Leading view papers – Days 1 to 7

Using digital media to develop learner engagement

 

 

‘Kids like games because they are the most intellectually engaging tool they have. We need to tap into the motivation and passion that they have for games!’
M. Prensky, March 2006

Digital media can act as a catalyst for the greater engagement of young people in learning. Digital media has the capacity to engage young learners because it is an integral part of young people’s culture. The cultural identification with digital media by students has informed many aspects of our teaching and learning strategies at the Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS).

This discussion of student engagement provides information about the implementation of whole school strategies to exploit the potential of digital media to revitalise schooling and enhance the engagement of students. Differences in opinion about the value of digital media in transforming learning and instruction have parallels with a broader debate which has continued for over 40 years concerning the degree to which schools should recognise, and include in curriculum planning, the social background and cultural practices of students.

A significant part of my work at the ASMS is evaluating the degree to which students collaborate on tasks and represent their learning to others using digital media. The connections may be by mobile phone, messaging systems, podcasts, online forums, surveys, public presentations or by video conferences. The theory of Connectivism (G. Siemens, 2006) compels educators to understand how young people network and use each other as resources.

The ASMS places a great emphasis on collaboration in learning programs. Students regularly work in groups of three to research topics or find solutions and then present their work to the class group or showcase their work at expo days. Teachers at the ASMS are aware of the power of authentic audiences in contributing to powerful learning.

The forum facility in the Learner Management System (LMS) is one environment where students are able to share ideas, not only with ASMS students as their audience but with others who are invited into discussions. One example of an extended audience was the nanotechnology fertile question forum, which was conducted in semester one 2006. One-hundred and fifty students and seven teachers were involved. Importantly, a Flinders University lecturer and seven students from Flinders University who were enrolled in nanotechnology courses agreed to act as online mentors. Interaction was not limited by face to face contact or by differences in the time of day that the students worked on the task. Forums in the LMS can, like the course content, be accessed at any time (while the forum is open) from any location.

Considerable time and effort went into building student awareness of how to participate in a forum through the LMS. My expectation was that students would highly value participation and that the forum posts would provide evidence of the power of collaboration in building understanding. I expected that the forum task would be valued by students, as the literature suggests that teenagers are regular participants in online communities. I envisioned that forum participation would mirror student use of MSN or forums. In a class discussion on forums, three students indicated that they moderated game-related forums.

At the conclusion of the forum, I conducted a survey of student opinions about participation in the forum. While many students commented on the growth of understanding that emerged through the forum, some students used words such as ‘clunky’ or ‘difficult’ in reference to the moderation process I had put in place to ensure that students used appropriate language and were respectful of other people’s opinions. The latter comments indicate the challenge that schools have in using online technology. The free-ranging users of MSN or Google or chat get frustrated if school-based technologies do not match their out-of-school-based experiences.

Digital media also enables students to present their work to different audiences. The processes used to make the connection with audiences require significant thinking about how the student may assist an audience to understand the topic being presented, without reference to complex scientific language. Such challenges have been apparent in student videoconferences. The school has an expensive, sophisticated videoconference facility, which has been used by students to present their work to students in Adelaide, to a conference in New Zealand, as well as to a US-based mega-conference. 

Those formal sessions required a lot of effort to set up. However, a recent incident, which began with me noticing two students talking in raised voices into a laptop screen, is indicative of the powerful tools that students have at their disposal. I approached the two students in a learning common late last year and one of them very earnestly asked if I would like to look at what they were doing. They were in the middle of a video chat session with an ASMS student who had left Australia 24 hours previously to attend a science fair in Japan. The students were using Skype to communicate in real time over the internet. The clear audio and video images made the interaction very effective. This case illustrates how digital technology is making global communication available to students through their laptop computers, without the involvement of teachers. This is yet another example of students personally adopting technologies which, not so long ago, were only available through institutions.

In describing how digital media is used at the ASMS, I am aware of two layers of the curriculum. One is the intended curriculum, in which teachers devise a curriculum to achieve desired outcomes, by providing learning resources, appropriate learning strategies and assessment practices. The other important component of the curriculum is the incidental curriculum; the curriculum that emerges through student action. The incidental curriculum is of particular significance to the topic of digital media and student engagement with learning because students are continually exposed to new technologies through their online experiences and are finding new uses for technologies. Schools must work hard at keeping pace with the technology demands of young people.

