Serendipity35

There are so many posts I have the past few weeks about trend for education and technology, but one way of seeing what trends may emerge this year is by looking at the tracks, presentations and keynote speakers at EdTech conferences. 

I'll be moderating a track next week at NJEdge.Net's Annual Conference: NJEdgeCon2018 "DIGITAL LEADERSHIP & ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION" January 11 & 12, 2018 in New Jersey.  My track is, naturally, Education and Technology which has presentations on best practices, innovations and the effectiveness associated with current LMS and online learning tools, effective infrastructure, resources, sustainability models and integrated assessment tools.

But if you look at the other tracks offered, you can see that INFORMATION Technology outweighs instructional technology here. Other tracks at the conference are Big Data & Analytics, Networking & Data Security, Customer Support & Service Excellence,  Aligning Business & Technology Strategies. and Transformation Products & Services.

Amber Mac (as in MacArthur) will talk about adaptation and the accelerating pace of corporate culture in the digital economy.

I have followed her career for a decade from her early tech TV and podcast venture to her current consulting business. She helps companies adapt to, anticipate, and capitalize on lightning-quick changes—from leadership to social media to the Internet of Things, from marketing to customer service to digital parenting and beyond. It’s not about innovation, she says; it’s about adaptation.

When it comes to teachers and technologies, the battle cry of Virginia Tech professor John Boyer is embrace, not replace. In his talk, he presents his view that the best teachers will embrace technologies that help them better communicate with students, but do not fear because those technologies will never replace human to human interaction. But blending the best communicators with the best technology has to offer will produce some amazing and unpredictable opportunities!

Wayne Brown, CEO and Founder of Center for Higher Ed CIO Studies (CHECS), will talk in his session on longitudinal higher education CIO research and the importance of technology leaders aligning technology innovations and initiatives with the needs of the higher education institution. His two-part survey methodology enables him to compare and contrast multiple perspectives about higher education technology leaders. The results provide essential information regarding the experiences and background an individual should possess to serve as a higher education CIO. In collaboration with NJEdge, Wayne will collect data from NJEdge higher education CIOs and will compare the national results with those of the NJ CIOs.

Timothy Renick (a man of many titles: Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success, Vice Provost, and Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University) is talking about "Using Data and Analytics to Eliminate Achievement Gaps."  The student-centered and analytics-informed programs at GSU has raised graduation rates by 22% and closed all achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and income-level. It now awards more bachelor’s degrees to African Americans than any other college or university in the nation. Through a discussion of innovations ranging from chatbots and predictive analytics to meta-majors and completion grants, the session covers lessons learned from Georgia State’s transformation and outlines several practical and low-cost steps that campuses can take to improve outcomes for underserved students.

Greg Davies' topic is "The Power of Mobile Communications Strategies and Predictive Analytics for Student Success and Workforce Development." The technology that has been used to transform, to both good and bad ends, most other major industries can connect the valuable resources available on campus to the students who need them most with minimal human resources. Technology has been used to personalize the digital experience in such industries as banking, retail, information and media, and others by reaching consumers via mobile technology. Higher Education has, in some cases, been slow to adapt innovative and transformative technology. Yet, its power to transform the student engagement and success experience has been proven. With the help of thought leaders in industry and education, Greg discusses how the industry can help achieve the goal of ubiquity in the use of innovative student success technologies and predictive data analytics to enable unprecedented levels of student success and, as a consequence, workforce development.

I read an article that mentioned that someone teaching game design was using the old game "The Oregon Trail" as a simple example of game design. I felt a little wave of nostalgia for that computer game that I used with middle school students in the late 1970s on Apple IIe computers.

What can we teach with 40-year-old software?

The game was developed in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. My school subscribed to MECC and received many software packages on the big 5.25 very floppy disks which we could duplicate.

The original game was designed to teach about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The single player is a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail via a covered wagon in 1848. 

But many teachers used it in other ways. In those early day, just teaching students to use the computer and navigate a game was a learning experience. I knew teacher who, like myself, used it was a way to teach cooperation by having players work in pairs or teams and justifiable arguing about choices was encouraged.

I used the game as an example when teaching literature as away to discuss the consequences of actions (draw branching diagram here).
 

Looking at the game again today via one of the several emulators available online (such as https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990 and https://classicreload.com/oregon-trail.html), it seems about as primitive in its graphics as it did back in 1975 in my classroom. But it worked. My homeroom students enjoyed playing it just for gaming fun, and I was able to incorporate the decision-making aspects into lessons. I taught English, not social studies, and was less interested in the historical aspects of the game. I did use it briefly in an interdisciplinary manner with a social studies teacher, but having students do research into the real Oregon Trail and that period seemed to kill interest in the game itself. 

It was one of the most successful games of all time and “The Oregon Trail” was inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. If you played it a few times, many of its screens are probably etched into your memory. I recall entering my real family members' names into the game the first time I played, and then sadly dysentery them "die" along the trail - probably from dysentery. It had game play moments (like hunting buffalo) and simple animation, but it was mostly text and so involved a lot of reading.

