Video
Video was my first EdTec obsession. iMovie to be specific. I was captivated by it and spent long, long hours timing my slides to fit the music just perfectly. "No, not 0.03 seconds into the seventy-third clip, 0.035 seconds. Yes, that's it," I would say to myself.
While making those first educational films in 470 and 541 I would reminisce on my sophomore year of high school in Northern California and the Spanish class I had with Mrs. Savin. Absences and a general slacking off had resulted in a C- grade at midterm, something unheard of from such an academic student as myself. I nearly shed tears when I read the little 2" by 8" progress report that showed me on the verge of a failing grade. "How will I tell Mom and Dad?" I mourned. Then, an idea! "Yes, this is perfect..."
My parents, reflecting back on the job they had done raising myself and my sister had decided that the one shortcoming in our upbringings was a lack of worldly travel experience; thus they set out to expose their children first to the tropical island of Maui and then, in the subsequent year, to the exotic land of Mexico. Puerto Vallarta to be exact. As it happened, this trip to Mexico was scheduled to take place just days after I received my unfortunate progress report and my plan, as ingenious now as it was then, was to film my entire winter break trip to Mexico and then compile a brief vignette of my experiences (narrated in Spanish of course) for extra credit in class. Mrs. Savin was literally ecstatic about the idea, I needed a way to get that C- up without actually learning any more Spanish and so, with my father's state of the art Hi8 Handycam in tow I proceeded for the first time to archive experiences for the end purpose of educating an audience.
I have some pretty good memories of that Mexico trip, but perhaps my most vivid recollection from that entire experience was the week after we got back, late at night, sitting on the floor of our living room about eight inches in front of our television. With Dad's Hi8 Handycam by my side and my fingers on the jog shuttle of our S-Video equipped VCR I weathered hours and hours of footage I had taken the previous week, searching for scenes that wouldn't make me the laughingstock of the sophomore class. It took all night.
In the end I wound up with a pretty entertaining little video, one that actually got shown to all of Mrs. Savin's classes over the course of the year in fact. I take a lot more pride in that fact now than I did back then though. Being recognized by Spanish 1 students as "the guy who did that movie in Spanish" wasn't really doing it for my social standing at the time. I did get the extra credit, but the cost was too high. I didn't edit another video for nine years.
EdTec 470 and iMovie changed that pretty quick. I started out in a group project with a simple skit I had seen done several times on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn called "The Recreation of a Press Photo." With that modest work, the seed was planted.
A lifelong fan of educational programs like NOVA, The Civil War, and pretty much anything on the Discovery Channel had convinced me in the power of video to educate. iMovie showed just how much that power had been downsized, to the point that a teacher could create a customized educational video for a specific lesson without much hassle at all (at least relative to what I went through for that extra credit). I decided to test my idea on myself, a young student teacher at the time, with my fifth grade students as subjects.
Soliciting the help of my father and and the use of one of his fuchsias I made a short step-by-step movie on how to dissect a flower. Coinciding with the material I had been teaching the students in class, the lesson was a huge success. Nearly all the students were engaged in the lesson, and I was freed from the front of class to be able to help those students who weren't. I luckily timed the film almost exactly right, leaving just enough time for the students to accomplish their task without having extra seconds to get distracted by something else. Most impressively though, almost every single student was able to produce an end product at least as good as my own example in the movie. I was convinced that video in education was the key to future teaching and learning.
It was a long time before I finally started facing some of the real shortcomings of video: no feedback, rarely interactive, still too time consuming to produce and too easy to screw up. I even used my time in 541 to build a flash-based web site devoted to building a community around educational video production and use, with ideas on how to minimize the above detriments. Ultimately though, two things forced me to realize that the future of all types of learning, including video, would be subject to the shorter and shorter attention spans of audiences, in turn pushing a new kind of instruction. The first thing was HOMER, the second was the HOMER rip-off I made for my middle school students at High Tech Middle School.
HOMER is a step-by-step Adobe Acrobat manual on how to build a website. It was created for use in EdTec 541, a class designed to teach concepts I largely knew coming into the class. This is a frustrating position for any student to be in, and while there were still some skills for me to gain from the course, I found myself in the position of being frequently irritated by the tedious nature of searching through pages and pages of HOMER to separate the information I needed from the material I didn't. At the time I didn't understand what it was about HOMER that I disliked, I simply knew it was not teaching me in an efficient or pleasing way.
Even with these simple realizations you might think I'd know better than to attempt my own step-by-step manual for building a web site. Alas, despite my own dissatisfying experience with the idea I forced the exact tactic on my own middle school students only two years later. Suffice it to say their experience paralleled my own. It was then that I realized the connection HOMER, my tutorial, and educational videos (to a large extent) had: they all failed to efficiently educate because they force the user to learn at the pace of the material rather than forcing the material to teach at the pace of the learner.
This was an important realization for me to make and it has subsequently affected my teaching profoundly. EdTec has since taught me that the prescription to my problem is "on-demand", "self-guided", "just-in-time" learning modules. Looking back I'm surprised I didn't see this solution sooner, for it was through my second EdTec obsession that I originally witnessed the type of teaching and learning I knew needed to be created to truly reach my students. In fact, the first concrete example I can recall utilizing on-demand, self-guided, just-in-time learning modules occurred years before I even knew about EdTec or had even visited SDSU. It was in Santa Barbara when I was an undergraduate and it took place in a virtual world populated by (among others) a witch, a mole, and a bear with a bird in his backpack.
