PMOGing Internet Research Skills…

PMOG: the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This is a game you play while browsing the internet, going about your daily internet related tasks… think webquest with mines, treasure chests, and quests.

You play the game by adding an extension to your Firefox browser. This browser lets you ’sense’ the game world, the activities overlaid on the plain old mundane net. Then, in the words of the game’s creators:

“This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!”

What does this entail? Again, from the PMOG site:

Prank Your Friends Across the Web< Using Mines that steal Datapoints	Leave Gifts on Web Sites Using Crates to hold Tools or currency
Make or Follow Paths Online Missions!	Develop a Rich User Profile Passively, just by surfing the web.

So what does this have to do with internet research skills? Well, it occurred to me that I can tell my students over and over again what constitutes a ‘good’ site versus a ‘bad’ site, but if I’m not there watching them, it never sinks in. Given that a lot of my teaching is done via distance, this is a problem.

But what if, as a class, we were all PMOGing? I could imagining setting a question the students would need to research in order to write an answer - maybe leaving their responses on a wiki somewhere - and then sending them out into the net with PMOGed enabled browsers. The game’s stats would instantly record how much work online the students were putting in, and if I set mines on all of the lousy sites I can find - the ones they typically go to, like the wikipedia page on Julius Caesar - and treasure chests on the good ones (like say a page from the British School at Rome, or from an online journal) they’d soon learn the difference. I could also set up quests that would take them to a number of good sites, or sites with opposing points of view, and require them to go to pages supporting or contesting the views… and of course, students could leave their own mines and treasures, and so hindering/helping their peers…

It would be quite neat, actually. Almost like laser tag in the library, capturing-the-flag…

“In the springtime of 51 BC, Ptolemy Auletes died…”

In the course of marking an assignment, I noticed a curious reference: “Interoz 2008″. What was Interoz, I wondered? In the bibliography, this was listed: http://interoz.com/Egypt/cleopatr.htm. It turns out that Interoz is a webdesign company, and these pages on Egypt are likely connected with some work they did on a tourism site.

A website design company is not the kind of source that students in a university-level Roman history class should be using. Time and again, I ask my students to ask themselves: “Who wrote this article? How can you know whether or not to trust it?” Needless to say, the author of the article is not listed on the site (though the person who put the page together is). The essay on Interoz goes on to describe Cleopatra’s life and times: standard info available in any textbook. I’ve encouraged my students not to be referencing the textbook, but to get out there and read widely; if they use the internet, I almost beg them to use JSTOR or the other digital resources of our library… to little avail.
Anyway, the page in question contains an essay that begins with “In the springtime of 51 BC, Ptolemy Auletes died and left his kingdom in his will to his eighteen year old daughter, Cleopatra, and her younger brother Ptolemy XIII who was twelve at the time.” In an effort to determine the ultimate source of this essay, I googled that phrase.

Results: 1310 pages. Most of the sites lead in circles, and I’m somewhat stumped as to the ultimate origin of the article. But you can buy it for $12 from this site: http://www.freeessays.tv/a5879.htm (In which case you’d be quite an idiot if you did).

So though my student didn’t take my advice or learn the lessons of internet research, at least she didn’t plagiarize. Small mercies.

How many universities and colleges, I wonder, make ‘research skills’ a required course during the first term of a student’s career? I get discouraged sometimes in my own courses: not only do I have to teach the content, but I also find myself devoting enormous amounts of time to teaching remedial basic grammar, spelling, internet skills, library skills… the net effect is to take away from the content, from the subject, and I fear the marks that get awarded might ultimately reflect whether or not a student can string together reasonably grammatically correct and properly spelled thoughts (in comparison to his/her peers) rather than any deep knowledge of the subject…

What a depressing thought.

Ryerson & Facebook

A student at Ryerson University is facing academic sanctions for his role in administering an online study group. To join the group, users were invited to post the answers to assigned questions - questions they were explicitly told to do on their own. From the Globe and Mail:

“Ryerson’s administration appears to have focused on Mr. Avenir’s main-page posting, which read: “If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted.”"

