Mark Hines EdTech Blog

A typical Sunday. Take the dog to the beach for a round of play catch. Come back read some of the paper, make a quad cappuccino, make breakfast, play with the boys, and spend some time with course work. Near the end of the day, I read the comics from the Sunday funnies and absolutely love this one from Retail:

http://www.seattlepi.com/fun/retail.asp

Why? Specifically, about three hours today I spent playing and creating with the free software called Scratch, from MIT media labs to create a prototype for a game we are designing for ETEC 697, Educational Technology in Informal Learning Environments. I’ve played with Scratch before, but never sat down to really tackle a project that had been defined through a game brief. What struck me was how many ways I could attack the problem to bring in graphics, to create animations, to design interactive elements. The end result of three hours of work was either remarkable or work at a seven-year-old could do, depending upon how you look at. My seven-year-old sat at the table while I designed the project, and understood most of the interface and the feedback in the design and even the programming aspects of the game. Let me say that again: a seven-year-old watched me go through the process of designing a game that had backgrounds, sprites, scripts, imported graphics, audio files, and programming errors and found it engaging to work with me and give feedback into the process. That’s why I found the Retail comic strip so funny. We have reached a point in technologic development that surpasses our ability to appreciate the amazing things we are doing (in this case on my kitchen table wirelessly with a computer more powerful than a 1990s supercomputer) and our generation of young students assumes this is the way the world has always been. It reminds me a lot of the Arthur C. Clarke quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

I believe we have come to an age where either it is magic or the response is “Meh.”. When go back and look at my Sunday I marvel at the layers of technology that I applied without thinking. I had a iPhone by my bed that both act as a alarm clock and a telephone in case an emergency scheme during the night. When I came back from the beach, I grabbed my iPhone to help finish off a crossword puzzle (six letter word for Island in the Bahamas? Bimini). While I was at it, I scanned my personal learning network, checked out the start times for NFL football games, then check the up-to-date news. A few hours later, I was on my laptop using Skype to connect to my cohorts in Colorado and Honolulu, where we planned through Google docs both a written document and the presentation to give in about 10 days. I then downloaded the latest version of Scratch from MIT media labs, and using the web to look for tutorials, taught myself enough to develop interactive elements in a game in less than three hours. While I was doing that, I was also watching the live New England Patriots game which was being broadcast through a streaming website. Meh.

Let’s look at Scratch a little more closely. A free, cross platform, easy to learn programming environment designed for primarily middle and high school students to design interactive games and media. When you are finished, there is a “share” tab that allows any author to create and publish their idea for free. Think about this… anywhere in the world, Macintosh, Linux, Windows, your creation can be shared via their website for free, or others can look for and enjoy it and give feedback. Meh.

Now, I readily agree that having access to a programming environment is no different than having access to a pen. Without assistance and good mentoring (teachers, facilitators, other means of building knowledge), the product will likely be weak and ineffective. With today’s technology, it is possible to easily find many free tutorials to learn how to do just about all aspects of the program. More importantly, there is a whole community of users who write about their experiences with the program. Think about that — resources that I can reach from my kitchen table, experts that I can find, video tutorials (screen casts) that others put up to help ME. Why? Because that is how users in this new frontier see themselves – as contributing community members for a world of users. Meh.

here is the game, btw (simple, yes – the goal for this prototype is to guide the butterfly to the flower – if you touch the flower and hit the space bar, it increases the energy level of the butterfly)

Learn more about this project

So where does this take us? Everything we see today is at the bottom of the exponential curve of technological change as we look into the future. What awaits us is even more connectedness, more access, more personalization, more ways that we can look back and wonder about a time that we didn’t have these resources. For educators with the right focus — who really are in the game to help students learn — the opportunity to help students appreciate both where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going makes this a marvelous time to try and drive away the “Meh” culture that surrounds us. Peter Vail in his book “Learning as a Way of Being” talks about Whitewater Learning as a metaphor for a dynamic approach to changing times. In Hawaii, we talk about getting on the wave as a way of dealing with the dynamic of the ocean as a metaphor. All educators need to recognize that the world is changed, and is continuing to change exponentially, and that the only way to stay relevant is to adapt and adopt to the changing frontiers in front of us, lest our classroom experience be regarded as “Meh.”

I gave a talk at the fall HAIS conference on the topic of Online learning and teens. I have attached the pdf version of the keynote I gave. I used a lot of video for the use of telling the story through case studies. Most of the graphics on the slides link to video stories that set the context for how teens learn with online media.

One aside – I tried the iphone app Keynote remote – it was marvelous – love it!
http://mhines.edublogs.org/files/2009/10/online-learning-and-teens.pdf

So, this week for ETEC 697 (Ed Tech in Informal Learning Environments), we were talking about two topics in particular:
Where the idea for a game comes from (chapter 3 from Rouse)
and
Getting the gameplay working (chapter 15 from Rouse)

Rouse, R., & Ogden, S. (2004). Game design theory & practice, second edition (2nd ed.). Plano, Tex.: Wordware Pub.

To start, some quotes from his text that I found particularly interesting:

Regarding the initial ideas for games:
“… computer game ideas can come from three distinct, unrelated areas of the form of gameplay, technology, and story.” (Page 41)

“often a game developer will have enjoyed a game in one of these genre and will want to apply her own spin to it.” (page 42)

“sometimes the designer will have both the stories she wants to tell you the type of gameplay she wants to explore, and will attempt to do both in the same game, even if the two do not go well together.” (page 43)

Regarding starting with a specific technology:
“Going into a project with a large portion of the game’s technology already developed is also fairly common occurrence” (page 43)
Of course, this makes me think of the iPhone as a platform that is already very robust, and well developed. It is no wonder, therefore, that so many developers have moved this platform — sometimes exclusively — to create content.

