Tag Archives: learning

Google’s Ingress and Location-Based Learning

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Augmented Reality flashmobThis month Google’s Niantic Labs quietly released a location-based game called Ingress that plays with data on multiple levels. The game, currently in invite-only beta, invites players to join either the Enlightenment or the Resistance and move through the physical world hunting “Exotic Matter”, and coincidentally generating data and pictures for Google on the way. These XM hotspots often center on places of actual historical or cultural significance, encouraging players to venture out into these locations.

Ingress opens with the warning: “Saving the world is dangerous. If you do not want to assume this risk, now is the chance to close this app and go back to your normal life.”

The next generation of augmented reality might look like something out of a science fiction movie, complete with head-mounted displays or constant data overlays transforming what we know at any given time. But even the current generation heralds interesting possibilities for location-based learning beyond the classroom.

Tools already exist to build simple experiences in line with the model behind Ingress, including ARIS, a mobile game creation tool out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ARIS allows for the construction of mission and exploration-based games with themes ranging from botany to history. [edited to fix truncated sentence--@JBJ]

Have you explored Ingress or another location-based game? What do you think about the possibilities of using these technologies for learning?

Sabbatical Diary: The Light Goes On

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ItworksIn one of my classes recently, we started getting some hands-on experience with PHP programming. I was happy enough about my first (very simple) script actually working that I tweeted about it. After class, I got to thinking about whether I could extend what we’d learned that evening and write a different (though very basic) script. When I had some time a few days later, I did a little searching for some information I needed, then gave it a try.

To my surprise and delight, it worked. That fact left me grinning the rest of the evening.

It also left me pondering how I might help my students have that same kind of “aha!” experience. I’d like my students—at least occasionally!—to have the satisfaction of learning something new and interesting, and really knowing that they’ve learned it. I’m in an enviable position at the moment: I’m in the class in question specifically because I want to learn what’s being taught in it. My students don’t always have the luxury of being in my particular class because they’ve chosen it (sometimes they have, but often they’re there because the course fulfills a general education requirement, or is required for the major, or fits their schedule, or . . . ).

Even in such a situation, though, I think it’s possible to help students have the kind of experience that I did. One way may be to give students a greater voice in determining what we learn in a course. Students are already involved in choosing the topics we study in my 100-level general education course, but I’ll be looking for ways to incorporate more student input even in courses where I have to be more directive about the syllabus.

Do you have other ideas to share? If so, please add them in the comments.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by pdinnen]

Sabbatical Diary: Thinking about Grades

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ReportcardThis semester, I’m in an enviable position. I get to take courses I’m really enjoying, simply because I want to learn what’s being taught in them. There’s no need for me to be overly concerned with grades. How well I do or don’t do has no direct bearing on my future. I’m not applying to a doctoral program. I’m not applying to medical school. There’s no one I need to impress with a “perfect” transcript.

That leaves me free to approach grades the way, ideally, I think they ought to be approached. I’m enrolled in particular courses because I want to learn particular things. To accomplish that, I need to attend class, do the work, and ask questions as appropriate—not because I’m looking to earn a particular grade, but because I want to learn. As the semester progresses, I’ll surely have a sense of how well things are going. What grades do is help me to see whether my own self-assessment is correct. They’re indicators, from someone who knows the field far better than I do, of how I’m doing in my efforts to learn the material, and of where I might need to focus more of my attention.

That’s it. They’re not, as Alan Jacobs has pointed out, a reflection on my efforts, my person, or anything else other than my current mastery of the material.

Of course, I didn’t think this way as an undergraduate. I doubt most undergraduates do; most of the ones I’ve met don’t, at least not most of the time. Yet I suspect students would be better able to relax and more freely engage the intellectual life if they did think this way about grades. But the fact is, they frequently have to take courses they’d really rather not, and often their grades do have an impact on their post-graduation future.

Given that, what can we do to help our students at least begin to think about grades in this way? If you have some ideas, or there are strategies that have worked for you, please share them in the comments.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by amboo213]