Leveling up
students with blogs
Motivating Active Learning Through Game Mechanics
kevin lim / cyberculturalist / 26th feb 2009
/ /

Why I’m interested...

“Passionate Teacher / Sleeping Students”
at Yale Law School entrance frieze
http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html

“Passionate Students / Indifferent Teacher”
at Yale Law School entrance frieze
http://www.henrytrotter.com/scholarship/yale-law-school-sculpture.html

PUSH
How to naturalize
learning objectives.

An unofficial Facebook Guide Book

Students everywhere using Facebook
Here’s a Russian clone, VKontakte.ru

PULL
Discover the hook of
social web platforms.

Dynamics of Teaching

Teachable Moments Cartoon by Matthew Henry Hall (Jan 2007)
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/teachable_moments/cartoon24

Printed “essays” and
“response papers” used in
many classrooms
traditionally promoted a
closed dialogue bet ween the
student and teacher.

In contrast, class blogging
allowed for a multi-logue
among the student, his or her
peers, the instructor, and the
potential public.

Does blogging
promote learning?

You call it copying; today's college students call it collaborating. (WSJ, May 2007)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010061
Duffy and Bruns (2006) have explained how blogs can
be seen to promote active and engaged learning, since
they afford \"digital literacy\" towards collaborative and
(co)creative purposes, as well as for the critical
assessment and evaluation of information

image source: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/092506/2012.gif
While the ease of participation could come at the
cost of quality and reliability, Boulos, Maramba and
Wheeler (2006) suggest that the “Dar winian type
's urvival of the fittest' content” would help ensure
competition for the production of quality content.

Befitting of Ray
Oldenburg's notion of
\"Third Places\" (1991),
blogs also situate
students in a broad
communication
environment that
reaches far beyond
the sociological
confines of their
classroom and homes.

Our Story
When Derek Lackaff and
I taught our Internet
communication courses
back in Spring 2007, we
tried to see if blogging
could support a truly
active and collaborative
learning experience.

Pedagogical Aspects of Blogs
Students create a discussion
sphere that is more controllable
and less threatening than the
classroom.
As students blog, they create an
archive of thoughts and
discussion
Allows theoretical connections
bet ween course topics to
manifest as hyperlinks.

Problem of Motivation
Typically weekly posting or
commenting requirement.
Affords minimal learning
and interaction outcomes.
Student need to internalize
intellectual interaction.

Motivating Blog Participation
Blogging situates students'
work in their own public
spaces
Intrinsic sense of ownership
and recognition of their
personal production
Likely produce higher
quality work if they are
motivated to engage with
their lessons and colleagues
in a more social fashion.

All in one
classroom
management
solutions
might not be
enough.

What makes social platforms so engaging?

Visible Scoreboard
To motivate student blogging communities, we tried
using Amy Jo Kim's game mechanics (2006)

Using Game Mechanics
Five Game Mechanics
1. Collecting
2. Earning Points
3. Feedback
Amy Jo Kim
4. Exchanges
Creative Director
ShuffleBrain
5. Customization

Using Game Mechanics
“I see a game mechanics
working well on sites like
YouTube, Yelp, Twitter, and
Flickster. [...] like points,
Amy Jo Kim leaderboards, level-ups,
Creative Director
ShuffleBrain
social exchanges, and
customization to a strong
core experience.”

1. Earning Points
Amy Jo Kim’s idea was in the
presence of a scoring mechanism.
Established a blogging leaderboard
via technorati.com authority
ranking algorithm.
Provide our students a basic
measure of how they were doing
against one another.
Students also given weekly audits
of the class overall performance.

2. Collecting Things
For quality blog posts, students earned weekly awards.
Variety of awards promotes diverse behaviors (e.g. Early Birdie)
Awards can be traded for extra credits or the ability to gain
“immunity” from extra assignments.

3. Feedback
Comments and trackback
allow students to understand
the quality of the blog and
wiki contribution.
Students are given the
opportunity to improve on
posts if they have not reached
the assignment deadline.
Accessibility of feedback
allows students to accelerate
mastery in each week’s theme.

4. Customization
Students instinctively
personalized their blogs by
the first week of use.
Low level: Blog templates
High level: Sidebar widgets
Social Objects
personal photos
favorite music
branding
chat box

5. Exchanges
To track the layers of interaction, we visually aggregated
RSS feeds of their blogs and wikis using web ser vices such
as Net vibes.com

What are students
actually doing?

http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-conversation-prism.html

Why is
blogging,
t weeting,
youtubing,
facebooking,
blah-blah-ing,
FUN?

co
ty mm
i Emotion
al un
n
so ic a
er te
p
Individual Others
se lf te
ca
-a w ni
a re mu
Feedback
ne s m
co
s

Capturing Spontaneity
• The Third Place: Being a shared
space not owned by neither
faculty nor students may mean
equal standing in power.
• This motivates the user by
choice (self-interest), rather
than coercion.
• Informality: Informal channels
allow for more spontaneous
interaction.
Image Source: http://mchabib.com/2006/10/05/digital-library-as-third-place/
• Distinguishing motivation for
using Facebook vs. Blackboard

Potential Challenges

!
The Digital Divide in terms of video media literacy (Stavchansky, 2006)

Dealing with Complexity
Digital Divide
- Parallel Backchannels
- Participatory Literacy
- Polarized Performance
Open to Subversion
- Private vs. Public discourse
- Opposing learning objectives
- Community self-moderation
http://maxpictures.com/weblog/2007/04/11/product-placement/
Swings both ways...

Fun matters
Enjoy or Adapt.

Thank you
Reach me via twitter at @brainopera