“When technology is handed to a game designer who is told to make a game out of it, it makes the most sense for the designer to embrace the limitations of the technology and turn them into strengths in her game.” (Page 44)

“For the greater good of the game, the story and the technology must be compatible with each other.” (Page 45)

Regarding starting with the story:
It is surprising to me that it seems that this is the least common of the three paths to get to a game. Perhaps it is the altruistic side of me, but as humans, we have lived primarily through the stories we tell, and it is the stories that are most compelling. This is not to say that games developed with technology or gameplay do not have compelling narratives, it just seems counterintuitive that the story comes after these other two areas frequently.

{{I find it interesting as a sidebar, that Rouse is clearly a fan of the rock band Rush, since phrases like “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and “those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme.”
Just an intriguing way to view some of the ideas and gameplay…}}

In chapter 15, which is “Getting the gameplay working”, some quotes here:

“by concentrating on getting a small piece of the game fully functional and enjoyable, the developer can get a much better sense of whether the final game is going to be any fun or not. If the gameplay does not turn out to be as anticipated, the prototype provides an early enough warning that the game needs to be either redirected in a more promising direction or, in the worst cases, aborted entirely.” (Page 283)

“looking back, if we had focused on making the gameplay fun before making a large number of levels, we could have avoided a lot of extra work and wasted effort.” (Page 285)

Regarding starting small, and prototyping early on:
“Besides, a playable demo will make the game easier to sell to a publisher or a green light committee.” (Page 286)

“It is very easy to lose sight of your gameplay goals when your game languishes in an unplayable state for much of the time. Certainly the game can be broken in many ways, with various components that do not yet work as they are supposed to…” (page 288)

“It is often a good idea to start developing your content from the beginning of the game. Early parts of the game need to be at the highest level of quality possible, so you want them to represent your more seasoned efforts, while levels at the end of the game will often tend to be more atypical and hence will not represent the “regular” gameplay that you want to have working first.” (Page 289)
It is interesting here, to think about the comparisons and differences between game design and lesson development, therefore. With good lesson design, we typically are not changing our knowledge fundamentally as we are developing our content, activities, and instructional plan after setting our end goal. If we know our goal is to have the students understand simple machines through an activity that involves building racecars out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands, we know as we design the lesson that we will not understand Popsicle sticks much differently at the end of our process than when we started. This is very different in game design, where the platform that we develop our content in will become easier to use, better understood to apply, and potentially evolve as we work on our design. There is also the time frame involved. In lessons, we typically design over a few days, although there is iterative design that occurs year by year as we go back and revise and improve lessons we’ve used in the past. For game design, the period of development which may be months or over a year, almost guarantees that changes in our understanding of the platform, or the platform itself will happen. Yet, there is a common idea here — the start (think Gagne’s first event: Gain Attention) and the end (culminating activity) both need to be powerful to best ensure their success.

Regarding prototyping: “observe how easily they manage to pick up the controls and mechanics. It is much simpler to make a game harder than to make it easier.” (Page 290)

“As you work on a project, you’re likely to become overly familiar with some of the content you have created, and familiarity can breed contempt.” (Page 291)

“Always try to remember how you first felt when you play a level or tried to pull off a particular move” (page 291)

Regarding the role of programmer versus designer — assuming that you have a team working on the project: “nevertheless, a designer who cannot program will be beholden to the talents and inclinations of her programmers, which can be eternally frustrating.” (Page 292)

Although not all of these ideas apply directly to instructional design outside of gaming, or certainly a few ideas in here that are significant whether we are looking at games, educational games, or just classroom instructional practice. A few thoughts that came into my mind through the reading:

One of the emerging technologies that still are in their early stages are virtual worlds. Specifically, second life is a platform that has no content at a starting point, but gives developers ample opportunity to construct openly in their environment. Is Second life is a technology looking for a story? There are certainly examples of projects that are creating virtual worlds with a story embedded — World of Warcraft, Runescape (quote of the day from my seven-year-old this morning “dad — someone ‘jacked’ my identity — can I make a new one?” I had to ask him what that meant, and then realized identity hijacking was a fairly common phenomena in that virtual world). These MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games) have story built into them, and a social community as a significant element. The numbers involved in these worlds attest to their viability, and as informal learning environments, we can use that as a learning laboratory to best design from.

Regarding multi-touch interfaces, I’m usually most intrigued with iPhone, but I saw this video recently that provided another window in game design: Microsoft surface D&D project

So here is a example of a powerful multi-touch technology, where the game play, the story, and the technology all Weave together. Perhaps that is the best view of where the future lies in game design — a happy mix of all three.

We’ve begun to investigate the underlying ideas behind game design. As always, my reflection stems from considerations of learning environments, and how they are emerging, with a lens on schools, and education in general.

We have been reading from:

Rouse, R., & Ogden, S. (2004). Game design theory & practice, second edition (2nd ed.). Plano, Tex.: Wordware Pub.

In particular this week, topics on storytelling (Chapter 11) and multiplayer (Chapter 13).
As it turns out, today, I was visiting the Honolulu Academy of Arts, because it was family Sunday, and the topic was medieval times.
I had in tow my seven-year-old and 12 year old, who enjoyed the swordplay, the Lego castles, the catapult building, etc. While I was there, I was thinking about the relative simplicity of their visitor design. Placards next to artwork, introductory walls to explain areas of exhibit, then the relative minor influence of technology and museums to visit. Short video of one exhibit room:

The readings from

Braverman, B. E. (1988). Toward an Instructional Design for Art Exhibitions. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 22(3), 85-96.

make the case that visits to spaces that have a focus on aesthetics have a very different mission, and displays and design are very different with that kind of focus. In most art museums, the focus is not specifically content, but more appreciation and development of the right brain part of our experience: creativity, context, beauty, passion.