I would have my students work in small groups and map the game both on a real map of the trail, and then later on a decision tree style "map" of the game's options.

For me, the strength of the game in the classroom was in understanding how decisions could change the game's outcomes and their traveler's fates.

I recall that students would argue about the design. They didn't like the random things that would happen, such as a fire in the wagon destroying objects that were worth game points. But that also worked its way into my discussions with them of literature. Things happen in novels - and our lives - that seem random and out of our control, and they have consequences.

The other software that I used back then which was more sophisticated (though not graphically) was made by Tom Snyder Productions. I met Snyder at an educational conference and we talked about his Decisions, Decisions series. The series focused on the best aspects of what I was using in "Oregon Trail." The series included products on politics and the environment and came with printed material to supplement the games, so "research" was easy and necessary to play well.

I had no luck finding online what happened to Snyder and his company. It seems to have been consumed by Scholastic, though the link I found was a dead end.  I did find something on Amazon, but it doesn't seem that the series was continued or updated recently. It could easily be an online or mobile game. 

Can we use old software to teach new skills? Absolutely. Though these software packages seem crude by today's standards, they are also "classic" curiosities. I haven't taught secondary school students since 2000, so my sense of what is acceptable is lost. Certainly some of these games, or similar decision-tree kinds of games are a very viable classroom tool at all grade levels K-20. Maybe someone has already updated them or created new versions. If not, there is an opportunity.

     

According to an article at insidehighered.com/digital-learning/  "The field has been around for 75 years, but many still wonder what instructional designers - who are gaining acceptance in higher ed - do."  Having worked in the field for 17 years, I wonder why people (especially in higher ed) still wonder what instructional designers do.

EXCERPT:
"The practice of instructional design emerged during World War II, when the military assembled groups of psychologists and academics to create training and assessment materials for troops. In 1954, Harvard University psychology professor and author B. F. Skinner introduced the concept of programmed instructional materials through his article “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching.”

Within a decade, noted academics -- including Robert Gagne, widely considered the father of the field of instructional design -- had embraced the importance of assessment and learning objectives in teaching and learning.

Although higher education typically left course design up to the professors who would teach in traditional classrooms, the popularity of online courses created a need for input from professionals trained in the science of teaching, instructional methods and the technology that would make learning possible for remote students.

And now, the field is growing. A 2016 report funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation estimated that a minimum of 13,000 instructional designers work on college campuses. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last year counted 151,000 jobs -- across all school levels and industries -- for instructional designers and those with similar titles: instructional technologist and director of educational research and product strategy, for example. In 2012, CNN Money predicted the field would grow by 28.3 percent within 10 years...

“We’re going to find a digital comparison [with the face-to-face classroom], but it will further encroach on the decisions faculty believe are their domain,” [Lance Eaton, an instructional designer at Brandeis University] said. “The institution might feel otherwise, and the institutional designer will be the person in the middle trying to balance that dynamic.”
                                                             read more 

 

Academy is Moodle's version of a MOOC) platform, It's not that some people and institutions haven't gone done the MOOC road using the Moodle platform that was originally developed in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas to help educators create online courses. The Moodle platform was conceived with a focus on interaction and the collaborative construction of content and it has evolved over the past 15 years quite successfully. But it was not designed with the aim of hosting a course that contained tens of thousands of learners with different (and perhaps more limited) interactions and less emphasis on student-centered content creation.
There was an announcement about Academy in May 2016 and the Academy platform is still a preliminary version. As far as I have read, it is being used by only one institutional partner (Dublin City University) and for seven courses that are currently in the pre-enrollment stage).
At first mention, Moodle Academy was being compared to the Canvas Network because it seemed that Academy would be a centralized MOOC hosting platform run and managed by Moodle. This would be ideal for institutions (or individuals?) who wanted to offer a MOOC but needed not only a platform but the servers and bandwidth to deal with massive users and activity. I taught a meta-MOOC called "Academia and the MOOC" in the spring of 2013 in Canvas Network, and have used Canvas to teach undergraduate courses at a university since then.
I signed up for an Academy account and pre-enrolled for a course to test out the platform. (No start date listed yet.) The course is "21C Learning Design" and described as being for teachers who want to develop 21st Century skills in learning design. There is currently no content, but the platform itself looks very much like a Moodle course. For example, filling in my profile information, photo etc. was the same, and the home page with topics also looks the same as what I have used when I teach in Moodle at NJIT. 
AS with Canvas and Canvas Network, I suspect that Moodle and Academy will differ more behind the scene and screen and feel very comfortably similar for Moodle users.
If you want to try out Academy, go to https://academy.moodle.net/ and register. If you decide to take the 21C class, please message me there. It would be interesting to meet some Serendipity35 readers in a MOOC platform.