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Big on Big Data

September 5, 2014 — Michael D. Hilborn

Of major interest in Educational Technology is Big Data, which is a rather all-encompassing term for the vast mountains of information that our computers are collecting and how we humans might take advantage of it. The 2014 NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education highlighted this interest, noting that the “Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment” and “Learning Analytics”, both of which revolve around the anlysis of Big Data, are technological trends that may have profound impact on education as we know it. A primary goal of several MOOCs, including edX, HarvardX, and MITx, is to research the data they collect from thousands of world-wide participants. And here, at Harvard, a main objective of the new Teaching and Learning Technologies program is to research all the data our new Learning Management System and associated tools will provide. Finally, our own little group, the Academic Techngology Development team, is starting to research how we can best analyze the data our tools collect.

Who r u?The main drive behind this interest in Big Data–at least, in Educational Technology–is the belief that through analyzing all of this information, we can create a better teaching and learning experience for instructors and students. The idea goes something like this: Alice, a student at Wonderland University, takes a course on existentialism from the Caterpillar. As Alice completes her assessments, the results are stored online, and through careful analysis of these results, the Caterpillar is able to deduce which concepts Alice is having difficulty understanding, and in which conecpts she is excelling. The Caterpillar can then tailor Alice’s future work to her needs, thus creating a better learning experience for her.

That’s the simplified version of the tale; many other permutations exist. For example, the Caterpillar may recognize that another student, Tweedledee, excels in one area that his brother, Tweedledum, does not, and decides to pair the two up so that Tweedledee can help his sibling. Or, perhaps, the Caterpillar discovers that his students grasp the concepts of mushrooms better when he discusses the concepts of fungi first, and adjusts his future syllabi accordingly.

Regardless of the scenarios, the promises of Big Data rely on the firm belief that something meaningful exists somewhere in all of that information, and that if we extract that meaningful something, then we can do something meaningful with it. Sound a bit ethereal? It’s not, as commercial companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Google have uncannily demonstrated with their search and recommendation enginees. And in regards to applying Big Data to education, there’s a large field of research going on, not to mention a growing field of application and practice.

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Gamifying Work

June 27, 2014 — Michael D. Hilborn
HabitRPG

My character, currently attired as a pirate, standing next to his pet, a flying pig.

I’ve always wondered how one might go about gamifying the workplace, and quite by accident, I discovered a way how. Although not specifically designed for work, HabitRPG is a “free habit building app that treats your life like a game,” and I and a colleague have started using it to gamify part of our work-life.

If you are like me, there’s plenty of things to do at work, so many things that it’s very easy to lose track of what one needs to do, so I take advantage of to-do lists. Every day, I create a to-do list of work that needs to be completed that day, even if it’s a simple thing, such as getting onto my Instant Messenger account or checking my calendar (seriously, as sad as it seems, if I didn’t remind myself to do these things, I wouldn’t do them). And if an item doesn’t get done, it gets pushed to the next day.

HabitRPG transforms to-do lists, as well as your overall habits, into a simple fantasy role-playing game (RPG). Like most of the RPGs in the fantasy genre, you undertake a persona called a “character” who starts out as a lowly adventurer. By completing quests, you gain experience, gold, and other treasures that help your character slowly build him/herself into a hero.

Quests in HabitRPG take on the form of individual habits (such as “isolating oneself for 1hr to get something done”) or individual items on to-do lists. When you complete a habit or an item on a to-do list, you are rewarded with experience, gold, and, if you’re lucky, you might find a piece of treasure you can use later in the game. The more you complete your tasks, the more powerful your character becomes.

And, as in any RPG, your character is in constant peril. Uncompleted tasks deal out damage, and if your character receives too much damage, your character will die. Never fear, your character will be resurrected, but there will be penalties, such as a loss of experience and treasure. This mechanic forces you to stay on top of your to-do lists, for if you let them go, you’ll pay the price.

I’ve started using HabitRPG for all of my to-do lists, including the one I use at work. I won’t claim an increase in productivity or anything like that, but the game does make keeping track of my worklife much more enjoyable than it used to be (and I get rewarded if I do something I normally procrastinate on, such as writing a blog post). Also, there are ways to team up with other players, such as your co-workers, which might make the workplace an even more congenial place, but we haven’t tried those aspects of the game yet.

The rules and mechanics to HabitRPG go much deeper than I have described–tasks can have different difficulty levels, you can collect and feed pets, you cast spells. . . just to name a few of the complexities of the game. But, overall, HabitRPG operates on a simple premise: For every task in life you complete, you and your character become hardier and stronger.

 

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Online Learning About Learning Online

August 30, 2013 — Michael D. Hilborn

As I continue to tentatively wade back into development waters, I’ve started taking advantage of the many online learning opportunities that are out there. The reasoning is two-fold: (1) The obvious reason is that I want to learn (or, as the case may be, re-learn) some new languages and frameworks, and (2) as someone who works as an educational technologist, I ought to be current on these online opportunities, anyways.