In places like the MET school in Providence, there is a movement away from content as core and the movement towards directed interests, creativity and context as a starting point. In spaces like museums, there is a shift from content as core and more an effort to wrap in context as the main experience. In the midst of this, I am reading

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? : a cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Early in the book, he talks about the concept of prior knowledge as a significant determinant in meaning making. Essentially, when we learn and experience, we first draw on our prior knowledge to help us make sense of what we are seeing. In a museum, we may see an exhibit with a surrealist painter, and without any prior knowledge, we would just see objects on a canvas, a bizarre mix of shape and form, but if we have some background knowledge of the historical setting that it comes from, when we have other artists from that time that we already know, we have an easier time both appreciating and understanding the work for what it is.
In Rouse’s book, in the chapters on storytelling and multiplayer, he still lays out the significance of drawing in the player, explaining the importance of not overwhelming or killing off a new player as a significant design element. There is an inherent tension in designing games to either get to the content, in the case of educational games, or the story, in the case of more fun/experience focused games, and there is a challenge here for educators. When the environment is designed too closely around the content, the engagement and interest will likely go down, and there will be the inherent problem with matching learners incoming, prior knowledge so as to best set up the learning environment. As a result, many games that try to focus on educational concepts, have either elaborate introduction or simple sequences that are not very interesting or rewarding, to lay a foundation of prior knowledge. One of the strengths in the engaging single and multiplayer games is the ability to start right into the story, and bring in information as it is needed to help the learning experience. This kind of scaffolding experience is more highly engaging, but often does not have nearly the educational depth that most teachers and schools would find a prerequisite for usefulness in a learning setting. As an example, we played Halo this week in class, and although it was highly engaging, I’m not sure I would replace my physics class (yet) with this virtual world.
The challenge then, for the major project that will be due in this class (ETEC 697), is to marry the best of what cognitive research shows works in the brain to build knowledge, and to structure it in such a way so it feels engaging and appropriate for the user. One of the ways to take advantage of that is through the social, multi-user interface that is emerging in game design.

Another experience this weekend gave some insight into this. I was at the Kapiolani Community College farmers market, and was struck by the sense of community that exists at this weekly event. Picture below:

There were hundreds of people, almost none of whom knew each other, but there was a common sense of purpose about being there that brought a true sense of community and shared experience to the event. As a result, people were more likely to interact, share stories, and drop their guard in order to the part of the experience. As I think about Second Life when it is at its best, I am struck by that same possibility: being in a place where a community can form around a good idea, and the nature of common mission and presence would allow conversation and knowledge building to happen as the users interact. We are not there yet, as the places that exist are still either too forced by their nature to specific goals, or experiences are too general to really be powerfully educational, but next-generation interactive design has the potential to go there. One effort towards this road is a emergent virtual world designed for educational experiences, but with a first look and feel as a engaging social community: Blue Mars. Time will tell if spaces like this will rise to the needs of learners AND schools.

A few gratuitous shots of my boys in medieval garb:

This is a short blog post this week that’s more reflective about the beginning of next area in ETEC 697: Educational Technology in Informal Learning Environments. We are beginning to get into talking about games — specifically computer games and a great multitude and the ways that they support learning. Two particular things strike me as a reflection point to begin this quest:

Gee, J. P. (2009). Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in 3-D Virtual Worlds. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2(1), 3-9.

In this article, Gee, a well known advocate and researcher on games and their possibilities in education reflects on the similarities between construction of knowledge in gaming experience and a similar research thread in science education termed modeling. Much to my surprise, he quotes and uses extensively the thinking of David Hestenes, who spent the last 20 years at Arizona State University developing a pedagogical approach to science education termed modeling. In the “it’s a small world”, I spent two summers at Arizona State University in 1995 and 1996 under the tutelage of Hestenes learning the modeling method for physics teachers. sense that experience, I have been a huge advocate for rethinking the way we teach and learn — initially science, which is what I was trained to do, but more broadly education in general, as the ideas of modeling are applicable across all domains of learning.
So it was with no small amount of pleasure, that Gee took on the notion that good game design creates opportunities for internal models to be constructed by the gamer. Like any instructional approach, there are better examples than others that indicate this, but the notion that a well-designed game requires the learning of, and the application of some framework about the virtual world that must be applied has some real basis at its core.
Chris Dede At Harvard University spent a decade developing a virtual world called River City, in which students were immersed in a virtual medieval world that was facing a health crisis. The students needed to collect data, interview individuals, test samples, build a internal model for what was going on in this community so as to propose possible causes and solutions to the crisis. The underlying goal was for students to develop an understanding of the scientific process, with an emphasis on public-health. There were two aspects of River city that I always found particularly powerful — students were engaged with the rich science problem, that required building knowledge, as well as social exchange in order to accomplish the task. Secondarily, there was a real emphasis on assessment, learning outcomes, to understand better how students learned in this environment. This is a topic for another blog post, but probably the most exciting thing I heard Chris talk about was their efforts to measure learning formatively as the students were playing the game. Programmers found ways to measure where students were going, what objects they touched, the ways that they built resources, so that instead of stopping the students in the midst of learning to see what they knew, it was possible to measure that without interrupting the flow of learning.
There is no doubt that students find games engaging. The thinking of Gee and the potential offered by Dede give two merging pathways to better support these tools and learning.
In the process of thinking about this article, I stumbled across a PBS website that has interviews with Gee and Prensky, amongst others, talking about pros and cons of games in education. The website is:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/games-that-teach/

here is an example of Gee talking about whether games might be educational:

The second topic, which is just a brief reflection, was the recent visit I had at High Tech High in San Diego California with a group of 60 Hawaii teachers from independent schools, looking at transformative models of education. High Tech High has built a reputation as a leading project-based school with a strong school culture on learning communities. In the process of talking to Ben Daly, the chief academic officer, the subject came up about expanding their program to a online environment. They are looking at creating a online Academy, for the students who cannot come to their school — either because it is too far away, or they could not accept any more students. They are fine tuning what an online environment might be like, and I found it striking that a school that values group work, authentic problems, and rich, deep thinking might not succeed well with traditional online classes. Games and virtual worlds, however, provide an opportunity to more than not mimic the kinds of problem-based, engaging, social learning that they value so highly. It will be interesting to see how they adapt their model online, and what tools they develop or utilize to support their philosophical core.

