Leveling Up Students with Blogs

Leveling up students with blogs

Motivating Active Learning Through Game Mechanics

kevin lim // cyberculturalist // 26th feb 2009

Why I’m interested...

“Passionate Teacher / Sleeping Students”at Yale Law School entrance frieze

http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html

“Passionate Students / Indifferent Teacher”at Yale Law School entrance frieze

http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html

PUSHHow to naturalize

learning objectives.

An unofficial Facebook Guide Book

Students everywhere using FacebookHere’s a Russian clone, VKontakte.ru

PULLDiscover the hook of social web platforms.

Dynamics of Teaching

Teachable Moments Cartoon by Matthew Henry Hall (Jan 2007)http://www.insidehighered.com/views/teachable_moments/cartoon24

Printed “essays” and “response papers” used in

many classrooms traditionally promoted a

closed dialogue between the student and teacher.

In contrast, class blogging allowed for a multi-logue

among the student, his or her peers, the instructor, and the

potential public.

Does blogging promote learning?

Duffy and Bruns (2006) have explained how blogs can be seen to promote active and engaged learning, since

they afford "digital literacy" towards collaborative and (co)creative purposes, as well as for the critical

assessment and evaluation of information

You call it copying ; today's college students call it collaborating. (WSJ, May 2007)http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010061

While the ease of participation could come at the cost of quality and reliability, Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler (2006) suggest that the “Darwinian type 'survival of the fittest' content” would help ensure competition for the production of quality content.

image source: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/092506/2012.gif

Befitting of Ray Oldenburg's notion of "Third Places" (1991), blogs also situate students in a broad communication environment that reaches far beyond the sociological confines of their classroom and homes.

When Derek Lackaff and I taught our Internet

communication courses back in Spring 2007, we tried to see if blogging could support a truly

active and collaborative learning experience.

Our Story

Students create a discussion sphere that is more controllable and less threatening than the classroom.

As students blog , they create an archive of thoughts and discussion

Allows theoretical connections between course topics to manifest as hyperlinks.

Pedagogical Aspects of Blogs

Typically weekly posting or commenting requirement.

Affords minimal learning and interaction outcomes.

Student need to internalize intellectual interaction.

Problem of Motivation

Blogging situates students' work in their own public spaces

Intrinsic sense of ownership and recognition of their personal production

Likely produce higher quality work if they are motivated to engage with their lessons and colleagues in a more social fashion.

Motivating Blog Participation

All in one classroom

management solutions

might not be enough.

What makes social platforms so engaging?

To motivate student blogging communities, we tried using Amy Jo Kim's game mechanics (2006)

Visible ScoreboardVisible Scoreboard

Five Game Mechanics1. Collecting2. Earning Points3. Feedback4. Exchanges5. Customization

Using Game Mechanics

Amy Jo KimCreative DirectorShuffleBrain

“I see a game mechanics working well on sites like YouTube, Yelp, Twitter, and Flickster. [...] like points, leaderboards, level-ups, social exchanges, and customization to a strong core experience.”

Amy Jo KimCreative DirectorShuffleBrain

Using Game Mechanics

Amy Jo Kim’s idea was in the presence of a scoring mechanism.

Established a blogging leaderboard via technorati.com authority ranking algorithm.

Provide our students a basic measure of how they were doing against one another.

Students also given weekly audits of the class overall performance.

1. Earning Points

For quality blog posts, students earned weekly awards.

Variety of awards promotes diverse behaviors (e.g. Early Birdie)

Awards can be traded for extra credits or the ability to gain “immunity” from extra assignments.

2. Collecting Things

Comments and trackback allow students to understand the quality of the blog and wiki contribution.

Students are given the opportunity to improve on posts if they have not reached the assignment deadline.

Accessibility of feedback allows students to accelerate mastery in each week’s theme.

3. Feedback

Students instinctively personalized their blogs by the first week of use.

Low level: Blog templates

High level: Sidebar widgets

Social Objectspersonal photosfavorite musicbrandingchat box

4. Customization

To track the layers of interaction, we visually aggregated RSS feeds of their blogs and wikis using web services such as Netvibes.com

5. Exchanges

What are students actually doing?

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Why is blogging, tweeting, youtubing,

facebooking, blah-blah-ing,

FUN?

Individual

Emotion

Others

Feedbackself-awareness

personality

communicate

communicate

• The Third Place: Being a shared space not owned by neither faculty nor students may mean equal standing in power.

• This motivates the user by choice (self-interest), rather than coercion.

• Informality: Informal channels allow for more spontaneous interaction.

• Distinguishing motivation for using Facebook vs. Blackboard

Capturing Spontaneity

Image Source: http://mchabib.com/2006/10/05/digital-library-as-third-place/

Potential Challenges

The Digital Divide in terms of video media literacy (Stavchansky, 2006)

!

Digital Divide- Parallel Backchannels- Participatory Literacy- Polarized Performance

Open to Subversion- Private vs. Public discourse- Opposing learning objectives- Community self-moderation

Swings both ways...

Dealing with Complexity

http://maxpictures.com/weblog/2007/04/11/product-placement/

Fun mattersEnjoy or Adapt.

Thank youReach me via twitter at @brainopera