In particular, I’ve been refreshing myself on JavaScript, teaching myself Python, becoming more familiar with Joomla!, and I’m also interested in getting some game development underway with HTML5. For my refresher on JavaScript and my dive into Python, I’ve been using Codeacademy; for Joomla, I’ve been taking advantage of lynda.com; and for game development in HTML5, I attempted participating in a Udacity MOOC. I’ve summarized my (ongoing) experiences below:

Codeacademy

This is a fantastic (and free!) resource for both beginner and advanced programmers, though advanced programmers may find the hand-holding approach a tad slow. Clearly aimed at introducing the newbie into the world of programming, each course re-introduces the fundamentals (syntax, variable assignment, conditionals and control flow, functions, objects, etc.). Each course is divided into sections, and each section into a series of lessons. Lessons build upon themselves, as do sections, and most importantly, several sections are reserved for implementing a simple application based on the concepts learned (I especially enjoyed “Pyglatin:” implementing a pig latin generator in Python).

The interface consists of panel on the left that introduces a particular concept, and then instructs the user to write some code based on the concept. Therein lies the genius of Codeacademy–unlike a book, you are not only forced to read about a subject, you are forced to actually sit down and implement it before moving on. And so far, I’ve discovered their console works amazingly well at detecting errors, giving hints if things don’t go well, and just generally getting things right.

In essence, Codeacademy was designed to teach code and coding practices–nothing else. It does so with simplicity–no fancy videos or multimedia, just well-written text and a console–which is what coding should be all about. Currently it offers courses in JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, PHP, Ruby, and APIs. It also offers Codeacademy labs where you can experiment with some of the new languages that you have learned.

Lynda.com

The amount of subject matter on lynda.com is staggering. From project management to 3D modeling, lynda.com offers courses on just about any popular technical concept out there. I typed in “Joomla” and received no less than 13 tutorials (granted, only three pertained to the most recent version of the system). I’m about a quarter way through “Joomla! 3 Essentials” and thus far, my experience has been a positive one.

The course on Joomla! 3 takes what I consider to be the “traditional” approach to online learning: Divide a course into a series of sections, divide each section into a series of lessons, with each lesson consisting of a video and downloadable content to perform the described exercises. Like Codeacademy, lynda.com understands that for most users, learning is the equivalent of doing. This particular course hand-holds the user through downloading and installing Joomla on one’s laptop, then stepping through a series of exercises based on downloadable material. The course sometimes encourages “homework” in between its lessons–that is, if you don’t complete the exercises after a lesson has finished, the next lesson will be tougher, if not impossible, to follow.

The videos for this particular course are professional and well-paced, though, again, for advanced users, the hand-holding might be a tad slow. Nevertheless, with just a quarter of the course behind me, I feel confident enough to go into any Joomla! environment and be able to decipher the basic structure of the site.

Perhaps the only downside to lynda.com is that it’s not free. Although you can get buy with paying $25/month, you really need to download the exercise files to fully experience a course, which ups the price to about $40/month. I’m fortunate that my institution offers lynda.com as a perk; if your institution doesn’t, I strongly encourage you to encourage them to invest in it.

Udacity

I won’t dwell too much on my first experience with MOOCs; suffice to say, I wasn’t impressed. I eagerly signed up for “HTML5 Game Development” when it started being offered, but gave up after the first lesson or two.

Like most MOOCs that I have seen, the course was divided up into a series of lessons, each lesson a series of videos, with each video followed by a “quiz” that could be automatically graded. This is where everything fell apart. The quizzes expected code to be inputted (in this case, Ajax code), and this code would then be “graded” as either correct or incorrect. The problem is that the Udacity grading engine (or whatever they were using behind the scenes) wasn’t able to grasp the concept that with coding, “there is more than one way to do it”.  Although a user could enter code that gave the correct result, the engine seemed to require that the code follow an exact syntax. And in following the discussion forums of each quiz (and some of the apologetic emails I received from instructors), it was clear I wasn’t the only one having difficulties. As I said, I gave up after a bit. Perhaps I’ll return some day.

Maybe I chose the wrong course, or maybe I was wrong in choosing Udacity; regardless, the experience seemed less professional and less reliable than either Codeacadmy or lynda.com. Maybe it’s because MOOCs are in their infancy. . . or perhaps it’s because they’re being run by academics rather than solid business professionals. Regardless, if the experience I had is any indication of how MOOCs are, in general, being run, I don’t see them as viable competitors to other online learning platforms.

 

 

Posted in Development, Javascript, MOOCs, Online Learning, Python. Tags: , , , , , , . Comments Off on Online Learning About Learning Online »

Flashcard Gamification

January 23, 2013 — JaZahn

With our Flashcard application, I am trying to make gamification a focal point. I want the games to be modular so anyone can create new games and I want games that are multiplayer. Friendly competition within the class would be ideal.

Competition among a scoring system is too antisocial. The score scroll at the end of a game of donkey kong doesn’t make for a lot of interest in this day and age.

I have a couple of ideas.

