1) Digital games (console and computer-based) will soon be an $84 billion/year business (projected 2014).
Virtual, in-game objects already represent an $8 billion/year business.

2) Web-based games are harvesting a treasure trove of precisely recorded human behavior in a wide variety of online game environments, and interesting discoveries are being made regarding the nature of human attention and fundamental brain rules. These discoveries are important for understanding what motivates people to learn, and how to optimize engagement. In his TED talk he calls some of these video game discoveries the Seven Ways to Reward the Brain.

These include:
- Experience bars that measure progress where an avatar player character is “constantly progressing in tiny increments”. Chatfield calls these “calibrated small tasks”.

- Multiple long and short-term aims – engaging in multiple tasks simultaneously – people can choose between them in parallel.

- Rewards for effort – in the form of points, “gold”, credit, recognition, awards, etc. He says the principle regarding this is “You don’t punish failure – you reward every bit of effort.”

- Rapid, frequent, clear feedback.

- The element of uncertainty. For Chatfield, this is a key principle. If a reward is unpredictable and variable it “lights up the brain”. It activates dopamine, the natural pleasure-producing chemical in the body. Chatfield says: “When we can’t predict something with certainty, we become obessed with it.”

- Brain activity models based on brain states generated during video game play can now “predict windows of enhanced attention.” Engaged brain activity can be measured and predicted.

- We are social animals and enjoy doing stuff with other peers – who watch us, collaborate, give us feedback.

Check out his video. You can see these principles  being used consciously and deliberately for online educational sites such as Boise State’s innovative 3D GameLab, which I’ve just begun to use this summer.

Gee claims there are numerous features of video games that make them excellent learning environments. First of all games let you fail and try again until you succeed. Secondly, they offer player choice and autonomy. Third, they provide ongoing feedback for success or failure – they continually assess performance until a task is successfully completed. Fourth, they can be collaborative, so that numerous players can participate in solving a challenge together. Regarding this last feature, Gee says, “The group is smarter than the smartest person.”

Regarding the ability to offer choice and autonomy, over the past few years I’ve been conducting a survey of students at the beginning of quarter. I find out what they’re interests and backgrounds are, and I let them choose a first, second, and third option for a final project. This lets me align them at the very beginning with an area of strong personal interest, and eventually place them within groups of students sharing common passions. At the end of the quarter students deliver a team presentation based on an area of knowledge or personal expertise that they have explored. They are also responsible for posting an article on the class wiki site, that becomes part of a permanent class archive/library. Their work is preserved for future students in the form of a class “knowledge base”.

This historically new situation has resulted in what information architect Saul Wurman has described as an information management crisis, that requires finding methods for organizing it in a way that is accessible and meaningful.

Wurman says:

There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. It’s filled with flotsam and jetsam. It’s filled with the sticks and bones and shells of inanimate and animate life. None of it is easily related, none of it comes with any organizational methodology.

– Source: Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety 2

Wurman wrote this back in 2001, at a time when over 2 billion documents had already been published on the World Wide Web and 7.3 million pages were being added every day. This amount of published information has dramatically increased since then, and much of it in a state of perpetual change – much like sports scores, weather reports, stock tickers, and public opinion polls. It’s a Category 5 information storm, and presents a special challenge to educational institutions and instructors. As instructors, how do we navigate this storm?

Enter the Personal Learning Environment or PLE. The PLE requires that instructors (as lifetime learners) step up to the plate, get organized, and become a manager of their own learning. For both students and instructors, this means that learning takes place both inside and outside a classroom setting. Everyone needs to become a librarian for their own personalized knowledge base, using cloud-based Web 2.0 applications to assist them in this process. This should not be a solitary activity however, but a shared experience by way of online learning communities of practice.

As my own Web2.0-based PLE uses the following applications:

1. Information organization and access tools:
   Symbaloo.com website access organizer, Delicious, Google Apps (Reader, Docs, Sites, Survey, Presentation), Microsoft SkyDrive (online Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel), secure password list, Evernote, Diigo, Flickr, Picasa, Photoshop Express, Facebook, Twitter, BC Library (online), Seattle Public Library (online)
   
2. Publication/Presentation tools: Vista/Blackboard, WordPress, Blogger, WetPaint (Wiki), SlideRocket (presentation storage and access), Prezi (presentation storage and access), YouTube (presentation storage and access), Vimeo, Screencast.com (Jing and Camtasia screencasts), Google Presentations, SlideShare, LinkedIn, as well as my own website (brucewolcott.com)
   
3. Learning communities: TED-ED, REZ-ED, Educator’s PLN, Skype Educators
   

For the EDUC 251 course I intend to use WordPress, Delicious, Diigo, Vista/Blackboard, SlideRocket, Prezi, and SkyDrive Office to organize and present information for my PLE.

