacts and so on. I find case studies that use Activity Theory very readable, so enjoy ‘From Teams to Knots’ (Engestrom, 2007) for descriptions of AT used in management consultancy like scenarios. Where there is a fit I would certainly see myself using AT for the reasons given in this paper.
In H809 are currently questioning the validity of words. What about graphs, charts and diagrams?
There is often bias, even a cultural position on these. For example, I’m curious to understand ‘our’ obsession with triangle and pyramids. I’ve tried other shapes with AT, putting the triangle on its side, even visualising it in 3d … and, as Web 2.0 is doing it, deconstructing the model and adding additional points of interaction … as Web 2.0 is allowing interaction of all nodes with each other, not simply via each other. i.e. the complex is winning.
Is there a case for research to provide a substantial part of the research finding for others to work on?
Or would it have to be redacted? Or are there practical, ethical and legal reasons why such data isn’t offered? i.e. the research team say, this is what we did, this is what we found, here are our conclusions … and if you’d like to analyse all the original data yourself … here it is.
I’ve followed up one or two further links, alternatives to AT.
Bardram looks interesting and I will be reading more from the likes of Kuutti and Nardi.
I have applied AT, most recently in understanding the flow of activity between the Institute of Swimming and a large, 1,000 member, swimming club, in relation to e-learning provision/accommodation for swimmers or coaches with disabilities. (ECA for H810)
I can think of many situations where I would apply AT from a consultancy perspective in order to better understand what is going on.
- Between e-learning, web agency, L&D department of multinational and learners.
- Across the GP Clinic, Local Hospital and Regional Hospital
- In Swimming, to include the IoS and ASA, and regional organisations, large as well as small and niche swimming clubs and the various players – online tools, tutors, amateur teachers, local authorities and leisure centres.
- On a film set, or in live TV.
Having the time/budget to ‘indulge’ AT would be an theory worth using with any of the corporate L&D projects I have worked on recently.
Turn round is quick, budgets tight and whilst they want you to think about the issues they don’t want me to come along and ‘over think it’.
I liked this quote in relation to the value of and use of theories.
‘From this point of view, theories are more like a pair of dark glasses. We put them on and the world is tinted. The change brings some objects into sharper contrast, while others fade into obscurity’. Halverson (2002)
FURTHER READING
Wilks, Y (2010) (ed)Close Engagements with Artificial Companions. Volume 8. Key social, psychological, ethical and design issues. Natural Language Processing. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
REFERENCES
Bardram, J. (1998): Designing for the Dynamics of Cooperative Work Activities. Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle,WA, ACM.
Engeström.Y (2008) From Teams to Knots: Activity-theoretical studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work. Learning in doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Series Editor Emeritus. John Seely Brown.
Halverson, CA (2002), ‘Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition: Or What Does CSCW Need to DO with Theories?’,Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11, 1/2, pp. 243-267, British Library Document Supply Centre Inside Serials & Conference Proceedings, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 February 2013.
Lally, V and Sclater, M (2012). “The Inter-Life Project: Inter-cultural Spaces for Young People to Use Creative Practices and Research to Assist with Life Changes and Transition.” Research in Comparative and International Education 7, no. 4 (2012): doi:10.2304/rcie.2012.7.4.480
Related articles
- OLD MOOC 2013 – Why Activity Theory needs to be seen, not itemised, to have any chance of being understood (mymindbursts.com)
- Who would you invite to an e-learning dinner party? (mymindbursts.com)
- The Gutenberg Galaxy – first thoughts, from the first pages (mymindbursts.com)
- I Have An Affliction – Models and Relationships (interactioncultureclass.wordpress.com)
- Reddit (2ndselves.wordpress.com)
- Analyzing Computer-Mediated Communication in Professional Environments: An Activity Theory Approach (tc.eserver.org)
The best virtual world is the one you create in your head. Or leave it to Disney and EA Games.
Fig.1 Digital Memory at the Design Museum
Whilst some dreams achieve this, the best virtual worlds I can think of are created in the mind’s eye – the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on radio or numerous novels. Game worlds achieve this for tens of millions, while Avatar did it for $250m or some such – these are not budgets given to you for e-learning, though £3m might buy you a module of an MBA coursr and a 12 year shelf-life.
