2nd Life for Language Practice
Like Facebook, 2nd Life (SL) is a social network that can provide students with online collaborative spaces for extra language practice outside the brick and mortar classroom. With the assistance of Deke Kassabian of ISC and designer Claudia Rossini, the Penn Language Center is building a virtual reality based on Williams Hall on Penn’s campus. Although the exterior of the building resembles the actual site, the interior of Williams Hall is quite another story. Upon first entering the building one sees traditional looking classrooms but that impression soon changes as blackboards transition with one mouse click from blank surfaces to displays for streaming video, images or Powerpoint presentations. Upon going up the stairs to the second floor of Williams, the eye immediately gravitates to an area in a far corner of the room that is attractively furnished and conducive to conversation. Avatars, the residents of 2nd Life, can sit on comfortable chairs and couches around a table in a setting filled with objects and perceptual stimuli, that lend themselves to conversation and promote language practice. The illustration below is an example of such a space in Williams.
Returning to the ground floor, students can use the building directory to teleport themselves to areas beyond the traditional looking spaces in Williams to more whimsical and fanciful spaces based on specific culturally identifiable settings. Alongside the typical classroom one finds dedicated language areas such as the Persian courtyard and Japanese tea room where students can meet, talk and acquaint themselves with cultural settings that they might later encounter in the real world. There is also the Wirtshaus “Max und Moritz” where students can sit around a German “Stammtisch,” chat, read a menu and order a meal. Within these hybrid fantasy settings, instructors can design assignments that extend conversational practice beyond the face-to-face meetings of the classroom. In this way, SL can be used to align homework assignments more closely with classroom activities where the goal is to develop the students’ conversational competence.
This pilot project will help to determine in part to what extent virtual realities and personal learning environments can be used to not only enhance the students’ language learning experience but also to change the nature of homework from that of an exclusively individual exercise to that of a more collaborative activity. In contrast to workbook exercises that provide students with individualized practice for studying vocabulary and grammar and improving listening comprehension, SL can provide students with opportunities to work with each other in communicative activities that promote language usage through written and verbal practice. The big difference here is that situations in SL have the potential to encourage language practice through usage, i.e., through communication and interaction rather than only through memorization and study. See below for other examples of 2nd Life in Williams.
Japanese Tea Room
Persian Court Yard
German Wirtshaus
9/25 Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium
9/25 Symposium
You don’t have to be sick in order to use technology for teaching.
This summer I’ve been involved in planning for how we’ll continue teaching in the event of a large outbreak of H1N1 – the dreaded Swine Flu. I’ve been asked to document how teachers can use technology as a substitute for some of the activities that would otherwise be carried out in the classroom.
It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching. You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu
Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall. But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.
Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments. Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools. Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.
But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy. That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.
By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving. Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions. Screencast movies can demonstrate how to use Library resources for research. Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie. Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture
eTextbooks for the iPhone?
Tech blogs were buzzing last week with the news that CourseSmart had just released “eTextbooks for the iPhone“, an iPhone app which allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbook. Seems fewer students want to carry around backpacks full of textbooks. Go figure.
Founded in 2007 and supported by six higher education publishers, CourseSmart provides higher ed markets with digital versions of over 7000 titles from some of the leading textbook publishers today (including McGraw Hill Higher Education, John Wiley & Sons , Sage Publication, Pearson and 10 others). According to its website, students from nearly 6000 universitites have subscribed to CourseSmart eTextbooks, saving an average of $62 per purchase.
Saving up to 50% off the publisher list price, students subscribe to eTextbooks for 180 days, in either fully online or downloadable versions. eTextbooks have the same content, page numbers, and layout as print versions of the text, as well as a suite of interactive tools which allow students to search for keywords, add notes, highlight key points, copy and paste quotes, print pages and even email excerpts to their classmates. What’s not to love?
Wolfram Alpha – not a “homework killer”, but something to watch
If you read technology news, or even the Chronicle of Higher Education, you may have heard of Wolfram Alpha, a free online tool that is somewhere between a search engine, a database, and a computer algebra system. The launch of Wolfram Alpha in mid-May of this year was met with much fanfare in certain circles, and much consternation in others. Some educators fear that this tool will allow students to skip the learning process of working out problems by hand, since they can get the results online. (Whether or not this would constitute cheating is a topic for a different post.)