A “card” game. Each student is dealt the same 5 cards from a “deck”. They see only one side of the 5 cards. The reverse of one of those cards is displayed and the first student to select the correct card gets a point. That card is then replaced with a new one. Having them both have the same cards takes any chance out of the game. It is time based, which means it is reliant on students being on at the same time.

So a variation of the previous could be one student plays and waits for the other student to play and they don’t lose a point unless they get it wrong. Players could be matched based on how much they’ve studied.

But is that fun? I think after a while, most people would just get bored of it.

Word games on phones are quite popular, but they’re all just variations of word scrambles, word finds, or crosswords. These are simple and not very applicable to a flashcard framework.

I stopped writing this and don’t have the motivation to continue, so I’m just going to post what I have.

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Making Money With MOOCs

January 11, 2013 — Michael D. Hilborn

The New York Times continues to explore MOOCs, this time with an article about how MOOCs, particularly those run by companies like Coursera and Udacity, have yet to become a lucrative business. Although millions of students have enrolled in classes and although millions of dollars have been invested in MOOCs, a stable and profitable business model for offering free, online courses has yet to be established. The current, most promising model involves licensing course content or entire courses to other Universities so that they can fulfill their online desires. Additional ideas abound, including charging small fees for certificates of completion, for more advanced courses or follow-up courses,  or for one-on-one instruction. And, of course, there’s always the possibility of  incorporating advertising.

To me, it’s interesting that these online companies are insistent that their courses remain free, and that they believe the bulk of their revenue stream will come from licensing models as opposed to charging for courses outright. I admire their desire to have free content online, but that seems at odds with traditional education, which requires steep tuition fees. It’s also at odds with extended schooling; all night schools that I have known charge for admission. So I don’t see the harm in Coursera or Udacity taking the approach of offering some courses for free, but then asking $0.99 for other courses. With hundreds of thousands of students per course, that’s a lot of money trickling in. And with some online courses costing Universities over $50,000 to create, that money needs to come from somewhere.

 

 

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More MOOCs in the News

November 20, 2012 — Michael D. Hilborn

Massive Open Online Classrooms (MOOCs) made headlines in the New York Times again. Harvard University’s own venture into MOOC-space, edX, is mentioned, along with the usual suspects, Coursesara and Udacity.

A couple highlights from the article:

  • The challenges inherit in widening a traditional classroom to a global audience are breathing new life into the art of teaching and learning. Professors are finding that they need to reshape and rethink their instructional approach when teaching tens of thousands of virtual students.
  • These challenges will be overcome with the help of the students themselves. For example, the crowd-sourcing of moderating discussion forums and of grading via peer-to-peer evaluation is becoming critical to running a MOOC.
  • Peer-to-peer evaluation of assignments, such as essays, is permitting the MOOC to go beyond computer science and engineering, which were suited to automated, computer grading. Humanities courses are starting to jump aboard.
  • There is, of course, still much to learn, especially about how well students learn in a MOOC. MOOC-space is young, wild, and untamed.
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Gamification in Software Development

November 10, 2012 — JaZahn


Gamification has been on my mind a lot lately.

I was just doing some of my sprint planning and found myself filling out borderline excessive github issues for my project. I put all of the issues for the current sprint into aptly named milestones. So as I finish the issues in the milestone, the milestone progress bar gets filled up. I recently realized I enjoy doing this because it’s very game-like.

I’ve turned work into a game and I think it has increased productivity and general happiness with employment. Maybe that sounds lame, but it seems true in my case, I would recommend it for most people who are finding their current work stale and are looking for some self motivation.

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Badgered about badges: Will higher ed be shook up by alternative credentials?

November 7, 2012 — Michael D. Hilborn

Harvard badgesOne of the big buzzwords circulating through the halls of academia has been “gamification,” the concept of introducing game-like elements into the higher ed environment. The NMC Horizon Report of both 2011 and 2012 indicated that game-based learning is a growing trend in the classroom, and just within the past month, articles in the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education highlight an element of gamification that may very well disrupt the entire paradigm of attending a school to earn a degree. This new element is the digital “badge,” a possible foundation for what might be called the “alternative credentialing” movement.

This movement is serious business.  The Mozilla Foundation has established the Open Badges project, which, with support from the MacArthur Foundation, is defining the Open Badge Infrastructure, a technology suite that can be used to build an ecosystem of badges.  The Digital Media and Learning Competition, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, awarded several grants to institutions such as Disney-Pixar and NASA to explore the concept of badges in life-long learning. Prominent Universities, including Duke, Purdue, and Carnegie-Mellon, are also experimenting with badges. And badges will probably play a significant role in the credentialing process of the now ubiquitous MOOCs.

The question remains, of course, as to whether badges will ever be considered as valuable as a regular degree. The jury is out on that one, and probably will continue to deliberate on this issue for years, if not decades, to come. But should the time come when a collection of badges on your resume is equivalent to a degree from a major University, prepare to witness a revolution in higher education.

Posted in Gamification, Trends. Tags: , , , , . 3 Comments »
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