As the way people learn can be so different they need the space to learn in there own way. Less is more.
Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality
To what extent do you think that all five of Woolgar’s themes are relevant to virtual worlds?
The answer is to look both ways and to do so with aplomb.
Read Woolgar’s five themes.
| 1 | The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context | Liff et al. (2002) demonstrated the importance of ‘third-place’ settings, separate from both home and work, as influential in engaging a wide range of local people in using the internet: museums, trains or jogging circuits. In all these places technology now enables people to learn using the resources of formal education. The idea of ‘place’ takes on a new form, as the boundaries of a multitude of sites are crossed. |
| 2 | The fears and risks, anticipations and enthusiasms associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed | Woolgar cites research into surveillance equipment in support of this theme. Counter to expectation, for example, surveillance technologies in the workplace were not found to be generally resisted by workers. However, acceptance was undermined by the failures of the technology to meet design specifications. This led to extra work and sometimes the technology had to be scaled back (Mason et al., 2002). There are differences between staff and students in universities, in terms of perception and usage of ICT. |
| 3 | Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities | Electronic communication has multiplied the use of paper in offices, though we can read material online. Learners may feel less need for the printed page. Educators look to substitute electronic supports for expensive and scarce direct tutor contact. |
| 4 | The more virtual the more real | One unanticipated outcome of teleworking was that travel increased. Electronic communication increased the number of clients contacted and a face-to-face meeting was then required. Computer-mediated communication is being used, partly because it offers benefits for learning and partly because students seem less able to, or to have less time available for, travel to study centres to attend tutorials. It may be, however, that mediated communication using one tool encourages a somewhat different form using other tools. Thus learners may use forums provided by their institution, but also Facebook, Skype and Twitter. |
| 5 | The more global the more local | ‘The very effort to escape local context, to promote one’s transcendent global (and/or virtual) identity, actually depends on specifically local ways of managing the technology’ (Woolgar, 2002, p.19). In Singapore, for example, the Singapore Institute of Management was the base for provision, and a careful fostering of mutual understandings between the two organisations was developed over at least a decade
Educational provision is typically seen as valid and trusted only if it is located within recognised local institutions and accredited by local awarding bodies – even though the technology enables all aspects of a course to be delivered electronically from the originating institution. |
Having just completed the activities about Second Life, to what extent do you think that all five of Woolgar’s themes are relevant to virtual worlds?
| 1 | The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context. | Not one bit, in this case any versioning is simply the English language (US). |
| 2 | The fears and risks, anticipations and enthusiasms associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed. | The context will include access to broadband, a computer, time to indulge, family attitudes to gaming, space in the home, time to indulge, other commitments (persona, family, school and/or work). |
| 3 | Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities. | Substitute. It has become too easy to tap into a game that is, like the modem and some computing devices, on through all waking hours and readily accessible. A blended form of activity often occurs with participants playing together online, sometimes coming round to each other’s houses to do so. |
| 4 | The more virtual the more real. | On the contrary, seeking out the tricks and cheats is very much the culture of gaming. Even if you don’t have wholly real-life attributes ways are found to defy gravity, walk through walls, I’ve even see a sub-culture underneath or behind the game in which you behave/exist play and muck about ‘subway’ like behind the set, as it were. |
| 5 | The more global the more local. | In the context of business working at the OU Business and Law School I have first hand knowledge of how OU materials are developed for Russian partners (the 1000th MBA student celebrated this week) and are being initiated in Japan while having various other local centres globally. Though NOT in the US or France where local politics have restricted tutoring on the ground. |
Select two of the five themes that you feel most strongly reflect the way in which you perceive the effects that technology is making currently in a context known to you.