I decided to wait before posting about this tool until it had a few months to mature, and until I had time to really kick the tires. Now that I’ve done that, I agree that it can be a powerful tool and that faculty in certain fields should be aware that it exists, but I don’t think that it’s going to make homework obsolete.
Since Wolfram Alpha is based on the computation engine of Mathematica, that’s where it does best. If you enter “integrate x sin^2 x dx”, you get
But a link also appears to “show steps”, which explains each of the steps in the solution, essentially doing the students’ homework for them. This isn’t really new, since sites like http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ have offered step-by-step solutions for some time, so people who teach courses that assign these types of problems are probably already aware of these resources and take them into account in their teaching. But so far, mathematical problems are the only type of input that results in a solution with steps, so instructors in other fields need not worry.
On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha employs a wide variety of data sets, so if an instructor thinks that an assignment will send students to the library or to a particular electronic resource where they’ll have to hunt for information and interpret it, they may be surprised. For example, how did the Consumer Price Index change between June 2008 and June 2009? Just enter “consumer price index june 2009 / consumer price index june 2008″ and you get the result: 98.57%, or a drop of 1.43%. And if you have a large data set, Wolfram Alpha will curate it for you – see http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/structureddata.html
There are a million other things that Wolfram Alpha can do, too, like:
- balancing a chemical equation: enter “C3H8 + O2 —> H2O + CO2″ and you’ll get
You’ll get the result, but you won’t get the steps required to get there, so students can check their results but it won’t do the work for them if the assignment requires that you “show your work”. - calculating the nutritional value of my favorite smoothie recipe (which makes 2 servings): enter “calories in 1 banana + 3.5 cups strawberries + 0.5 cup milk + 0.5 cup orange juice + 3 teaspoons sugar + 1 teaspoon lemon juice” and you get the full nutrition information in a format that looks very similar to the panel on all packaged food products. You also get a place to choose what type of milk you want to use and to make other ingredient choices.
I’ve used Wolfram’s Mathematica software for more than 10 years now, and I’m very interested in the ways in which it might make a positive contribution to engaging students with course material. If you’d like to talk about ways that you might use it in your course, please contact me!
A vision of students today?
I enjoyed reading the Chronicle article Cathy posted yesterday, and agree wholeheartedly that there is great value in “spending time socializing students to the type of interaction that the technology can facilitate”. I also wonder how we might better design interactions that align more closely with some of the ways of knowing and doing that the Net Gen brings to the academe. Doesn’t socialization go both ways?
Just what do the students of today look like? In Spring 2007, Dr. Michael Wesch, in collaboration with his 200 students enrolled in an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created a
short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
Check out what they have to say in A Vision of Students Today. If Penn students were to complete a similar project, how do you think their findings might differ? How might they be similar?
If you’re interested in learning more about Wesch’s projects, check out his blog. What do you think about his reflections on this project? Post a comment!
… we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
Game Theory and Technology
This is my first official post on the Penn Engaging Students through Technology blog so I’d like to quickly introduce myself. My name is Erin Murphy and I work for a group at Wharton Computing called the Learning Lab. Each year the Learning Lab receives proposals from Wharton professors to develop web-based applications that extend the reach of learning in the classroom. Some of these applications would fall under the category of simulations that allow students to engage in real-world challenges without assuming the real-world risk (e.g., The Online Trading and Investment Simulator allows students to experiment with different trading methods without losing real money).
Through my experience with the simulations, I’ve come to realize that game theory in general is a particularly useful concept to understand and can be applied to different segments of life that one would not ordinarily associate with game theory. In fact, I’ve been following a blog online (Mind Your Decisions blog) that is entirely dedicated to game theory and how it can be found in interesting places. In this particular post from several months ago, the author details how game theory played a role in significant events like the financial crisis all the way to more trivial daily activities like waiting for the bus in the morning. It is also being used to predict political events – see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on TED.com using game theory to predict the future of Iran.
Technology (especially simulations) is great at capturing game theories because they often deal with the actions/interactions/and negotiations of two or more players in a closed system. As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita mentions in his TED talk, computers successfully keep track of these actions/interactions/and negotiations much better than people and we can then analyze the data to predict a player’s future actions. On that note, I’d like to discuss two of the most frequently used game theory types in Learning Lab applications.