Video Games
Video Games were my second EdTec obsession. Specifically I was interested in the potential of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPTs) to teach and motivate learners. When I think about it though, I see an entire progression of learning styles in the video games I played as a child and young adult.
The first games I played required the user to read through a manual to understand things like moves, rules, enemies, even a complicated back story sometimes. I can still remember being amazed at the number of pages in the 1992 John Madden Football manual documenting everything from team statistics to seemingly endless possible audibles.
Command and Conquer was the first game I can remember playing that included its own form of a reference manual within the game. Operating on a war game premise, the player acts as a field general training, building and directing different types of troops and instruments of war for the purpose of conquering the other team. While I still read the manual for the game, it also featured built-in feedback that forced the player to learn the rules of conduct. Certain building options,for example, would be unavailable to the user until a preliminary structure had been erected and the game would display this information to the player if they tried to forgo the rules.
Banjo Kazooie was a breakthrough though. It completely eliminated the need for a manual at all. The user simply turned the game on, was greeted with a brief vignette explaining the back story and began playing. An adventure game featuring a bear and bird team as the main characters, Banjo Kazooie was among the first games to feature true three-dimensional game play, allowing the user to move the characters along all three axes and explore virtual landscapes at will. This might seem an overwhelming environment for a novice gamer, but unique on-demand, self-guided, just-in-time learning modules (featuring Bottles the mole) were expertly built into the game to not only explain game controls, but also the game rules, and even certain objectives. Best of all, because the game featured a non-linear style of play, it was largely up to the player which modules they learned and when.
This type of learning (whether in a video game or in the real world) has many advantages over other teaching methods. It is a more engaging, more efficient and more satisfying way to learn. It is within this last attribute that I believe the greatest advantage is held, as satisfaction inherently leads to motivation. When a Banjo Kazooie player is in the middle of accomplishing an objective and comes up against an obstacle they don't know how to conquer, there is little more motivating than the knowledge that somewhere in that virtual world lies the answer and with just a little work it can be had. At that point, the act of finding Bottles, learning a new attack and conquering the objective becomes its own reward.
My own reseach into Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games showed that they too employ many of the same on-demand, self-guided, just-in-time learning modules. Instead of focusing on this property though, I chose to focus on the addictive nature of MMORPGs. I became engrossed with these never-ending games and their millions of members who were continually motivated to play. Ultimately I hypothesized that the addictiveness of MMORPGs stemmed from their communal nature and the social connections that players forged through playing and participating in the world, and while I still believe that, in some ways it kept me from investigating what I now believe may be a more interesting aspect of motivation within video games: the role that the choice of playing itself presents.
Proposals
My current EdTec obsession is proposals. I first stumbled across the power of proposals when assigning to my sixth grade class a brief project to "design, conduct, and report the findings of your own experiment." It wasn't a great project, especially at first, but I noticed that my students were highly engaged and excited by it. I couldn't figure it out at first. I had spent far more time designing our previous project on indigenous cultures from around the world.
Long hours over sushi and green tea with my teaching partner had resulted in a laundry list of deliverables that we thought covered the gamut of material we wanted to cover with the indigenous cultures project. The students would create their own animal, draw it to scale and write a story explaining how it related to their own selected culture. They would create three artifacts relating to their culture and write about each one, they would narrate a podcast detailing a day in the life of their organism, they would design a tri-fold board of their culture and organism to display all of their work at an Exhibition Night. It's no wonder that after a project like that the students were ready to do something that they had designed.
For the experiment project, all I required from each individual was a proposal detailing what their experiment was, how they would do it, and when certain benchmarks would be met. If their proposal was not approved, they could not begin the assignment. Seeing firsthand how much more motivated my students were to do a project that they had developed rather than one that I had developed was a revelation. Even an expertly designed game such as Banjo Kazooie is rendered useless if the players only play against their will. The learning modules within the game may be self-guided and allow for a certain amount of user choice, but the most important choice the player makes regarding the game is to play it at all. This is why my current obsession centers around designing lessons to provide the least amount of guidance and the most amount of choice without compromising the learning objectives. Therein lies the rub I guess, but I consider it a noble goal because it gives the students a stake in their own learning, builds value within the project and encourages the students to analyze their own learning patterns and behavior.
The Future
In K-12 education we are preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, requiring mastery of tools that haven't been invented to solve problems we can't imagine. In this dynamic and unpredictable environment a mastery of English grammar is far less important for an individual to possess than the ability and willingness to master English grammar or, in my case, the completion of a laundry list of deliverables is far less important than the desire to conduct a self-designed experiment.
Considering I began my tenure as an EdTec student building videos that focused on the method of delivery far more than the results of it, this is a pretty radical place to be. I know of a model by which to view this progression though: the hierarchy of evaluation I learned about way back in EdTec 540.
My first teaching strategies focused on making sure that the students could do the work I wanted them to do. Videos helped me accomplish this, but they did not tell me whether or not the students would do the work without me. I chose to look at video games as a way of understanding that which they chose to do of their own accord. Eventually I began to look beyond that too, towards the use of proposals and other methods of teaching that ensure what they are doing makes a difference, that it prepares them for the future.
I'm not sure what the singular theme of my time in the EdTec program might be. Perhaps metacognition and the instilling of a lifelong love for learning. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will change. In attempting to teach these lessons, I've had to learn them pretty well myself. My development as an EdTec student wouldn't stop at graduation even if I wanted it to.