So this week, I took a look at some museums and exhibits in Second Life, with a particular focus of analyzing them based on some of the research and writings on museum exhibits and design. Although we’ve used authors like Falk and Dierking, Pine and Gilmore, to name two, I decided to utilize a few new resources to help me frame my thinking about my visits (Urban, Black, Gammon). Full bibliography is at the bottom, with some key ideas from those articles underneath.

As a general point of discussion, none of the sites I visited covered all of the appropriate design ideas. What there was, however, with some insight in each one about strengths and needs for improvement to make the experience more vivid and powerful.

In order:
Exploratorium:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Exploratorium/192/202/25

When you arrive at the Exploratorium Island, There are a variety of interactive exhibits to explore – test your ability to track objects, be a molecule undergoing brownian motion, or take some visual perception tests. From a Gammon’s work, there is a definite sense of each exhibit attracting and holding attention. Urban emphasizes the importance of setting, media richness, and user agent. These are all true for the many exhibits that populate this space. Black details 23 characteristics for visitor involvement, and these exhibits do engage including features like enjoying the activity, it is enjoyable and planned out, users have the power to select, learning will occur because of participation. Each exhibit by itself clearly shows effort in the design.

Some shortcomings here included a lack of cohesiveness that Urban might attribute to lack of consideration of setting. Gammon states the importance (as do many others) of linking to prior knowledge. Black uses the phrase “clarity of vision”. Although the exhibit is bright, full of interesting exhibits, and covers a range of science topics, there is a lack of a general sense of the plan, and signage is minimal to the point of being confusing. Probably most frustrating for me, was the lack of depth of the science explained. With the opportunity for lots of different media richness (Urban), I felt the designers could spend more time providing better information, learner guidance, and differentiated entry points for learners (Black).

To compare the site to others, I also visited:

Basilica San Francesco Assisi:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/san%20francesco%20assisi/246/109/68/?i&title=San%20Fran cesco%20Assisi

This site has a striking look and feel to it. Unlike the Exploratorium above, the site was rooted in reality. This location addresses the scale and setting issues brought up by Urban in his article. Although I’ve not been to this location in real life, it has the authentic look and feel of the original space in Italy. One of the impressive features was the opportunity to purchase a heads-up display, that gave guidance and information for many way stations along the path. For the most part I found this display helpful, but there were some glitches. The controls did not always work, and once a description started, it kept looping until you are out of the approximate range of that specific exhibit. is probably the most frustrating aspect of this design (for me anyway) was a general lack of direction available to guide a visitor through. Although the heads-up display gave useful information, it was not as intuitively easy to use as it might’ve been, and more importantly, did not really the two specific places within the building.

It was interesting to me that both visits (and the others I looked at) all lacked some major elements that would’ve made the visits more engaging. It certainly cuts to the core of Urban’s comment about developers who are using Second Life as a “Third Space”. Although they are passionate in creating very interesting spaces, they are not fully applying all the principles of good design into the spaces consistently, and thus minimizing the impact that these places might have if they were more fully thought through.

Readings that have specific information that is applicable to virtual world design:

Black, G. (2005). The engaging museum : developing museums for visitor involvement. London ; New York: Routledge.

Gammon, B. (2003). Assessing Learning in the Museum Environment [Electronic Version], from http://sciencecentres.org.uk/events/reports/indicators_learning_1103_gammon.pdf

Urban, R. et al., A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums, in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 1, 2007 Consulted October 4, 2009. . http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html

NOTES:

Urban:

Key ideas: developers in Second Life are often using it as a “third place” to develop their serious leisure pursuit.
Characteristics of Second Life environments:
scale: there’s a lot of flexibility in Second Life to work in the scale of your project based on your intention, and not in the physical limitation.
Setting: how artifacts are displayed is very open to interpretation. Some spaces minimize the setting to make the artifacts standout, others create a rich copy of the original space to set their setting, others invent new ways of representing the works.
persistence and evolution: more so than real-world, Second Life spaces evolve dramatically over time, which can be both powerful and unsettling for return visitors.
Media richness: a Second Life exhibits can incorporate powerful use of media to enhance the experience. Whether it is sound, video, or just interactivity, all of these features create the opportunity for a rich experience.
visitor engagement: There are many opportunities in Second Life to create this gauge, and invite people for second and third visits based on their experience.
Intended purpose: although it is not possible in Second Life to re-create any specific real-life equivalent, there is a need to match the intent of the space, and the design as close as possible
Collection types:it is possible to have a variety of types of artifacts and Second Life — from replicas of original objects like paintings, to interactive models in which participants can take an active role. The spectrum across these wide variety of the exhibit types within the Second Life environment create multiple opportunities for experienced.
Target audiences: because of the anonymous nature of Second Life, collecting specific information about the audiences for exhibit is challenging, if not entirely impossible. That makes targeting exhibits based on user experience a tricky problem indeed.