| Reflection | Example | |
| 4
The more virtual the more real |
On the one hand there is a culture of gaming that attracts escapism and engenders a rule-breaking sub-culture of hacking with cheats a supplementary and important quest and reward. On the other webcasting and conferences whilst becoming more real, speaking and seeing each other in real-time, nonetheless afford less than real behaviours. | I attended a live-cast 250 miles away and did so in my PJs, not dressed for the office. When interviewed by an organisation in New York I set up an redecorated one corner of a bedroom rather than reveal that I was sitting either at the end of a bed, or at the kitchen table, or in an office the size of a walk-in cupboard and as messy as a shed-used as a dump for unwanted stuff. It is a different reality, sometimes a ‘hyper-real,’ that as we become familiar with its nuances will play to these differing attributes and so become distinct from reality … or of course, enrolled in that universe that we call ‘real’, which of course it is. |
| 5
The more global the more local |
Thinking directly of the technology, it strikes me that there is a global language: HTML. Are these codes not universal? | Watch the HSBC bank ads and see how we have two distinct types: the importance of local knowledge on the one hand, followed by the current roll-out support for their ‘Key’ which is universal. i.e. there is a duality, that is Janus-like. Aptly Janus is the god of transitions. He is depicted as having two faces on his head facing opposite directions and so look simultaneously into the future and the past, back at the last year and forward to the next. What strikes me about HSBC is that whilst globally owned and operated, it works to meet not impose local cultures; while this new ‘key’ with its diddy 1970s like plastic key-ring calculator code generator and the concept of bolts, locks and vaults, feels highly retro. |
REFERENCE
Liff, S., Steward, F. and Watts, P. (2002) ‘New public places for internet access: networks for practice-based learning and social inclusion’ in Woolgar, S. (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp.78–98.
Mason, D., Button, G., Lankshear, G. and Coates, S.(2002) ‘Getting real about surveillance and privacy at work’ in Woolgar, S. (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp.137–52.
Thorpe, M. and Godwin, S. (2006) ‘Computer-mediated interaction in context’ in Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. and Reimann, P. (eds) ‘Who’s Learning? Whose Technology?’, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, University of Sydney, Australia; also available online at http://routes.open.ac.uk/ ixbin/ hixclient.exe?_IXDB_=routes&_IXSPFX_=g&submit button=summary&%24+with+res_id+is+res20033 (last accessed 10 February 2011).
Thorpe, M. (2008) Effective online interaction: mapping course design to bridge from research to practice, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, vol.24, no.1, pp.57–72. This article provides an in-depth case study of a well-designed sequence of conferencing and online activity and introduces a particular form of concept mapping called ‘compendium’ to demonstrate the design.
Thorpe, M. (2009) ‘Technology-mediated learning contexts’ in Edwards, R., Biesta, G. and Thorpe, M. (eds) Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching: Communities, Activities and Networks, Abingdon, Routledge, pp.119–32.
Woolgar, S. (1999) ‘Analytic scepticism’ in Dutton, W.D. (ed.) Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Woolgar, S. (ed.) (2002) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Why you should act it out as a way to learn and do so in a virtual world
We role-play as children to make sense of the world, we take on multiple personas to some degree in real-life as well.. I am particularly taken by the way people with a disability can walk in a virtual world (Peachy) or indeed how any of us can fly and do much more in these environments (die and repeatedly come back to life of course.)
At no cost my dentist, or rather our family dentist, made a set of dentures for me out of dentine that fitted over my teeth. This allowed me to sing. I foolishly sharpened the fangs and promptly punctured my lower lip. I learnt by the way that unless I could have dislocated my jaw biting someone’s neck is impossible. Vampires should bite the wrist or leg, but then all, or at least the obvious sexual innuendos are lost.
REFERENCE
Peachey, A. (2010) ‘Living in immaterial worlds: who are we when we learn and teach in virtual worlds?’ in Sheehy, K., Ferguson, R. and Clough, G. (eds) Virtual Worlds: Controversies at the Frontier of Education (Education in a Competitive and Globalizing World), New York, NY, Nova Science.
Was I living out a fantasy when I played Dracula in my teens? I kept acting into my twenties until I decided that my mental state couldn’t handle the selection process (rejection) and my experience in front of camera and on stage left me bored senseless (I had minor roles).
Do actors, as in role-play, have to overcome or compensate for who they are?
Peachy raises all the points in a common- sense and everyday way. I can imagine or should research where stepping into the role of an avatar has life- saving qualities, for example is not learning to fly a commercial jet-airliner in a simulator not a form of virtual role-play? I believe firemen are trained in virtual set-ups too and believe the nuclear power
industry do so too.
