Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
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?
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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.
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.