Gammon:

Specific ideas he mentions about learning in museums:
Cognitive
Affective
Social
Developing skills
[mental and physical]
Personal

Specifically:
Does the exhibit:
Attract and hold attention — absorbed, repeat, attend for requisite time
comprehend content — challenging but achievable, attain detail and depth, makes difficult easy to understand
increase or consolidate knowledge — clarify, consolidate, address open-ended, retention weeks later, pre-post increases
link to prior knowledge — connectedness through mapping, Everyday experience,
process and apply information — new ideas, deep discussion capability, use information to complete task
challenge belief, attitudes, values — change is evident, new perspective
inspire strong emotional reactions — emotive language, described exhibit in personal emotional terms
increase awareness of other people’s beliefs, attitudes and values — spontaneous empathy, tolerance
increase empathy with other people’s beliefs and attitudes and values -

develops skills of cooperation
develop skills of communication
increased sense of self-confidence and self efficacy
increased sense of identity and self-worth
inspire interest and curiosity
motivate to investigate further
associate experience with positive feelings
skill-based — prediction, deduction, experimentation, decision-making…
numeracy and literacy skills
manual dexterity and other skills
artistic appreciation and criticism

Black:
a model for interpretive planning
when you wish to present such a specific site resource issues themes etc.
who you’re targeting the presentation I have to consider the nature of the target audiences there needs to expect patience
why you wish to develop/change the presentation — by defining specific objectives and outcomes. What are the benefits for the visitor, for the site collections, for the organizations, and our these benefits evaluated
how do you intend to present the museum — the interpretive strategy and gallery concepts — to achieve the objectives of the outcomes required

key principles:
interpretation is inclusive
external image is vital
interpretation emphasizes the overall visitor experience
the threshold is all-important
atmosphere matters
through orientation, interpretation gives visitors the power to select
interpretation is enjoyable
interpretation should be based on the latest audience research
interpretation seeks to use visitors personal context to build on pre-existing experience, skills and knowledge
interpretation is planned
interpretation emphasizes clarity of vision
the interpretation itself must be selective and themed
sound interpretation requires sound research
sound interpretation recognizes multiple points of view
interpretation is committed to active viewer participation
Interpreters believe learning occurs as a result of visitor participation
visitor participation means “pacing” displays
visitor participation also needs rest, recuperation and time for reflection
visitor participation means encouraging social interaction
visitor participation requires an impact on the emotions and senses as well as on the intellect
visitor participation requires a palette of approaches and layering of content
interpretation must also relate to the detail
interpretive approach will enable regular change into continuous program of activities and events

This week’s post is framed around some experiences from this week, and some ruminations from weeks past. The title comes from a Winston Churchill quote that I have kept with me over last seven years or so from being involved in a new building design. And in light of the visits we had, some of the readings, and most importantly my own thoughts and experience, I have some thinking going on about design for formal and informal environments.
A week ago, we visited the Bishop Museum, and toured the newly reopened Hawaii Hall, as well as the science Center. Here were two facilities that had different origins — Hawaii Hall was built 100 years ago, and although it was face lifted in minor ways a few times, it was closed, reinvigorated, and reopened with a focus towards applying good visitor design ideas for the first time since it opened. Info here: The Science Center, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up and therefore had a different approach, look and feel, and goal.
On Tuesday, we visited the Waikiki Aquarium, and looked at its designs from the visitor experience, including the audio tour. The aquarium, has gone through a series of redesigns, and applying new exhibits and approaches over the years.

So along with that, I’ve been thinking about classroom design and library design in particular. My wife recently was at the Sinclair Library at the University of Hawaii and commented on the redesign which created a more friendly, open space for students. An area for socializing with food, coffee available for students, different configuration spaces with more openness, location of a Student Success Center to support studying, research, and other areas of student life. Essentially, they became more of a learning center, and less of an archive of paper text. As a result of small budgets, they did a lot of the work themselves: painting, receiving donations for furniture, rethinking spaces and making the most of what’s available. The results, a threefold increase in traffic over the last three months.

This made me think of a talk I heard in December 2008 by the architectural firm Fielding Nair International and their architect Randy Fielding titled “Transformation through Innovative School Design”. In this talk, he both talked about creating spaces for the 21st century, as well as gave design examples from his company and others. It made me think a bit about how a space like a library, or the Bishop Museum, or the Waikiki aquarium, would start if a donor gave them $2 million to redesign their facility. Make old things new? Or go back to square one, and design with a new eye?
To that end, Fielding discussed 20 modalities and four supporting areas that come into design ideas based on the social nature of humans and the way people learn. The modalities are:
independent study
peer tutoring
team collaboration
1 to 1 learning with teacher
lecture with teacher at Center stage
Project-based learning
technology-based with mobile computers
distance learning
research video wireless Internet
student presentations
performance-based learning
seminar style instruction
community service learning
naturalistic learning
social/emotional learning
art-based learning
storytelling (floor seating)
learning by building
team teaching
play-based learning

Not all of these modalities fit our thinking about informal learning spaces, at least in the way we think of them in exhibits in museums, but there are kernels in each one that support the readings that we have had two this semester.
More importantly, Fielding lays out four design areas that he thinks are significant in any new designs of formal (and informal, in my opinion) learning designs. They are (my explanations, not Randy’s):
The Campfire: a place where a group can gather around, share information, tell stories, and create a social context for their learning. This area has a sequence or synchronized mission to it.
The Watering hole: a more informal place to gather, that allows Asynchronous and unstructured sharing.
The Cave space: this area is designed for more quiet, reflective, individualized learning. A study area, a workroom, an out-of-the-way place.
Real life: spaces that are outdoors, or authentic for learning, experiment, grappling, learning with real objects.

At the end of his presentation, Randy shared a matrix that has been developed to aid schools in determining whether their design meets 21st-century goals. The instrument is called the Educational Facilities Effectiveness Instrument. The website where it is located is here:

The instrument includes criteria like entryway, technology readiness, supporting small learning communities, inclusion of learning studios, storage, transparency, casual eating areas, music and performance areas, outdoor learning, etc. In total there are 200 criteria that are assessed with this instrument. It includes images/exemplars of each category to prompt designers to consider ways to include these.

Some images from his slideshow might paint this a little better:

Are all of these criteria relevant for our thinking about informal learning environments? Probably not, but these prompts would lead one to really identify what areas in your informal environment you really wanted to focus on. For instance, maybe the addition of considering how outdoor areas might expand the kinds of experiences you offer is worth considering. The small way, the Sinclair Library transformation, models this. There was an outdoor lanai area that was redone, with furniture, better lighting, etc. and the result was increased usage on the part of students, who found the area inviting and welcoming. The Waikiki aquarium utilizes very well outdoor areas for their reef tank, small presentation areas, and fish and monk seal exhibit. The ability to be outside changes the feel of the environment, and creates context from the indoor and outdoor experiences of the facility.
So we have a wide range of opportunity as designers. Sometimes it’s weekend repainting and asking for donations of furniture like the Sinclair Library. Sometimes we have the opportunity to design from the ground up, as in the Bishop Museum and science Center. And other times, we can redesign with some resources on spaces into new learning areas. Instruments like the EFEI give a context upon which we can draw out our thinking and our understanding of the research on visitor experience and learning to best design old places new.