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Tragedy of the Commons: The notion of tragedy of the commons developed from an article of the same title written by Garrett Hardin in the journal Science in 1968. “The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen”(Wikipedia, 2009). The tragedy of the commons scenario can be used to demonstrate the effects of any group’s actions on a limited resource in a closed system from specific things like oil or TUNA to more complex resources like the environment.
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Prisoner’s Dilemma: “A game frequently displayed in television police dramas. Two partners in crime are separated into separate rooms at the police station and given a similar deal. If one implicates the other, he may go free while the other receives a life in prison. If neither implicates the other, both are given moderate sentences, and if both implicate the other, the sentences for both are severe. Each player has a dominant strategy to implicate the other, and thus in equilibrium each receives a harsh punishment, but both would be better off if each remained silent. In a repeated or iterated prisoner’s dilemma, cooperation may be sustained through trigger strategies such as tit for tat” (GameTheory.net, 2009).
For more information on game theories, check out gametheory.net.
Does Boredom Really Leave Classrooms When Computers Leave?
This week The Chronicle’s information technology section describes the crusade of Southern Methodist University’s dean Jose A. Bowen against PowerPoint. You can read more here
http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/
(Thanks to Ian Petrie the new Associate Director at CTL for giving me the heads up on this one.)
The gist of the article is that Bowen is removing computers and presentation hardware from SMU’s classrooms because students find PowerPoint boring. (The article also notes that this was cost effective because the computers were due for an upgrade. You might also note that professors got lap tops out of the deal.)
I have a lot of trouble ascribing what is boring about classes to technology (I took college classes before PowerPoint) but that assertion is an easy topic. Everyone reading this blog has seen technology turn the classroom into a vigorous, interactive space where students are involved, creative and energized. And we have all seen some boring PowerPoint presentations.
What is more interesting about the article and what is worth thinking about is what it says about students. “The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.”
For those of us who work with faculty to help them use technology, I think this article suggests the value of spending time socializing students to the type of interaction that the technology can facilitate. I’m not sure getting rid of computers is going to solve this particular educational problem.
Penn’s new Second Life campus under construction
Did you know that ISC is building a replica of the Penn campus in Second Life? Thanks to the annual IT Staff convention, I learned about this new project headed by Deke Kassabian. Deke will be giving a guided tour of the new building project here at the Weigle Information Commons at a WICshop on July 8 at noon. The new build includes several prominent landmarks on campus including the Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center.
Interest in Second Life seems to be in a resurgence at Penn lately. In March, PennGSE and Cornell University held a workshop on Taxonomies of Virtual Worlds for Education organized by Yasmin Kafai, and in May, the Wharton School held the Virtual Worlds in Academia Symposium organized by Tim Allen. In recent weeks, langauge lecturers in Japanese and Persian have been exploring Second Life hands-on. Deke has set up a new SIG (special interest group) email list called VIRTWORLD-SIG for all at Penn who are interested in exploring virtual worlds.
New report on the effectiveness of online learning
The US Department of Education released a new report on 6/26/09 concerning the effectiveness of online learning. This report is a meta-analysis which analyzes the results of prior studies.
The attention-grabbing headline of this report states, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes…was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face.”
However, the authors provide this important caveat:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction”
Later in the report the authors mention,
“Studies in which analysts judged the curriculum and instruction to be identical or almost identical in online and face-to-face conditions had smaller effects than those studies where the two conditions varied in terms of multiple aspects of instruction” (page xvi)
and
“In terms of instructional features, the online learning conditions in these studies were less likely to be instructor-directed (8 contrasts) than they were to be student-directed, independent learning (17 contrasts) or interactive and collaborative in nature (23 contrasts). Online learners typically had opportunities to practice skills or test their knowledge (42 effects were from studies reporting such opportunities).” (page 17)
In my humble opinion, this study validates the effectiveness of a variety of pedagogical techniques and thoughtful course design. These techniques can be applied to both online and traditional courses; the pedagogy matters more than the medium.
An article which summarizes the findings of the report is available at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/online
and the full report is available at
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
