Is There a Problem Here? An Instructional Alternate Reality Game

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

It’s not too late to share this. This is the biggest thing I can give to the Creative Commons. I made it well before I knew about The Commons and am only now remembering to do this. This is many many hours of my time. This is the scholarly project which completed my M.Sc. in Instructional Design and Technology.

It is an exercise in embedding instruction into an alternate reality game. Or it’s an exercise in deeply embedding narrative into learning. Either way I tried my best and I want the commons to have it.

It is an alternate reality game in which players need to learn about problem gambling behaviors and harm reduction strategies in order to bring a story to its end. That story is the dognapping of a mildly famous and much-loved English Mastiff.

Oh and it’s so low tech it’s hardly ed-tech at all.

Chance on the Rick Mercer Report

Here is the zip file of all the pieces to the game Missing Chance. The main piece to look for to guide you through are the ‘Puppet Master Instructions’. Here is a little excerpt:

The Story:
Jack Berlian is a YMCA board member who fought to get the original funding for the Youth Gambling Awareness Program. He was one of the first people to realize the potential harm that gambling is doing to our youth and was in a position to do something about it. We just found out that his dog, Chance, has gone missing from the YMCA and there was a clue that made him think that Chance was stolen to help pay off a gambling debt. Chance is actually a bit of a celebrity dog, so she is worth quite a bit of money. Since we know a little something about risky gambling behaviours and ways to reduce the harm, we are in a unique position to help Jack. You (the puppet master) have been up all night, prior to coming to the YGAP meeting, preparing a plan to help Jack. You feel like this is our chance to pay back Jack’s efforts in creating YGAP, by helping to find Chance. You also feel like this is an opportunity to truly validate all of the work that YGAP does.
The Rabbit Hole:
The beginning of an alternate reality game (ARG) is called a ‘rabbit hole’. This is the point at which we enter the alternate reality of the game. For this game, the rabbit hole is simply the lost dog poster that Jack has prepared to try to get people to help find Chance. This poster will be posted in and around the site that you are running the game, in places
where your game players will likely see it before coming to your session. This will add some ‘reality’ to the story when you tell them that we will be spending our time today trying to help find this dog.
The Puppet Master:
The remainder of the document is a set of instructions for you, the Youth Outreach Worker, to follow in order to take this game to its conclusion. You will be in front and behind the scenes, pulling the puppet strings.

If you know of any organization that works with problem gambling behaviours that might like to use this, let them know about this and let me know if I can help them.

Featured image from: https://unsplash.com/@bkotynski CCO

The Worst

Daily Create 1940: The Worst Decision.

Without a doubt the worst move I’ve ever made was getting involved in this online cesspool known as ds106. It’s really quite disgusting. Here are some of the drawbacks I have endured:

  • Got to know strange Internet characters and interacted with them and have maybe even been able to call them friends. Weirdos with strange names like cogdog and Talky Tina and Jim Groom.
  • Got help from and learned new skills from these same Internet characters.
  • Practiced with and got much better at many uselesss tools like Photoshop, WordPress and general Internetting and other useless skills like writing and sharing. (is sharing a skill? I think so.)
  • Found new favorite writers to follow like Hack Education, Gardner Campbell and the aforementioned Internet weirdos.
  • Found other weird communities to get stuff from and give stuff to like Creative Commons and Virtually Connecting.
  • Generally fallen for sharing things through the Internet thing, probably annoying everyone who comes into contact with this stuff.
  • Probably a bunch of other things that I’m too emotional to remember right now.

Thanks a lot ds106.

Faetured image: “Bad” flickr photo by nathanmac87 https://flickr.com/photos/nathanmac87/7571070554 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

The Ghost of CC Future

The whole reason the Ghost of Christmas Future shows up is just to say “Don’t eff this up, Ebenezer. Get your act together and avoid your terrible future”. It worked for that cranky old bastard and it could work for us.

On Saturday at The Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto, Ashe Dryden showed us some of our past futures. Things that we used to think might be our future. What I take from that is the need to think about the things that could have happened, the things we hoped would happen, the things we hoped wouldn’t happen and what actually did happen to help us try to forge the best future that we can. The ruby red-lipped, shark people of Jupiter with 8-pack abs have not yet taken over, but we still want to avoid it. Maybe they are super chill, though, so who knows?