Navigating the information storm: http://www.screencast.com/t/HqGg8WqU

1. Building community. Online courses should be designed so that the instructor begins with strongly structured directions and coursework while gradually releasing progressive amounts of control to the students. In effect, this creates a learning community in which everyone is expected to step up to the plate and contribute. Associated with this, is the idea that projects/assignments can be loosely defined so that students come up with their own content and solutions. This practice pulls participants out a passive observer state of mind, and places increasing responsibilities on them to produce meaningful content, through building a class knowledgebase. During the class, a teacher’s role changes from a top down manager to facilitator and advisor. Boettcher and Logan’s textbook includes a good explanation of this, and Jennifer provided an excellent role model for this practice.
2. Diigo. I found myself reluctant to adopt Diigo at the beginning of the quarter – since I couldn’t quite understand its value. I was thinking that we had the Vista/Blackboard discussion tool, so why adopt another threaded discussion program? As everyone became progressively more comfortable posting to Diigo, its value became clear. Diigo allows for a simplified posting of links, and makes it easy to tag and locate specific content within the discussion area. The threaded discussions are also easy to follow, comment on, and edit. Since it was linked directly within the class site, it felt comfortably integrated into Vista/Blackboard – it didn’t seem like a cumbersome outside application. I also like the fact that Diigo was used as an access point to new articles posted in individual student blogs.

   As the quarter progressed, it became clear that Diigo was the central engine for course communication and delivery. This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say. While initial conversations were somewhat tentative, they later became more substantial. The many suggested links to applications, online videos, and websites I found to be extremely valuable – especially when they were put in context with the materials we were covering for each module. Again, Jennifer’s continuing suggested online reading provided good “grist for the mill” for the rest of the student posts and related links.
    

   One area that could’ve been improved regarding Diigo, is that it would’ve been helpful to have a clearer online tutorial showing how it would be used in the course. For example it took me awhile to figure out how to comment and edit in the discussion area – or how to integrate links into the content area. It took me a couple weeks to figure out how to implement hash tags. I also didn’t understand how my blog posts and Diigo posts were related. While there was a text reference to all of this, I found it difficult to apply. It was more confusing than it needed to be.
    

3. Assessments. I think as online courses begin to mature, the ability to accurately and reliably assess student work in this environment is becoming increasingly important. While I’ve devised my own assessment approaches over the past few years of online teaching, I’m thinking they can be improved, and made more precise. Quality Matters provided some useful examples of these. I was especially intrigued by the self-assessment survey that was included with each module. This actually made me more aware of my progress during the week, and provided good motivation for getting my required work done on time. If it works for me, it’ll work for my students in future classes. I’m definitely going to try out this approach.
4. 10 Best Practices. Boettcher and Logan’s best practices provide a well considered set of guidelines for creating online courses. The final project for this class gave me a chance to think about these practices and consider how I use them now, and in the future.
5. The Future of Education. An idea that occurred during this class, is that a significant part of education in the future is going to look much like the learning community that we’ve created for this course. New generation Web technologies have enabled us to communicate, collaborate, and share our ideas in an accelerated learning space. We all bring our strengths and experiences to the table, and mutually benefit from that collective knowledge. Because of this course, I’m now involved with Rez-Ed (virtual worlds education) and TED-Ed (Ted talks educators). These are both online teaching and learning communities with participants from all over the world sharing common interests. These online communities provide a growing trend that will provide thriving lifetime learning and teaching environments. June Cohen of TED talks about this in her presentation, TED: The 21^st Century University? I believe our schools will need to expand and adapt to this new paradigm, in much the same way that newspapers and magazines have had to accommodate themselves to the Web. As Alvin Toffler prophetically said years ago (1970) in his book Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Our professional degrees will not be as important as our ability to rapidly navigate, assimilate, and apply newly gained knowledge, as all information becomes as fluid the daily weather report, stock quotes, and sports scores.
6. Media Production Tools: This class has given me the opportunity to come in contact with a variety of new Web based media production tools, as well as implement some tools that I’ve used in the past. These included Camtasia, Jing, Screen-o-Matic, Photoshop Express, Posterous, Prezi, VoiceThread, VUVOX, YouTube, Audacity, SlideShare, and Glogster.
7. Twitter: Jennifer’s Thursday night demonstration of how she uses Twitter to quickly navigate and locate current information relative to her interests, was very valuable. The light bulb finally went on in my head when I saw the tremendous usefulness of this kind of flash review of new and current information coming from a wide variety of experts. I failed to see the value of Twitter until this demo.

My only complaint about Screen-o-matic is that the audio is somewhat muddy – although this seems to be a petty complaint, considering how powerful and easy to use this online app is. Screen-o-Matic lets you save to their server, to YouTube, or as a video file to your local hard drive. Kudos to the Screen-o-Matic designers for pulling off this technical coup.