I’d argue that there’s a difference between comparing the process by which answers are arrived at (as a legitimate study group might do), and putting the answers online for everyone to see.  It’s interesting to observe how this is being covered in the media - many reporters put a spin on it saying in effect that the prof in question is old fashioned to be upset by this:

“Some have framed the debate as an issue of universities becoming uncomfortable as Internet innovation brings existing practices into new, more public arenas. But Ryerson spokesman and professor James Norrie said the online forum is irrelevant to the central question of whether misconduct occurred, and rejected the notion that new technology brings different standards.

“Ryerson University is not attempting to prevent the use of Facebook for appropriate learning,” he said. “The question is, do we want to hold people accountable for their online behaviour?”"

Bravo Prof. Norrie: new technologies do not change the standards of behaviour. If you don’t do your own work, it’s cheating, pure and simple, whether it’s done on-line or in the pub. If you did it in the pub though, you’d probably get away with it; putting it on facebook is plain silly: it’s there for everyone - including the prof - to see.  When I taught media studies at the high school level, many students were shocked and astonished to know that Myspace, facebook, etc were not private. Indeed, if you put anything on the internet, (I taught them), you should expect eventually for it to be treated as public whether you intended it to be or not. It strikes me that in the Ryerson case, the student(s) acted as if the group were private, while the prof treated it as public.   Nevertheless,  whether the students believed it to be private or not, the fact remains that they were instructed to do the work on their own.

(I write this as someone who has to deal with cut-n-paste’d wikipedia articles masquerading as essays every bloody term… Frankly, if I could, I wouldn’t assign essays any more. (The literacy skills of many of my students just make me cringe, too.) What I’d love to do is assign this sort of thing: build and script a scenario for a game highlighting your understanding of the historical/social forces at play…  not likely to happen, I know, I know….)

Interviews with Digital Historians & Humanists

I was a participant at the First Digital Workshop held at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Nebraska Lincoln in the fall of 2006. I had forgotten that I - and others - had been interviewed for our thoughts on the Digital Humanities: what they were, what they were for, where the field was going, etc. So imagine my surprise when I found the video clips of those interviews today!

My clips are here:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

The atmosphere surrounding or reception of digital scholarship in the academy

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

It’s a bit odd to watch oneself on video for the first time… I remember I was caught somewhat by surprise, so you can see the little wheels exploding in my head, as I try to sound reasonably intelligent.

The people you should really listen to are:

Abdul Alkalimat, University of Toledo

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

The atmosphere surrounding or reception of digital scholarship in the academy

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Teaching and student involvement with digital scholarship

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Peter Bol, Harvard University

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

The atmosphere surrounding or reception of digital scholarship in the academy

Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Teaching and student involvement with digital scholarship

The atmosphere surrounding or reception of digital scholarship in the academy

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

John Lutz, University of Victoria

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

The influence of the Newberry Library on digital scholarship

Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

Her initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Teaching and student involvement with digital scholarship

Janice Reiff, University of California, Los Angeles

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The influence of the Newberry Library on digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Robert Schwartz, Mount Holyoke College

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Andrew Torget, University of Virginia

October 6, 2007

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

His initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

How do you use digital history projects in your research and teaching

Does digital history reach the same or different audiences than “traditional” history

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

Vika Zafrin, Brown University

September 22, 2006

Interview segments:

The definition of “digital history” or “digital humanities”

Ways that digital tools allow activity that traditional methodologies do not

Her initial encounters with digital scholarship in the humanities

Teaching and student involvement with digital scholarship

The atmosphere surrounding or reception of digital scholarship in the academy

Audiences for or community involvement with digital scholarship

The potential for “humanities in the digital age”

University of Leicester - Designing in Second Life

This was posted originally here. Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester, talks in this video about Second Life and using it to teach ancient history.

A Polis of Pixels: Social Networking for Classics Instructors

I am a member of the ‘eclassics social network’, which was recently written up in the case studies section of the Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centre for History, Classics & Archaeology. The response to this social network in classics circles,  as documented by Andrew Reinhard, is quite interesting… read the case study.

“The eClassics website was created to build a bridge between Classics teachers and technology, and between technologically enabled teachers and those instructors who describe themselves as technophobic. By creating a virtual, comfortable, even fun meeting space to candidly discuss the topic of integrating technology into the Classics classroom, we can begin to break down barriers between the perception of technology as “scary” and its genuine usefulness to language learning. Recently developed technological applications, specifically software in the Web 2.0 toolkit (wikis, blogs, social networking, and the like), can blend traditional book learning with a more kinetic, active approach to exploring how language works. This new pedagogy of active learning better suits modern students. eClassics serves as the nexus connecting teachers to technology and, ultimately, to those students….”