Readings from this week:

Black, G. (2005). The engaging museum : developing museums for visitor involvement. London ; New York: Routledge.
(Chapter 7: Applying the principles of interpretation to museum display.)

Gammon, B. (2003). Assessing Learning in the Museum Environment [Electronic Version], from http://sciencecentres.org.uk/events/reports/indicators_learning_1103_gammon.pdf

Hein, G. E. (1998). Learning in the museum. London ; New York: Routledge.
(Chapter 8: the construvist Museum)

Standards for Museum Exhibitions and Indicators of Excellence. (2009). Retrieved September 16, 2009, 2009, from http://name-aam.org/about/who-we-are/standards

So the main focus both in the readings in their class discussion centered around ways to both analyze, and engage learners in museum environments. My interest this week stemmed from a some examples that Peter gave during class that triggered some new thinking in my mind about ways to build in learner centered information, and the potential to assess that real-time.
Three of the examples that Peter gave were virtual guides: one of multimedia CD of The Galleria dell’Accademia, which is where the statue of David from Michelangelo is held, amongst many other significant works. This CD started my thinking about a new way to think of informal learning. At one level, it’s just a standard virtual tour: maps of the Museum with the exhibits labeled, visual 3-D imagery that allows a user to move through and approach exhibit objects, and layers of information that can be pulled up on any given object such as historical information, connections to other pieces in the exhibit, embedded images in either movies. Peter mentioned, and I agree, that although this multimedia product was available when you leave the museum in the gift store, it would have best been situated at the entrance to the museum, to guide the visitor, shape their understanding of the scope of the exhibits offered, and build in prior knowledge before they approach the actual objects. All of these things are good instructional design ideas.
He also showed us a virtual tour of Pompeii, in which a view of the current site was slowly reconstructed into the best understanding of what it looked like at its height 2000 years ago. Probably the striking thing with this visit was the fact that we often only see the ground-level of these sites, and have a hard time imagining things like roof lines and second stories. In particular, we visited the theater and seeing how high the edifice was built upon the stage, the fact that the seats were covered under a canopy, really got me thinking about how important that layer of information matters when we view objects and sites.
The third interface that he showed us, was of the Museum in Naples that had viewers interact with the visual display on frescoes before they entered the museum. The wall sized virtual display allow the user to reach out, zoom in, and interact with the frescoes, with supporting text and audio that explains the historical significance of areas of the fresco. This is a huge improvement in engaging the learner, in giving them the hook (from Csikzentmihalyi), because it sets up a higher level of attentiveness, addresses multiple modes of learning and engagement, and allows self-directed ownership of the information.

So with all of that, it triggered in me an appreciation for what is about to come through mobile technology. There were three separate, but importantly connected pieces of information that I drew together through this process. The first was a TED lecture from 2009 by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry, in which they show a device they call “the sixth sense” the wearable device that projects onto any object to hold in front of it, and impresses this with text, images, and even movies about the object. Imagine this device in a museum, where as you walk through and face exhibit objects, you get a very personalized layer of information that you can zoom in for more specifics, or zoom out to get a broader sense of what things you might draw from this experience. Maybe you haven’t thought about the historical connections from earlier readings you had made. The device knows that your family history and included connections to this artist four generations ago, and shows your family tree that makes the connection for you. Perhaps in your calendar in two months, you’re planning a visit to a city where other pieces by this artist are available, and it lets you know that. These are all possibilities that exist today, if these devices come to be. Here is the video from Ted that is the first generation of this device — think of what the implications of this will be in just a few years.

Another development that lays on top of this is the recent release of “did you know version 4”. This video, looks at trends in learning and technology. In looking at the version that was just released for September 2009, one of the key trends that it mentions is the likely scenario that pocket computers (like the iPhone or Google android device) will be the primary way that computing happens by 2020. It also mentions that “the computer in your cell phone today is 1 million times cheaper, and 1000 times more powerful and about 100,000 times smaller than the first one developed at MIT in 1965”. We are emerging into a new realm where instead of going to the computer, we will be wearing the computer, the information will be coming to us. From an informal learning perspective, this becomes extremely empowering, because we now have the opportunity to let the world be our Museum.

The last development that layers into this, is the recent release of augmented reality software for the iPhone. This is a paradigm shift in information technology, from my perspective. Much like the device developed at MIT, this kind of software gives a learner the ability to view the world through a lens of tailored information at any point that they choose. There is a video here of the first release of this kind of software, which allows a visitor to Paris to hold up to your iPhone, and get an augmented view, based on their direction you’re facing in their location (utilizing both compass, and GPS data):

Think of the implications of this from a learning perspective. If it is true, and I believe it is, that mobile devices are going to become more ubiquitous, the developers will seize on this to geocode rich data into a great deal of the world’s spaces, then one of the first places that this will become viable and rich are museums and other informal learning spaces, because they already have a dedicated audience, and content worth generating virtual information about. With the development of the semantic Web (Web 3.0), it will become more and more the experience for any user that the information will come to them, tailored to their history, their interests, and their capabilities. We’ve talked a lot in this class about the importance in museum design to take into account the learner experience. Augmented reality, whne it comes of age fully, will come along way to aid in this quest.

It’s significant to note, in my mind, that augmented reality as a technology, has been long awaiting full adoption — its “killer app”. The Gartner Group and their Hype Cycle has long held augmented reality in its early phases as a technology trigger. Whereas some technologies have moved quickly off of this early phase and into adoption, augmented reality has languished at the beginning of the curve for a decade.