I reviewed the Fundamentals of Interactive Entertainment based on best practices for online learning as described by Judith Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad in their book the Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips. Their suggested best online teaching practices I cover in this screencast include the following:

• Be present at the course site
  
• Develop a set of explicit expectations
  
• Make use of content resources that are available in digital format
  
• Create a supportive online course community – faculty to learner, learner to learner, learner to resource
  
• Use a variety of large group, small group, and individual work experiences
  
• Use synchronous and asynchronous activities
  
• Combine core concept learning with personalized learning
  
• Plan a closing activity for the course
  

This project provided some interesting new territory for me to explore in my online classes, since it spanned a distance of 10,000 miles, and a 17 hour time difference. It also brought home to me the incredible power of live online communication and the new Web 2.0 applications, which have made our world seem so much smaller and interconnected.

Times have changed dramatically over the past decade with the Web becoming more ubiquitous and integrated into our daily way of doing business. As a result of this profound change, Miles Austin made several important points.

1. If you don’t have a developed presence online, you don’t exist, as far as potential employers are concerned.
2. Of new hires – 6% got their jobs from mass mailing of resumes, 4% answered ads, 10% researched a firm’s activities and applied, 80% found work through personal contacts.
3. 78% of all recruiters now use LinkedIn as their first search application. Facebook comes in second at 54%
4. LinkedIn is the home base for your professional image. To a large degree, it has replaced the traditional resume, and actually provides powerful tools for posting your resume online.
5. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 80 million members.
6. Austin summarized the use of three top contending online applications by job recruiters:
   LinkedIn is used to review and screen new employee prospects
   Facebook is used to eliminate unwanted prospects
   Twitter is used to advertise new positions

Here’s a summary of the LinkedIn online service by career and employment specialist Fabienne Mouton.

LinkedIn is a business networking tool. It operates on a modified version of the “six degrees of separation” theory. Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

How It Works

You put in your own profile information, and invite people to connect to you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn tracks your connections, and shows you the connections of your connections, and so on up to four degrees away.

Your email address is only exposed to hose people to whom you are directly connected. You have the ability to enter as much or as little information about yourself as you choose. You can enter your full resume and job history, or simply enter your name. The tradeoff is the balance between privacy and the fact that the more information you enter, the easier it is for others to find you.

Here’s my own updated Bruce Wolcott LinkedIn profile. You can also learn how to set up your own LinkedIn account.

First of all, I’m intrigued by the main objective for REZ_ED … an “online hub for practitioners using virtual worlds, and offering access to the highest quality resources and research in the field to establish a strong network of those using virtual worlds for learning. One of the first areas I looked at on the site was a listing of current conferences dealing with virtual worlds education. Two major ones are coming up for March and May.
 

For example, the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is happening in Second Life from March 17^th to March 19^th. This conference is all about teaching, learning, and research practices in social networked virtual environments like Second Life. This will undoubtedly draw some of the top names in this field, so I think I’ll check it out.
 

There are also videos of various courses, conferences and tutorials available, that are updated every month. Here’s an example of how to build an online conference using a free development tool put out by Sun Microsystems called Open Wonderland. There’s also a sponsoring product called SmallWorlds on the site, available for gaming and social interaction.

I was surprised to find several what they call third generation world tools that are currently being used for online teaching. This first one is called the Open Cobalt Virtual Workspace which available for free – for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual workspaces for research and education. Second Life is currently the leading application for the development of online teaching worlds – many colleges and universities are represented here – such as the University of Derby, located in the Second Life Labs.
 

Finally, REZ-ED is the gathering place for many of the leading luminaries in the virtual worlds arena – such as Fleep Tuque, Lucas Gillispie, and Jeremy Kemp. It’s worth noting here that all registered members are able to contribute their work and ideas to the web site.

What follows is a description of the learning activity for CMST 115 -Visual Storytelling. The course objective or understanding for this activity is: Develop a 2-8 minute online visual screencast integrating images, text, and sound – applying presentation design principles learned in class.

When I’ve checked for plagiarism in the past, it usually goes something like this:

I’m reading a written project and I come across a paragraph or sentence that sounds out of character with the rest of the paper. Or the overall language seems out of whack from what I know of the student’s style of speaking and communicating. This is usually my best indicator that something is amiss. What I do next is copy the suspicious sounding text, past it into Google search, and place quotes around the search string so that Google will search for verbatim-only versions of the phrase.
If this doesn’t work, I’ll take shorter text sequences and past them in. In many cases, I’ll see them appear as part of a larger work, where other sections were plagiarized for the assignment. I’m sure there are students who have found successful work-arounds for this – but it has worked quite consistently for me. I also announce at the beginning of the quarter that I do check for plagiarism, and I think this works as a good incentive to keeping students honest.

I checked out a free plagiarism tool called Dupli Checker, using some search text that I had copied from a site on the web, and then modified somewhat. It wasn’t very helpful, but hey… it’s free!

This program goes line by line from the entered text and finds a “best case” web source and pops it into a window so you can click further on the displayed site to explore further. The excerpted text is shown in red, and the Google search results are shown below it. My question is, why would I use Dupli Checker if I could just do the search directly on Google? This is why I won’t be returning to this detection tool in the future.