Adding legs to the snake

"Seductive augmentations" are audio-visual elements that not only fail to enhance but actually detract from learning objects. Some very preliminary research indicates that adding "bells and whistles" to a lesson can interfere with learning (primarily as measured by "retention.").

(My title comes from the Chinese equivalent of "gilding the lily." Certainly less off-putting than "seductive augmentations.")

{elearnspace}

Centering work on projects, not channels

One reason why I find the Groove approach to collaboration so satisfying is that it centers my work around specific projects (e.g., developing the Basic Lawyering Skills Training online course) rather than around communication channels (e.g., email). One report, commissioned by Groove, captured the advantages I see in this approach:

For many of us, our office or workplace is our email Inbox—a difficult, often frustrating place to work. Email provides a “flat” interface—with no context, no visibility into available resources, no obvious difference in importance of messages as they come in, and limited functionality.

Groove users live and do their work within Groove workspaces, freed from cluttered, unprioritized email inboxes, disconnected file folders, and databases. As a result, they are able to interact directly with colleagues and clients in real-time and in the context of their shared work—avoiding the perils of email and voicemail overload and lack of responsiveness. Their work is organized, trackable, and manageable, both from a team and organizational point of view. And they are able to get their individual and group work done more productively and effectively.

The key to workspaces is that they are built to support a specific business construct—be it a project, a process, a set of relationships, or some combination of the three. For example, a specific workspace (see Illustration 1) has been devoted to the writing of this paper—with invitation-only access granted to those people directly involved in the creation, commenting, editing, and approval of the report. The workspace is currently both a place to complete the project (this paper) and also to foster relations between the parties involved (whether they are directly involved with the paper or generally observing its creation).

-- David S. Marshak, Groove Virtual Office: Enabling Our New Modes of Work" (note: This document was commissioned by Groove)

The most glaring weaknesses of Groove emerge from features that diverge from project-centeredness, most notably the instant-messaging feature. IM'ing in Groove is almost as convenient as any IM-specific software, e.g. AIM, but like email, Groove's IM feature lacks context. If I am working on several projects, it's even harder to distinguish which messages belong to which project on IM than in email. Workspace chats simply don't work on a UI level, both because (in 3.0) they are too small and because they lack the urgency of a "push" IM.

With the advent of true file-sharing (see my earlier post), one of the major problems of the Groove Workspace -- synchronizing between the virtual file and my local file -- is likely solved. I have yet to test this tool in a production environment, however.

While Groove offers quite a lot for teams, unfortunately their pricing now reflects it. Unfortunately, the company did not stand by their previous statement that users of 2.5 would automatically upgrade to 3.0 gratis It looks like, if we want to play this game, we'll have to shell out another several $100s...

The Impact of Instructional Games

The New York Times today questioned whether instructional games are an oxymoron. The article coincides with a story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday that notes how food manufacturers are shifting their marketing of children's snacks to web-based video games. Though the for-profit world is known to make mistakes, I would bet that if Kraft is spending big money to get kids to catch falling Oreos in glasses of milk, there's a damn good reason why.

What are instructional games not good for?

The real question isn't whether games can teach, but what they can teach. And the fact is that games aren't quite as good at teaching "hard facts" (the capitals of all the states) as they are at more ineffable areas like attitudes and beliefs. The corollary to this is that most "games" that teach facts aren't very fun.

The problem with the NSF's Scrub Club "games," cited in the NY Times article, is that they aren't really games: they're basically quizzes with some extra bells and whistles. As anyone who went to school in the 80s or later knows, these are about as fun as flashcards. And if it's not fun, there's almost no point in going the extra step to making them a game.

Our own experience in this area was a Flash-based video quiz that depicts a lawyer asking a client a series of questions in an interview, and the participant had to identify what kind of question it was. We didn't intend it to be a game, and the difficulties we had with it were more with the fact that the answers were ambiguous. (Never give a lawyer a multiple-choice test; she will always figure out why the answer is "none" or "all of the above").

What are instructional games good for?

Presuming that the game meets the threshold test of actually being a game -- which, as the NSF effort cited above demonstrates is not always easy -- games can be very effective at shaping and molding opinions. The Oreo game doesn't convince you through facts and figures that Oreos are the best cookies in the world! In fact, Oreos are almost irrelevant to the game: the most important purpose of the game is to generate brand recognition and to associate a feeling -- fun -- with the brand.

The fact that Oreos are almost irrelevant to the game makes this marketing effort sub-par for what could have been. The best kinds of instructional games ties the "lesson" into the game itself. The Greenpeace game cited by the article, for example, has players protect whales from whalers, an act of role-playing which automatically creates sympathy for the cause. (Of course, people opposed to the cause probably wouldn't be playing the game).

So what would make either the hand-washing or the Oreo games more fun and instructive? Well, the flu game could involve actually hunting down the flu germs in the age-appropriate video game format (a first-person shooter probably wouldn't work for young kids). The learning -- that the flu virus could be anywhere, so you need to wash your entire hand -- happens in the background, which is fine because if the game is actually fun the participant will certainly absorb it over time. For the Oreo game -- how about a Tony Hawk Underground-style game in which you make up creative and kewl new ways to split or dunk the Oreo?

As for our courses, the best "games" we've come up with so far has been simulating the actual practice of lawyering itself.

A good read on this topic is What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, which I am halfway through. The Chrome Chalk Monster blog follows learning and games.

Synchronous Meeting Software needs improvement (BLaST Beta)

We held the first of our weekly Live Linkups today and managed to get 5 out of 8 participants (and 2 of 3 facilitators) into the online space. This is about the same batting average as I've seen on WebEx and other plugin-dependent synchronous web tools.

As a result, a significant percentage of the participants missed out on a lot of the meeting. In the long run, this is unacceptable. I'm starting to look more seriously at Flash-based conferencing software, because I've found that Flash just works. We can't rely on fickle plugins that presume too much about users' setup -- many of our trainees are and likely will remain users of computers held together by duct tape.

Starting work on Case Planning & Discovery

We are going to try to rapid-prototype this course by taking the existing Case Planning & Discovery course, laying out the existing objectives and activities in a chart, and translating those activities into an online equivalent. That would give us a solid starting point for more creative development around the kinds of activities that online learning enables.

Our new program associate, Randi Smith, has already completed the first step of creating the chart. This week I'm going to tackle the next.

Blogs in the K-12 classroom

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards [NYTimes] describes the use of blogs in traditional classroom teaching. I'm not sure I can distinguish between the value of blogs and the previous incarnation of "community" technology, web-based bulletin boards. In fact, it sounds like bulletin boards would be a better solution than blogs -- the main difference is that they often look uglier and less inviting than blogs.

"With blogging intended to be a vehicle for students, the labor is built in. The work that is required to refresh and maintain an interesting blog is being provided by students."