Have we reached a turning point? I believe we have. We are currently in the baby steps of a new type of technological overlay in our world. It is already possible in most of the developed world to take out a pocket-sized device, connect to the global information network, and receive information almost instantly. We are only a few short steps away from the device knowing us, where we are, and what we want to know. In thinking about how this will influence informal learning environments, and even formal learning environments, which is where I spent my professional life, I can’t help but be excited at the opportunity to empower learners to fully take advantage of this.
I know some people will think this is the end of institutions of learning because the seat of power will shift from the experts (teachers) to the learners. I rather think it will create a new kind of learning environment where adult mentors (facilitators) will become masters of process and information utilization, and support learners (apprentices), to fully develop their interests and potential. Moreover, it will increae the importance of informal learning environments. Like all technologies, this will not come to all equally or at the same time. But it will be scalable in a way that may make adoption across socioeconomic and cultural differences much broader.
The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades (but they better have an interactive overlay built into them…)

Another Brick in the Wall

This week’s readings and class time focused on two main ideas: how the instructional design process should be considered within the context of informal learning environments, and consideration of learning theory in looking at exhibit design.

The readings are here:

Braverman, B. E. (1988). Toward an Instructional Design for Art Exhibitions. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 22(3), 85-96.

Schlenk, G. W., & Shrock, S. A. (1991). The Use of Instructional Development Procedures To Create Exhibits: A Survey of Major American Museums.

The very general synopsis of the Schlenck article is a research question on what kind of instructional design approaches are used by museums in preparing exhibits. Although that isn’t really the thrust of my discussion on this blog post, it should be mentioned that although this research was from almost 20 years ago, it makes the case that most museums make a perfunctory effort to consider instructional design practices and exhibit creation, but it is neither prevalent in or thorough in most cases. Perhaps, it is best to say a lot of it is done like action research — that is “if it feels good it is good”.

As always, I am not just interested in the formal context of the focus of informal learning environments by itself. I’m still driven to explore where the overlap between informal learning environments, and the more formal learning environments which have been most of my professional career. With that in mind, and our conversation around both instructional design theory and upcoming visits to Bishop Museum and the Waikiki Aquarium, have me thinking about the impact of field trips as means of merging the informal environments into our formal schooling.

Probably most powerful in my mind, was when I was teaching astronomy back in the 1990s, I took students on a three day trip to the big Island of Hawaii to visit the active volcano, snorkeling in a Marine sanctuary, and visits to the summit Mauna Kea, which was ostensibly what drove the trip, as I was interested in exposing my students to the greatest astronomical Observatory which was a short flight away. Invariably, at the end of the trip, when I asked the students to summarize what they have learned, many commented on it being the most exciting and motivating experience in their educational career. This always surprised me, as although I knew that the trip had wonderful visceral experiences built into it (swimming in a coral reef, exploring lava tubes, seeing 200 inch telescope’s up close) I hadn’t expected it to be that powerful an experience. It always was in the back of my mind that it was a telling commentary about the stark barren experience that most traditional education exposes inquisitive minds to.
But here is the real problem — whenever a teacher wants to take students out of the traditional school day for experiences that we would deem “authentic” it involves a myriad of paperwork and coordination and apologizing to your professional peers for taking their students away from their seat time in their classes. As a result, over the years, although I have encouraged fellow teachers to explore the opportunities offered by taking students into authentic, informal environments, many do not choose to for the reasons stated above. Easier to conform then to challenge the status quo.

In a recent conversation with an administrator, the question came up about the value of a trip during the school day with the question being “can’t the students to do this on their own after school?”. Although I understood the rationale for the question, I felt the need to explain why experiences in the field a few times a semester can have powerful affective influences on students, and increase their motivation, behavior, and willingness to follow through the more traditional school day.

This came to my mind, because in talking about writing good learning objectives, our class this past week struggled with how to construct good learning objectives in the affective domain. When I took students to the Bishop Museum planetarium, I knew instinctively that the opportunity to see the way the stars look at the planetarium, to get out of their normal routine and interact in a different way, and to approach the subject matter from a different perspective well outweighed the inconvenience of taking them away for three or four hours from their normal routine (my opinion). Of course, by that point in my professional career, I had a adopted the mantra that the job of a good instructor is to be an arsonist lighting fires, not a fireman putting them out.

Which brings up another story from this week. I was at the hospital for a routine procedure, and the laboratory technician that was setting up some tests told me that when he was in ninth grade he was removed from his normal classroom, which he was doing academically fine, because he couldn’t help laughing in class because the word “dingy” had come up as vocablary. His family for years had called him “dingy” because he was the smallest of the family. His language arts teacher asked for him to be removed and put into the lower-level class, because he couldn’t help giggling during class time. As a result, he was put into a class with other failing students, where he said they read third-grade level books like “go dog go”. That singular event determined the rest of this person’s life, as he never had another chance to recover and join the academically challenged students at his school. As we talked during the day, he expressed his love of history, art, and literature. He was well read, historically motivated, and a wonderful interpersonal communicator. Yet, he readily offered that he was not smart, based on his experiences that have led from this demotion when he was 14 years old. Why talk about this? He talked at length about his love of Civil War history in particular, in his fulfilling of a lifetime dream to visit Gettysburg this past summer. His vivid recalling of walking the grounds, thinking of the battles on the hills that he knew so well, and Lincoln’s later visit showed an incredible intellect and passion about understanding the historical and social context of this important event. Yet, when I mentioned to him that I thought he would make a marvelous teacher, he insisted he would never be smart enough to do so, because he had never learned to write, since he was put in a lower-level class. I could imagine for Joshua a different outcome in his life, had he been in a school where visiting real sites that engaged and expanded his learning beyond the classroom walls might have led him down a different path.