The trouble with doing this in a learning context is the huge development costs. i.e. It has to be better to use a ready made platform. I then ask though, what is wrong with using our imaginations, that improvising and role-play doesn’t require the disguises?
Virtual worlds cross dressing and role-play
I have an avatar.
My son took me through the set-up, vital for any software, have an informed and experienced teacher.
I wasn’t allowed to make one quick choice, I had to look at the options. He had views as well as information concerning all the characters. My wife joins in and we plum for a female as the way she poses and sticks out hefty butt when she shuffles about made us laugh. I think I am a night elf. Unable to give her a real name (all taken) I got for Val d’Isere … Which gets transmuted into Valdesire. This is a lady with attitude; I guess I see myself as a Lara Croft type 🙂
Aided by my son he insists we skip the intros.
Intermittently he reaches over and gives me a belt, boots and a sword. And were off. I know I am painfully slow for him but after while I can position myself in front of a hovering, dragon slug thing which seems about as easy to kill as standing on a snail. I gain pouts, collect stuff and go up a few levels.
I assume my son is off to the bathroom when he goes of, actually he has signed on a second computer and with delight says the person I am standing next to, my twin but wearing clothes is him and his (her) name is ‘Notvaldesire’.
‘Let’s have a dual,’ he says and knowing what he is like I get my sword out and put in a strike only to have some god-like voice/ figure berate us.
On returning from the shops I ask if anything had happened as my wife had taken over ‘Our Val.’
We had to sell all you clothes, he said, to buy a spell that didn’t work.’
Having no clothes has me think of the only campus Second Life I’m aware of at Sussex University where I understand that repeated calls go out for everyone in Second Life to take their clothes off 😦
Thinking about role play as I wondered through Lewes I saw groups of language students in the same blue-tops and football fans gathering before going off to a match.
This is the town where a substantial part of the town dress up for November 5th, indeed I am in Commercial Square and dress up as a Confederate Soldier each year. We joined as newcomers to the town 11 years ago; as a social network it is extraordinarily effective.
Related articles
- Best of Val d’isere (besttripever.wordpress.com)
Role-play and learning in virtual and made-up worlds
We role-play as children to make sense of the world, we take on multiple personas to some degree in real-life as well.
I am particularly taken by the way people with a disability can walk in a virtual world (Peachey 2010) or indeed how any of us can fly and do much more in these environments (die and repeatedly come back to life of course.)
At no cost my dentist, or rather our family dentist, made a set of dentures for me out of dentine that fitted over my teeth. This allowed me to sing. I foolishly sharpened the fangs and promptly punctured my lower lip. I learnt by the way that unless I could have dislocated my jaw biting someone’s neck is impossible. Vampires should bite the wrist or leg, but then all, or at least the obvious sexual innuendos are lost.
Was I living out a fantasy when I played Dracula in my teens?
I kept acting into my twenties until I decided that my mental state couldn’t handle the selection process (rejection) and my experience in front of camera and on stage left me bored senseless (I had minor roles).
Do actors, as in role-play, have to overcome or compensate for who they are?
Peachy raises all the points in a commonsense and everyday way. I can imagine or should research where stepping into the role of an avatar has life-saving qualities, for example is not learning to fly a commercial jet-airliner in a simulator not a form of virtual role-play? I believe firemen are trained in virtual set-ups too and believe the nuclear power industry do so too.
The trouble with doing this in a learning context is the huge development costs. i.e. It has to be better to use a ready made platform. I then ask though, what is wrong with using our imaginations, that improvising and role-play doesn’t require the disguises?
REFERENCE
Peachey, A. (2010) ‘Living in immaterial worlds: who are we when we learn and teach in virtual worlds?’ in Sheehy, K., Ferguson, R. and Clough, G. (eds) Virtual Worlds: Controversies at the Frontier of Education (Education in a Competitive and Globalizing World), New York, NY, Nova Science.
Related articles
- The Various Applications of Virtual Worlds (2ndselves.wordpress.com)
- The Complete World (2ndselves.wordpress.com)
- How can Second Life build your writing skills? (dsworld215.wordpress.com)
- CFP: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds conference, 21-22 May, 2013 (fransmayra.fi)
- Virtual Worlds: Portals to Our Self-Discovery? (njsmyth.wordpress.com)
Mind Bursts 