So in that spirit, I want to make sure I don’t squander the opportunities that attending the #CCSummit afforded me and forge the best path that I can from here. If Scrooge can do it, I can, too.

Here’s my quick list. It is not exhaustive of all the things I want to take from the summit, but it’s my start:

  • Read my signed copy of ‘Made With Creative Commons”.

Popping into Helen DeWaard’s Virtually Connecting Session with Rajiv Jhangiani (@thatpsychprof)

  • Get CC certified and hope that they go with tattoos as their form of certificate/badge because that would be tight.
  • Use those pretty pictures on unsplash. Hopefully they can get themselves a button on the CC Search page. Found a pretty sweet one of a ‘ghost’ for the featured image of this post, I think.
  • Finish colouring my Women of The Commons colouring book if I can get it back from Alice.

  • Work to put a project in place to make sure we’re using all of the open textbooks that we can and move towards contributing as well. All the amazing work BC Campus has done for open textbooks is soon going to be adopted by eCampusOntario so that we can join the party, too!
  • Convince Matt Ryan and Tom Jenkins to get on Twitter and join the party.

What’s your CC future?

 

Feature photo: https://unsplash.com/@luisdelrio

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

p.s. Here are the culprits who broke the news/Internet

 

Digital Pedagogy: It’s Like Riding a Digital Bike

The saying, ‘it’s like riding a bike’ means you just don’t forget. Even if you don’t use a skill for a long time. You can pick it right back up. I can see that has truth to it, but it got me thinking about what it is actually like to learn to ride a bike.

It starts out with just about as much support as possible. A grown up literally supporting you, balancing you, giving you instant feedback and encouragement. And oh the rush of emotion when you actually do it on your own! Just a few months ago, I witnessed this happen. The boy shouting “I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” as he rode away for the first time. It struck me that I witnessed an event that boy would probably remember for the rest of his life.

After that first time you ride away from your support person, what kind of ‘formal’ instruction do you really get or want in your bike riding skill acquisition program? Not much at all, really. Now it’s all about experiential learning. You learn from the crashes what not to do. You learn from exhilaration what to do. You try different bikes and they feel weird at first, but then you figure it out. You roll over new terrain shaky at first, but then you get used to it and enjoy the challenge.

I can remember most of the actual instructional events in my life to do with biking. Probably because they are so few and far between. Any formal tips or tricks for biking have been searched and sought out on my own here and there in magazines or from other cyclists and I have just been ‘experientially learning’ the rest of the way (the experientalliest learning being the year I spent as a bike courier.)

But I digress and lose sight of the point I haven’t yet made. So, to review what I’ve been trying to say: learning to ride a bike includes large amounts of start up support and then you’re mostly on your own.

I think that the bike-learning methodology is kind of what it’s like to wade into the digital world as an educator. You can find those opportunities for the start up support to get going, but from there you’re on your own to choose your path. Going into new systems is like trying out a new, different bike. WordPress might be your all purpose commuter and a flat-tired unicyle might be your Learning Management System. And like biking, you can get more out of it by adding some accessories (Slack, Twitter, etc) and joining a club or community (Virtually Connecting, #OpenLearning17, #ds106 etc.). Your friends are here to help, but it’s up to you to ride through new terrain and feel the wind blow your hair back. It’s great fun that you have to work for.

“Bike near campground First Landing State Park” flickr photo by vastateparksstaff https://flickr.com/photos/vastateparksstaff/33089545372 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

featured photo: “riding bikes” flickr photo by jonny.hunter https://flickr.com/photos/jonnyhunter/1043775061 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

 

 

First Steps to A Farm of One’s Own

This post’s purpose is to help the Fleming College Sustainable Agriculture Program take their first steps into the Farm of One’s Own project. It is here as an example of what a post on a WordPress domain might look like.

First off, one thing you can do to add some excitement to your posts is to use Creative Commons Search to find pretty pictures that you are free to use because of open licensing. Like this:

But make sure you give attribution! Photo credit: “100_3695” flickr photo by dugsong https://flickr.com/photos/dugsong/4164468894 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

by the way, that featured image of the boots at the top gets attribution, too! “Clagett Farm Fall Festival 2009” flickr photo by krossbow https://flickr.com/photos/krossbow/4004610129 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

You can add your own images, too, of course! You may even want to be cool about it and openly license your images for others to use!

