Learning, Games, and Future Learning

Scrabble image from Flickr User jking89: CC-BY 2.0

Over the past week or so I have started playing Scrabble again, something I haven't played for years. The affordance of technology here is that I can play my partner or my mum asynchronously using the free Wordfeud app on our iPhones. 

Through playing and reflecting on our Scrabble games, my thoughts last night (typically when trying to get to sleep) were directed towards three points (not in the scrabble sense!) I want I discuss here;

1) Do we learn differently now, or have you forgotten how to spell words as well? Generally I'm still pretty good, but from time to time I might write (or more probably type) a word that just doesn't look right. So I might ask someone how to spell that word, or being tech-enabled, use a spell checker or google. 

But at what cost does this affordance come? Are we forgetting things more easily now? We don't need to be so rigorous with spelling because the the trusty spell check will auto correct us. So we can afford to be a bit more lax. Arguably, if we still used typewriters to construct our documents we might pay more attention - perhaps if you don't use it, you lose it (in a working memory sort of way)?

2) This leads on to my second point, which is related to technology enhanced game based learning. Scrabble has always been a great way to learn new words and their meaning. In the Reed household growing up, the word 'Xu' was famous - not normally part of one's vocabulary, however it's useful to get rid of that 8 point letter 'x' at difficult times in a game. (For the record, Xu was/is a Vietnamese coin, and yes I do realise I'm not really painting the picture of the mischievous youth that some will perhaps know). 

Now playing scrabble via iPhones has somewhat ruined the game for me. I'm able to put my tiles in the board and check if it's a word without my opponent knowing. So I can (and ashamedly have) put a few random letters across a triple word score and got lucky. But I don't even know what it means! In 'real life' scrabble, you can't do that. 

So whilst we often eulogise the affordances of technology to enhance 'things', it can also have a negative influence at times, reinforcing the importance of thinking critically (why, what and how) before introducing tech solutions; not only in game situations like above, but also in relation to teaching and learning. 

3) And on to my final point, related to learning and future learning. Does it matter anymore if we either forget to spell certain words (or if youths don't know how to spell as we once did)? Previously we needed to hand-write letters and job applications, so spelling was a very important skill/literacy to present ourselves professionally (I am young enough to have never actually been required to hand-write a letter/application). The importance of accurate spelling is arguably less important now we're all wired. Knowing the rule to put 'i' before the 'e', except after 'c' (which actually isn't always true) isn't as import at as it once was. This isn't goin to solve the problems we will face (as a sector / an economy / a race) in the future, is it? And yet we still cling on tightly to these so-called essentials. Now I'm not suggesting we completely abandon spelling, but this reminds me of Ken Robinson's TED talk; 'Schools kill creativity', and his example of the young girl who 'wasn't any good in school' as she was fidgety and couldn't concentrate. As it turned out, she was highly creative and became a leading ballerina. Horses for courses, one might say.

We can't solve problems of the future with the same type of thinking we used when they were created (was that Einstein?). So perhaps if we want to prepare for the future, we might have to let go of some of the inherent things of the past? 

I've embedded the Ken Robinson talk below - a worthy watch if you're one of the few who haven't already seen it.

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Open Educational Practices and the Future of Open Learning

If you're one of the few regular readers of my blog, you will likely know I'm a big fan of all things Open, however I'm also a bit sceptical about Open Education being/becoming mainstream (which in my view, leads to problems around sustainability). Actually, I wrote a post a few months back questioning if the Open Content Movement is indeed Mainstreamed and Sustainable.

Now, I've been thinking about blogging on how I see the future of learning for some time, but I was prompted again this morning when reading a Grainne Conole chapter about Open Educational Practices (OEP), in Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education. For the record, OEPs are practices that support production, use and reuse of OERs (from policy to on-the-ground activities).

When I sit back and ponder what the world might be like in 15 years, with a gang of Mini-Me's running around (you might want to be careful if/when that happens by the way), I think about how their education might be different to mine, and what practices and skills (or Capacities as Doug Belshaw might suggest) they will need to do their homework (their learning/digital literacy toolkit, perhaps).

Now I'm not going out on a limb here and suggest robots and all that jazz, but over the years we have seen massive developments in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), moving from the Command Line Interface to Xerox, Apple Lisa, and the birth and development of the mouse to control a graphical user interface. Metaphors such as the desktop, folders and the recycle bin were revolutionary. Later, Apple changed the game again by really conquering touch interaction. 

In recent times, we've seen new interactions with things like the Nintendo Wii, XBox Kinect, and  Apple's personal assistant, Siri. The latest breakthrough is the Leap 3D Gesture Device, allowing users to interact with the computer through gestures.  I really think these developments will once again revolutionise the way we interact with computers on a mass scale, so much so, that people will no longer immerse themselves into computers; I think the ubiquity and control of computers will become immersed into our environment. I think we'll move to something that closer resembles Minority Report (If you haven't seen Minority Report, check out this clip to see what I'm on about).

So not wanting to deviate too much from the title of this post, I'll move on to relate this to openness.

So when my kids are doing homework, they will have access to search for anything and everything. And I don't just mean the stuff we can search for now - not just a wikipedia article, a YouTube video or some random site. I mean a voice command that returns an instant seamless stream of content that they can quicky engage with or disregard with a swipe of the hand. Not a google results page that they have to work through methodically to filter out what's good or not, or have to try and move past the sponsored results. Instead, it will know what they want. It will know them!

Now Google have already started to build on the semantic web with their Knowledge Graph, which they claim is building a massive graph of real-world things and their connections, to bring more meaningful results. So combined with the developments above, I suppose I'm hardly predicting anything new. However, we can't take this future as a given. It's not just going to miraculously appear because Google have put their weight behind it. OERs and Open Data will be a key (and critical) factor in this. As things stand, it will rely on the Open Educational Practices that Conole discusses (2012) (which is a bit of a problem because they are currently not embedded as standard practice, nor for that matter, is engagement with OER [from a creation and reuse perspective])

Conole suggests there is a resistance to the adoption of open practices, which I fear will relegate OER to an abstract concept. So what's needed to ensure they don't? 

Whilst the structure and models Conole discusses are very valid, I have a bigger problem with it all. Similar to how I believe computers will be immersed into our environment, so to must this set of practices which are currently abject and separate. I think we need to move away from the mindset that open educational practices are something different, and to do this, we need move away from the very practice that open education itself is something different. That is, the process of (re)developing, licensing, sharing and curating. Currently the difficulty in creating a reusable learning object is too much for the majority - there is no single and/or easy way to go about this - academic staff have to learn about the various methods (whether that's looking at Exe, Xerte, Glomaker, etc), learn how to use them, perhaps develop their graphical design skills so they look engaging. Concomitantly, they must license them appropriately, and upload it to whichever repository they like (Jorum, Merlot, etc). Ensuring every academic has these skills is without doubt a tall order. 

Instead, these processes need streamlining. Sometimes, choice can be a bad thing. I'd like to see a mechanism that brings all of the separate elements of OER together in a standardised way, so even the academics with few IT/digital literacies can participate without having to learn lots of new stuff (actual skills, understanding licenses, and generally being aware of repositories, etc).

Until it's easier for the masses to engage, I'm unsure if OER will ever be fully embedded as a core practice, and ultimately the future I envision will remain a deluded thought. To prove it's possible, I leave you John Underkoffler's TED video on the developments of UI....






This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.