Cognitive flexibility is a theory that recognises non-linear, random access, immersive learning and the role of the learner in devising strategies through which meaning is created. Cognitive flexibility represents a challenge to behaviourist theories of learning (for example, Skinner 1968), which have provided the basis of traditional approaches to learning and instruction. Behaviourist theories emphasise direct instruction, teacher-centered processes and individual learning, whereas cognitive flexibility is learner centered, process-oriented and values collaborative learning. Cognitive flexibility is an illuminating theoretical approach to the types of learning that is embodied in the use of digital media at the ASMS because of the emphasis on students taking increasing responsibility for their learning and collaborating with others in both the online environment and in the learning commons of the school.

Two important thinkers on the uses of digital media and engagement through immersive learning strategies are Marc Prensky and Jim Gee. Marc Prensky has asserted that:

‘Kids like games because they are the most intellectually engaging tool they have. We need to tap into the motivation and passion that they have for games!’

He believes that educators have a lot to learn from computer games about engagement and children.

‘Games produce learning with engagement. Once they’ve experienced this, kids want to learn with engagement all the time. In everything we design in education, engagement is more important than content – not that content isn’t important but engagement has to come first. Typically, educators have a content and methodology focus and not an engagement focus. Game designers have an engagement focus.’

Prensky believes students develop important skills via ‘gaming’.

‘Through games, kids are learning to cooperate, collaborate and work in teams, quickly learn new skills and information, deal with massive amounts of data, think laterally and strategically.’

Gee picked up on the theme of immersion and videogames in a recent conference presentation, ‘Are Video Games Good for Learning?’ (Curriculum Corporation, 13th National Conference, Adelaide 2006) and compared the language use of gamers and expert scientists (JP Gee, 2006). One observation he made was that expert scientists project themselves into a problem. For example, the scientist becomes the atom or molecule and is able to discuss his or her relationship with other molecules at a personal level. Gee found that gamers use similar language patterns. Gamers develop a personal relationship with the game and the other participants in the virtual environment.

Jim Gee also posed a question about why there is a global community of online gamers who pay a subscription of $US15 a month to engage in a difficult, strategy-based game entitled World of Warcraft. Gee considers that game players want to participate because of the great understanding the game designers have of learning strategies. Another interesting comment he made focused on the prominence of the concept of failure that was built into the games. For example, game designers have players ‘fail early and fail often’. In games, that’s how players learn the rules of the game and build strategies for future success.

There is a clear contrast between the styles of learning in games and styles of learning evident in traditional schools. Videogamers seem to be compulsive learners, while schools often use compulsion to ensure that students endure the experience.

The features of online games Gee spoke about at the conference were presented to provoke thinking about the dissonance between the ideas used in schools to build experiences for learning. His comments are a source of reflection on the cause of student disengagement with the experience of schooling. While I consider that students in my classes are reasonably engaged with the tasks undertaken in school, I do not expect them to pay a monthly subscription fee or stay on task for four hours at a time and regularly experience failure over the semester. It seems that it is worthwhile to try to understand the basis of player engagement with video or online games, if we are going to better understand how to engage with the young people in our care.

Gee and Prensky argue that video games teach valuable skills and that the learning embodied in gaming experiences is quite different from traditional approaches to learning and instruction in schools. Digital media can be used to create rich visual representations of ideas. While there are strong arguments that young people learn skills through interaction with digital media in the form of video games, the question then arises about the actual application of digital media skills by young people. If most of the interaction in digital media is in the form of first person shooters, why should educators embrace the ideas of advocates such as Jim Gee? Young people do not watch new media; they experience it, immersing themselves in the media experience. The creation of the immersive experience is clearly the intention of the game makers and so the challenge for schools is to develop digital media that are both engaging and educational.