Towards a Theory of Good-History-through-Good-Gaming for Historians and Educators

What do you get when you bring together educators, historians, and new media specialists to discuss what constitutes best practice for history simulations & gaming?

Well, everything from turtles, termites and traffic jams to life, the universe, and everything! Kevin Kee (of Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities) and I have recently put that conversation up on the ‘Simulating History‘ project website for your consideration. Enjoy!

<snippet below>

Games that have been designed by academics, with little grounding in theories of good gaming, are typically of the boring drill-and-response type. As academics, we run the risk of ruining what makes a good game, if we do not consult with professional game designers. At the same time, gamers are good at figuring out what makes a game ‘fun’, but will not make games that are paedagogically sound if we do not engage with each other. “The answer is not to privilege one arena over the other but to find the synergy between pedagogy and engagement” (Van Eck 2006:18). Commercial game designers do not set out to be historians. But interestingly, many students trained in history or the humanities have ended up becoming game designers (Don Daglow, Keynote address Future Play 2006 conference)

We can detect therefore some areas of overlap between ‘good history’ and ‘good gaming’ in our survey of literature we believe to be the foundation for developing a theory of good-history-through-gaming. Recently, we brought together historians, educators, and gamers to try to find Van Eck’s ‘synergies’, and to discuss the literature that each considered to be seminal for their own work in games and history. We wanted to join together our previously separate lines of inquiry, to understand one another’s disciplinary perspectives for research into simulations and games, and to explore the intersections between these perspectives. The resulting (free-wheeling and free-associating) conversation took place over two days. Here, we have collated the different contributions to gather our thoughts under (more-or-less) coherent headings, but have left the editing to a minimum to allow individual voices to retain their idiosyncrasies and individual approaches to teaching, gaming, and the past….<more>

Wikis in plain english

 Sometimes, a glorious failure has as much to teach as a resounding success…

I’ve tried now, in two classes (one at an online university, the other at an online high school), to use wikis and collaborative writing as part of my formative assessment. The online university was asynchronous, the highschool was synchronous. Both did not work out very well, but for very different reasons.

I think it was James Paul Gee who coined the phrase ‘digital natives’, ie, our students are immersed in digital media, they understand it intuitively, and we, as ‘digital immigrants’, will never wade through the sea of 1s and 0s as successfully as they do. At the online high school, this did not prove to be the case. My students were certainly familiar with digital technology, but their familiarity was profoundly superficial (if I can say that). While they had often used wikis (most often as a source of information for History class), they had never actually considered what was involved in making them, or the implications of how that information was collated/created into the wiki article they so freely copied. I had to take them by the hand (voip-style) and talk them through the entire process several times before they started to catch on… but by that time, the needs of the curriculum were such that I had to abandon the project.

At the online university, my course was organised by topic, over the duration of the session. The student on their own time, whenever they felt like logging in, could digest whatever topic they chose. At the end of each topic was a wiki, with several possible article suggestions. The idea was that instead of writing a 3000 word term paper, they’d write - and edit others’ - short articles (which in total would equal more or less the same amount of work). In the process, they’d be communicating with each other via an online forum or by voip, and as a class they’d create what would be essentially a text-book. It’s now the end of the session, and I finally got the first wiki articles posted, all in a rush. No time for editing, no time for collaboration, just a series of v.small essays, with no external links or images.

Clearly, I hadn’t explained the concept well. Just as clearly, I can’t rely on my students to be motivated enough to get the articles done early enough so that the collaboration process can start. I dug a little, and found that the main problem, as far as my students were concerned, was the fear of letting others see their written work. Procrastination was of course another issue, which was compounded by my error in letting the students ‘choose their own adventure’ through my materials. And finally, like my high school students, they were not familiar with how/why wikis work (which I found astonishing - but why should I? I spend every day online and so encounter wikis all the time, but my students apparently do have lives…

The next time I run that course I think what I shall do is abandon the wiki format in favour of journals (that only the student and myself may view). The topics and questions and the amount of writing will all be the same. I will also set firm deadlines and chart a linear progression through the course. And I think I shall make the students watch the wee video below: