E1n1verse – WoW, Learning, and Teaching by Michelle A. Hoyle

Martin Weller gave a 30-minute presentation last week for George Siemens’s CCK09 course on an idea he called “the pedagogy of abundance.” The key idea was that teaching in the past had been based on a scarcity model. I interpreted this as meaning knowledge was scarce (or closely guarded) and educators (the “talent”) were the scarce high priests on high–classic sage on the stage. He likened it to the music industry, which doesn’t strike me as too far off-base.

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As part of a course under development at The Open University, I was approached as a known World of Warcraft player and asked to write a short paragraph or two on why I play World of Warcraft. I freely admit to failing to only write a short paragraph or two, but that’s probably because I’m passionate about World of Warcraft and my activities in it, especially given the prominence it plays in my life in so many areas. Read on to find out why I play World of Warcraft.

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For the first time in years, I’m taking a postgraduate course myself: H812: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, which I’m doing both for personal development and to provide theoretical groundwork in educational pedagogy for my Ph.D. work in educational technology.

A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

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If I don’t finish my marking very soon, they’re going to kill me. The phone calls are increasing. With the ADD, though, I just have this overwhelming sense of guilt, failure, and frustration. More about that later. Something must be done.
Anyway, I have a plan. My Sweetie is helping me do some of the grunt administrative work that’s required (filling out the forms, uploading some of the files to each project directory to help check the functionality, checking for missing/incorrect project directories, etc.). While Sweetie’s doing that, I’ll put in a big push to finish assessing the remaining reports (22). Then, to take a break, I’ll fill in the scanning sheets for all the report-related marks for each student, and then have a go for a bit at assessing the coding parts of the projects.
The coding part is cognitively easier to assess for me as it’s definitely more black and white (it works/it doesn’t work; it’s written well/it’s written poorly). It still takes time to do, though, because you have to check through all the functionality for various points and write up the notes.
With luck, proper use of my ADD medication, and SweetieSupport, I hope to get it all in tomorrow evening’s post. I’ll let you know how I make out.

Project marking has to be one of the banes of my existence. Right now I’m working on grading an end of course project consisting of a coding component and a report. The coding component is fairly straightforward to do. Other than perpetual shock at the things people believe is good design/coding, it’s something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. The part I have trouble with is the report.
Actually, any kind of marking where you need to subjectively weigh how close an answer is to what you want is difficult for me. Perhaps it’s because Ein’s have two states in many things in life: Ein/Auf, Happy/Sad, Tired/Bouncy. There’s not much room for shades of grey in the EinWorld.
Anyway, that leaves me with a 53 projects to finish and I’m already two weeks late and having trouble mustering any enthusiasm for it. To be fair, I already finished doing 60 for another course which also had a coding component and a project, so I am feeling a little burnt out and I do have attention deficit disorder. Nevertheless, I promised I’d be done.
As things stand, I finished 5 completely before deciding to switch to doing all the reports first. As the reports are independent of the coding component, that’s feasible. I picked the reports to do first because I like them the least and I’ll feel the most relieved when they’re done and the rest will be easy.
Of the 48 reports to grade, I’ve done thirteen. Any motivation, inspiration, or encouragement welcome!

David Jonassen visited the IDEAs lab on May 11th from the University of Missouri to present a talk on “Model-Building for Conceptual Change (Cognitive Tools in Action)”. While this isn’t (or so I thought) related to my own research or interests in any way, we were all encouraged to attend if possible and I’m always interested in talks about learning in general. Here, belatedly, is a synopsis of my understanding of his presentation.
The key underlying principle seemed to emphasize having people fail in their problem solving attempt at some issue because then conceptual change has a change to be engaged and then students will learn. This failure need not be catastrophic; in fact, it probably should not be, I would say, or the failure would foster a strong sense of discouragement, which is not going to get a student into the “learning zone.” So, how do you put students into a non-threatening environment where they can safely experiment and fail? David Jonassen’s idea was to encourage them to engage in model building which demonstrates their conceptual understanding of the problem/issue at hand. When learners build models,their understanding of the problem domain is deepened because you cannot model what you do not understand. Model building also allows you, as the instructor, to view the learner’s level of conceptual change as their models evolve. It is therefore possible to assess their underlying understanding without resorting to formal assessment tests. Finally, David Jonassen suggested that model building also improves critical reasoning and thinking because model building forces the model builder to examine the process and problem solving methodology.
David Jonassen researches (among other things) the use of technology in educational settings to improve understanding. More information on his approaches to problem solving are available from on the following web site page: http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/PB.htm.

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