At the ASMS, significant progress has been made using digital media in the form of an internet-based Learner Management System (LMS). Students can access curriculum materials online at school and from home. The wireless connection enables students to access material throughout the school and in the school’s cafeteria. While the LMS, at the present time, tends to be used to support traditional text-based curriculum delivery to teaching groups of 25 students, there has been progress towards curriculum delivery to smaller groups. Digital media brought together in the form of a Learning Management System can make online curriculum materials available to students, parents and teachers, and clearly present curriculum frameworks, as well as provide continuous feedback to students and parents about student progress. Learning Management Systems are a way of breaking away from curriculum delivery according to divisions based on year or class groups.

Learning Management Systems can be used in a way that promotes student involvement in curriculum construction and assists young people in being more engaged with learning.  This is because digital media enables students to work in ways that are more attuned to their personal skills and experiences of digital culture.

The ASMS has had a Learning Management System in place since term two 2004. One of the reasons we developed a Learning Management System was to promote personalised student learning pathways through curriculum. The LMS can be used to design curriculum that takes into account of prior learning, diversity in learning styles, areas of interest and to allow access to learning materials for students who miss lessons. As a further development in the functioning of the LMS, I introduced the ideas of Tapscott at a teaching and learning meeting in term one of 2006. I want to use Tapscott’s ideas to address the challenge of transforming the functionality of Learner Management Systems from a teacher constructed, content-driven, text-based repository to a system that meets the demands of constructivist learners (Tapscott 1998).

At the ASMS, our approach to LMS is based not just on ensuring that there is stability of the network. We also seek to evaluate the LMS in terms of the pedagogical practice. I am seeking to understand the degree to which LMS reflects the growth of knowledge in the school community over time. The growth of knowledge depends on building the capacity of students to express their personality through contributions to the LMS.  Monitoring how the LMS develops over a semester has provided data about the degree of co-construction of the curriculum.  Contributions by students to the LMS, in the form of learning objects or by participation in forums, are indicators of the co-construction of the curriculum. So it is worth knowing what proportion of the added components of the LMS were created by teachers and by students.

The main types of student contributions to LMS at the moment is through the creation of  learning objects, the posting of links and the interactions based on surveys and forums. The ideal situation is that student interest drives curriculum development. A specific area of interest is the recognition of a diversity of learning styles. The LMS can deliver curriculum materials in a number of modes, apart from written text. While written text has dominated the earlier curriculum versions in LMS, there are indicators of success in 2006 in encouraging students to contribute to the curriculum.
Students have also contributed to the LMS by creating learning objects in the form of Quicktime movies or animations. In the philosophy topic in ‘Toward Nanotechnology’, students were asked to demonstrate their understanding of modernity. They were given the choice of writing paragraph responses or were able to use another format to express their ideas. To initiate discussion of how ideas about modernity could be represented I proposed that ideas of modernity (individualism, instrumentalism, relativism and voluntarism) could be represented as like-charged particles in a Petri dish. We discussed as a class how the model could be drawn and came up with a two dimensional model. The class discussion then threw up the image of a crucible instead of Petri dish because one group thought that it was important to speed up the process.

A few days later, a student quietly asked me whether it was acceptable to make a Flash animation. He and another student produced a three-minute animation about the grounds for thinking about who should be allowed to get into a life-raft from a sinking boat. I projected the animation to the class and we had a lively discussion about the accuracy of the animation as a representation of modernity. The animation was subsequently posted on the LMS and other groups of students engaged in some friendly rivalry over who could produce the most interesting animation.

Another example of curriculum innovation with digital media to foster engagement is encouraging the use of visual material to cater for different learning styles. In the Central Study, The Body in Question, students were able to access examples of web animations on body functions by using the Google search engine, and by typing .swf. The animations were used to inspire students to design, produce and evaluate their own animations. Those three processes involved a lot of planning, perseverance and reflection, challenging many students to translate ideas into accurate visual representations.

While the Central Study curriculum plan included the web animation activity, I want to relate an episode I had with a student in my tutor group as an illustration of the expectations some students have of the modes of curriculum delivery at the ASMS. Bobby Brown (not his real name) was a student in my tutor group who had been diagnosed as dyslexic. He had been coached successfully and was an articulate, enthusiastic learner. He stated in tutor group, ‘I can learn things quickly if information is presented in a way which I can understand it’.  A few weeks later, he came across some cartoons drawn by another student who had been sitting at the back of a learning common, doodling during a lesson on antibodies and disease. Peter put the cartoons in front of me and said: ‘That’s what I mean … I had no idea what the teacher was talking about until I saw these drawings. Now it all makes sense’. Peter’s experiences are a pertinent example of the need for schools to consider ways of engaging students who prefer to work in a visual medium.