Another thing you can do is easily pop YouTube videos into your posts. All you have to do is copy and paste the URL into the page and it will embed itself! See it in action below:

And then you have a nice little video embedded right into the page. You can add your own videos to YouTube in order to do this, or use videos already on Youtube. Hopefully the video you post hasn’t broken any copyright rules by being posted. You may want to look into that.

Below is an example of a YouTube video embedded right on in the page. It is relevant to this post because it explains something you need to know about WordPress. It explains the difference between a ‘page’ and a ‘post’.

Another thing you can do is link to other posts or pages. Maybe you will want to link to one of your classmate’s domains when you are writing about where you got your inspiration for an idea, or perhaps to the original Farm of One’s Own page, or even another post on your own domain.

Your FoOO domain will be your space to grow as you reflect and share your Sustainable Ag experiences. You will also teach & learn with your peers as your domain takes shape.

Phase 1 of this project will be for you to reflectively blog while you are off on your co-op experiences. This will be a way to keep in touch with and learn from your peers and see all the other farms your peers are working with. You may even get lucky and not have to do a ‘what I did on my summer vacation’ presentation when you get back, because we will all know about each other’s experiences already!

So, let’s get started with these start-up instructions: Getting Started with WordPress SAG (Thank you to Dennis Vanderspek from COMM 201 for the starting point instructions btw)

The Open Ed Workout

Open Education is like going to the gym. Lifting the same weights together isn’t really what we’re doing (unless we work directly together) but mostly we’re just lifting our own weights and working out in the same place. We’re in the Open Ed Gym getting ideas from each other’s workouts, generally working towards similar goals and gaining inspiration and motivation from each other.

What’s in your Open Ed Workout? Domain of One’s Own? ds106Virtually Connecting? Bryan Alexander’s Book Club? Open Learning 17NetNarr? Antigonish 2.0?

#FeeltheLearn

photo credit “Workout” flickr photo by Carlos Varela https://flickr.com/photos/c32/3173303193 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Petition to Adopt Reddit into The Open Ed Family

“Fishing spot” flickr photo by Patrick McConahay https://flickr.com/photos/pat_mcconahay/15106445506 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

The way Reddit works is really quite conducive to open pedagogy. I think, if I’m understanding the meaning of this saying properly, it is one of those things that is ‘of’ the Internet and not just ‘on’ it. The structure wasn’t designed specifically for educational purposes, but it sure does a better job of it than most things designed with ed-tech in mind.

Here’s how it works, put simply:

Subreddits:

are subdomains with their own topic/category/culture/set of rules. r/hockey is a place to talk hockey. r/Toronto is a place to talk about Toronto (helpful if you live there!). r/Askscience is a place to ask science questions that you hope somebody who knows more than you to answer. r/shittyaskscience is the same thing only with deliberately shitty answers, just for fun. There is a whole suite of ‘shitty’ subreddits, which is hilarious. Subreddits can be whatever the community wants and you can create your own.

Posts:

You can post a link, image or just some text to a subreddit. See something cute and educational anywhere else on the Web? Go post it to r/awwducational

Comments:

Each post basically gets its own discussion board by default. Know some more info about that cute thing on r/awwducational? Add your knowledge and link to more in-depth info. Or just ask for more detail if you don’t know.

Voting:

Each post, and each comment, can be upvoted or downvoted. The stuff with the higher +/- in votes is higher up, with the idea being upvoted stuff is the best stuff. It doesn’t always work that way as hive-minds can get carried away, but it often lets you find the quality stuff more quickly. You can also sort by new comments or controversial etc.

And all those things together gives us what?

What we end up with is a place where we can create our own community, easily contribute ideas and things, discuss, and vote on (to give more/less visibility). If the Open Education community were to post the awesome things that they find or do on Reddit (say, anything that someone would Tweet out) what we would have is a stream with a little more permanence than your Twitter feed. If Twitter were a rushing creek or waterfall, Reddit could be a slowly plodding brook or river full of life meandering through it.

The most interesting Subreddits seem to grow organically. Here are some neat communities:

Explain Like I’m Five

Cool Guides

A whole bunch more

Thanks for the inspiration to blog, Gardner!

 

 

Magic Realism Bot

Daily Create # 1882 Spawn a story that the Magic Realism Bot started. Okay! This should be pretty normal.

What? Well I have some advice for the Irish Shopkeeper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dispatching The Patchbook

Patches the cat almost did me in. We’ve been conceptualizing our Open Faculty Development Textbook for a few months now and were searching for a foundational idea to build the project around.