After talking to Joshua, I couldn’t help but think of Pink Floyd’s great album “The Wall” which includes the lyrics:

We don’t need no education

We don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

In the article by Braverman, he asks the question “…why are learning theories not readily adopted by museum professionals when designing exhibits devoted to art?” (p 86). Braverman also makes the case that there is little research about how art museums and their desire to showcase aesthetic have any ability to evaluate the impact of their exhibits on visitors. In much the same way, traditional classrooms suffer from that same problem of not thinking of the whole child, and how experiences that reach to the aesthetic can engage and transform a learner.
Braverman talks about how the unique experience of the art museum requires this special consideration towards the aesthetic, but taken for a broader perspective, the need to think about affective responses and motivations within all learning is a consideration that all formal and informal learning needs to address better.
Braverman also gives a definition of appreciation (from Kjell S. Johannessen,) “… a skill that is central to the dynamic interaction, or praxis, between art museums in their public.” (Page 88). It reminds me of an old Sidney Harris cartoon. I’ve always found his commentaries on society, science, and their mismatch particularly funny and have shared many with my classes over the years. This graphic says it all to me:

So, as we continue to explore informal environments, I hope to keep thinking about where the interplay between informal and formal can continue.
To that end, this week our high school principal, who used to teach in the Museum school at New York City (mentioned in my previous blog post) will be talking to the class this week a bit about the use of informal learning spaces in formal education. Stay tuned…
Here’s a question to end our visit for today — if students were not required to come to our schools by law, would they? I don’t mean to confuse this with wondering if students are interested in learning, or whether valuable things are happening within the confines of the bricks and mortar of our traditional schools, but would they choose to come to this environment if they could? Museums and other informal environments every day ask themselves that question, because no one comes to them unwillingly. Perhaps it’s because in an informal learning environment, you’re not treated as another brick in the wall.

Week 2 entry: Learning as play

The context of this post is the readings from our ETEC 697 “Educational Technology in Informal Learning Environments” class.

The bibliography for this week:

Csikzentmihalyi, M., & Hermanson, K. (1995). Intrinsic motivation in museums: What makes visitors want to learn? Museum news, 74(3), 35-37 and 59-62.

Falk, J., & Dierking, L. (1992). The Museum Experience. Washington, D.C.: Whalesback Books.

McLellan, H. (2000). Experience design. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 3(1), 59-69.

Pine, J., & Gilmore, J. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), 97-105.

With this topic I’m interested in exploring within these readings is the notion of formal and informal environments, distinguishing characteristics, and how schools manage to beat the life out of learning. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a teacher for 27 years, and I think there are times when we truly engage students by the process we take them through a traditional schools, but truthfully, this is more the exception than the rule, and certainly not the purpose of education as we know it. Think about what we’ve learned in the readings that we have. One of the primary tenets of Csikzentmihalyi is that real powerful learning stems from intrinsically driven behaviors. Even in the article, he makes the case that if a learner starts any activity with the intent of needing to do it for some external factor (a grade, a requirement, a non-optional activity) it immediately changes their motivation, their attention and their ownership of the learning.

What distinguishes intrinsic learning, and the design that must occur around it, is that the learner comes to us because they have an interest, and at least believe, even if it’s not true, that they are driving the experience. Here is where the potential overlap with formal and informal learning environments have something to learn from each other. The significance of design implies that although the learner may believe that they are in charge of the experience, that truthfully behind the scene and instructional designer has thought through purposefully how to engage, and take into account the perspective of the learner, so that they feel as though the experience was initiated and driven by them.

In my physics class, we practiced a pedagogical approach called modeling. In it, I was always the shaper of the experience, always new the path we needed to take to have an experience that was worth doing, and yet, with good design and purposeful intent, my students felt more than not that they were driving experience. They felt that they made the decisions about their research, about the results, and what the meaning was. It often felt that though I was pulling the strings, it was an original experience for them, because they built it on their actions.

Csikzentmihalyi makes the case that a “flow” experience arises when we are so immersed in an experience that we reach a higher level of engagement, where we are immersed powerfully, sensory affected, in time slows down to enable the experience to unfold powerfully. In his latest book “The Element”, Sir Ken Robinson talks about Csikzentmihalyi’s flow as happening when a learner is engaged because they are in their environment. Traditional school is full of poor matches of students, adult mentors, and experiences that do not feel intrinsic, nor have any sense of flow whatsoever. One of the things that I’ve been impressed with recently is the power of homeschooling as an alternative model for schools to consider. Think of a learning environment that is always adjusting to our interests, abilities, schedule, strengths and weaknesses, so that we feel engaged, involved, connected.

So what does this have to do with the readings, how does that tie in? Well whether it’s Falk’s description of the interactive experience model that takes into account personal, social, and physical context or it is Pine and Gilmore’s matrix that plots out a “sweet spot” between immersion and absorption, passive and active participation,



or McClellan, who talks about these ideas applied into virtual interfaces, the goal and understanding of human experiences the same. We learn best when we have activated motivation, when we have taken into account the abilities and interests of the learner, and when we unfold an experience that tells a story and creates a sense of ownership in the experience.
This is where traditional school fails us horribly. This is not to say that some schools have found new and exciting ways to accomplish this, but the traditional structures on school: textbooks that are nothing more than unengaging tomes full of uninteresting factoids, schedules that separate out learning into small periods of time that are domain & topic specific, and activities that are at best poor seconds of the real learning that could happen.
To close, maybe the best thing to do would be to reconsider how we treat learning. Our new principal for the high school at Mid-Pacific Institute once taught at the Museum School in New York City. In that school, the learning was based around visits and experiences of the many multifaceted museums that exist in New York. Certainly there were still problems within that school — probably more than anything the inherent tension between the public’s expectation of what schools should be like, and what motivated and drove students to do higher, more authentic, quality work. But any model that takes us closer to learning as play gets us a little closer to the way our brains are wired, and real learning can happen.
Shouldn’t we do this for the sake of our children?