Visual literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and produce visual messages. Work on visual images as a language has centered on the development of educational programs to train students to evaluate and create visual messages, as well as improve their reading, writing and thinking skills. Fluency in a subject can be demonstrated when a student expresses understanding in a variety of ways. Visualisation tools, such as Inspiration, for mindmapping, and Reasonable! (used to formulate and evaluate arguments) can help students from graphic representations to text, and from text to graphics.

Visual literacy, the understanding of media and the use of media by students to make representations of the students’ experiences, are vital to a participatory model within Central Studies. Specific to the ASMS is a requirement that any media production at the school has a strong scientific basis. The content of productions must relate to the Central Studies and be scientifically rigorous. For example, students need to demonstrate their use of experimental methods by including ideas on the hypothesis, method, procedure, constants, variables and data collection. The fact that students are recording scientific processes using visual images, such as animations, or through the production of a digital movie, involves students in intertextual thinking.

In the Central Study, Biotechnology, students were set the task of making a video documentary on a bioprocessing experiment. Students chose the process, commonly fermentation, and were faced with the challenge of communicating the experimental method. I helped students develop a plan of the types of shots, the general structure of the documentary and steps to record usable vision and audio signals properly. When filming was completed, students had to edit the film, add voiceovers and then graphics, such as subtitles, to produce their message. The documentaries were shared with classes of 25 students and feedback from teachers was obtained. The product was then formally assessed using a rubric. The completed documentaries were formatted for web-streaming and some productions have become exemplars in the LMS.

The documentary production is an example of the use of digital media in the intended curriculum but the next example of media use by students is included as an illustration of the incidental or student-generated use of media by students at the ASMS.

A student who had displayed minimal engagement with the Central Studies curriculum approached me and said that her documentary was completed and that she wanted to take the production out of the studio. I enquired whether she wanted to burn a DVD or load the product to a flash drive. Unsure about what format, and what quality, she wanted, we sat down together at an iMac computer and I ran through the file format options. It was then the student spotted the Bluetooth function. Quite excitedly, she asked if the documentary could be loaded onto her mobile phone. Within two minutes, the student had the product and was off to share the documentary with her friends.

This particular exchange is very significant. Mobile phones are the most personal and private devices that students carry with them to school. While teachers might be aware that mobiles can capture images and that the quickest way to contact a student is to ring them on their mobile, the school expectation at the ASMS is that the phones are switched off in class. For most teachers, mobile phones are an interruption. For students, however, mobile phones symbolise a person’s technology credentials and the quality of their social network. The fact that this student, who generally displays little motivation in school, wanted the bioprocessing documentary on her mobile phone, signified that this type of assignment was good enough to impress her network of friends.

Working with students on digital media tasks has involved me in connecting the students’ skills and interests in innovative technologies with learning tasks. At other times, I have been able to mentor students to help them get to the next level of skill in things like webpage construction. It is apparent that students work with boundless energy using technology to communicate ideas. Students who put the results of their learning on show at science fairs, school expo days or videoconferences demonstrate a considerable degree of pride in their work. While the standard learning object or LMS experience is a long way from matching the immersive game environments that Prensky and Gee have described, the ASMS, through its use of digital media in interdisciplinary science and mathematics curriculum, has made considerable progress in engaging students in new ways of learning.

Find out more on this topic

James Paul Gee http://blogs.guardian.co.uk
Prensky, M (2005). Don't bother me, Mom - I'm learning: how computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success and how you can help. Paragon.
Siemens, G (2005). Connectivism: learning as network-creation. www.elearnspace.org
Tapscott, D (1998). Growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. New York. McGraw-Hill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Thom Burns is Coordinator, Information Communication Technologies and Interdisciplinary Science, at the Australian Science and Mathematics School, at Flinders University, in Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia.

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