The other day, on a not-directly-related search, I was trying to find an image for a badge or patch for faculty to wear once they’d agreed to contribute to the text, so I CC Flickr searched for ‘patch’. I was inundated with images of Patches the Cat, sometimes with his owner, sometimes not. I’m glad you love your cat, buddy, but it wasn’t helping me.

I thought it was funny to see so many pictures of Patches, but was disheartened that I wasn’t finding what I was really looking for. And in the back of my mind that this project didn’t have a hook yet. I don’t remember exactly the mental steps it took to go from Patches the Cat, to The Faculty Patchbook, but it happened, and here we are with our hook.

Patchwork. A community quilt. This is what we’re trying to make. A community built collection of ‘chapters’ or whatever you want to call it. Each individual telling the story of one pedagogical skill in order to build an entire quilt. Tales about pedagogy for teaching in-class, online, designing/redesigning lessons and courses. Whatever the community quilt needs to cover our teaching and learning needs.

It seems serendipitous that in further searches for ‘quilts’ and ‘patchwork’, I came across a very fitting image by the cogdog himself, whom I take a great deal of open learning inspiration from. This image is now the feature image on the About this Project page for The Patchbook. The link is coming, don’t worry! 🙂

Farm Quilt flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Check out the quilt in progress here. There you’ll see a description of what we want to do and how you can get involved, too. Fleming College’s main campus is in Peterborough, Ontario, (also known as The Patch!) and we are dispatching The Patchbook out to you and with you.

Maybe it should be dedicated to Patches the Cat.

Feature photo: “Patches” flickr photo by Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue https://flickr.com/photos/waffleboy/8918477914 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

 

A Spartan LMS

Spartans flickr photo by Masked Builder shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

I am currently in an in-between phase of figuring out what is wrong with the traditional way we use Learning Management Systems and how to move along. Although I do like to refer to them as Learning Constrainment Systems. What would you put in a basic, spartan learning management system? You know, the things that are actually pedagogically helpful, but so you still end up with no bloat. The current LMS that I work with, which I do not desire to reveal at this time, has a huge whack of tools, most of which don’t get much use. What can an LMS do better than just a Domain of One’s Own system? What can we get rid of to finish with something more SPLOTy that would actually be really helpful? Is the ideal a combo package of the two? I’d like to know what people think.

I’m thinking, if anything, include in the LMS:

  • A class roster. Basically a tool to show which students are in which courses with which instructors.
  • A grade book with good feedback functionality
  • Assignment dropbox (where students submit links to the assignments actually housed in their own domains that they wish to submit for feedback). Possibly it could also be used for submitting sensitive type work that really shouldn’t be out on the Web.
  • A ‘journal’ type discussion thing for sensitive discussions that only certain people should be involved in like instructors or tutors with the students. Certain subjects like Counselling would find this more useful maybe.
  • A quiz tool (just a ‘grandfathered’ tool to get the masses to come there and then slowly make it fade away)

I’m thinking the things that should not be housed inside the LMS, but outside in the World Wild Web include:

  • Syllabus and week by week instructions for what is going on.
  • Assignment instructions. Ideally a place that allows students and others to also submit assignment ideas. Students are then able to choose the ones they want to do.
  • A central list of URLs to classmate’s domains
  • Any content delivery including instructional videos of talks with lecturers and guest speakers and slide decks, set up instructions, readings
  • Any live video chats or collaborative annotation exercises
  • Collaborative notes produced by students
  • Obviously all posts and pages students create for their domains (in a central flow as well as on individual domains)
  • A general discussion board.
  • A social media layer like Twitter for students to informally share and discuss things they are working on and connect throughout the course

Housing these tools outside the LMS invites openness, collaboration, riffing, remixing and generally (hopefully) bootstrapping everyone to a higher level of performance and creativity.

So, we’re left with 5 tools in the Spartan LMS (one of which has an expiry date) instead of the 42 in my current LMS. That means there are 37 tools I don’t really desire 2 use. 

So, do we need any of these LMS tools at all or should we leave the LMS to head off into the sunset? Throw out the bathwater, the baby and then smash the tub while we’re at it? I’d be interested to hear about anyone who uses both by choice (or if they have to). Comment below to let me know!

Sunset flickr photo by Jason O’Halloran shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Terry Greene

@greeneterry 

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