Interview of Henry Jenkins on Games-Based Learning and Importance of Collaboration, Learning Ecology, and Media Literacy

Henry Jenkins will be moving from MIT to USC Annenburg School of Communication and the Cinematic Arts School. He'll be teaching courses such as "Transmedia Storytelling" and "New Media Literacies".

"...there is a learning ecology now, one that takes place outside of the classroom in the after school world...and right now, schools are cutting themselves out of the learning ecology by blocking games, by blocking YouTube, by putting filters on the computers. They block off ways the students are technologically connected, from the best ways of learning..and they leave those students who are trapped behind the participation gap from having access to the experiences that prepare the technically literate for the future."

"..Good teachers are fighting a valiant battle just to be able to access the materials of YouTube .. the other day we discovered that students could not access online resources about Moby Dick, the great American novel, because it had the word "Dick" in it."

My high school blocks websites about games. TeacherTube is blocked, too!

In the above video, a school that integrates the use of games within the curriculum is mentioned. The school is Quest to Learn, scheduled to open for the 2009-2010 school year. It is known as "New York's school for today's digital kids".

"Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century."




Institute of Play (A partner of the Quest to Learn school)
Quest to Learn Press Links
A Win-Win Scenario: "Game School" Aims to Engage and Educate
Eliza Strickland, Wired 8/6/07

Rich White's "Mobile Immersive Learning Lab" Project; EduSim Update

Rich White is an educational technologist for Greenbush County, Kansas, has been working with the 3D interactive virtual world, EduSim, for quite a while. He's taking EduSim to the next level.

"The concept is one of an enclosed virtual learning space - with surrounded projection of the virtual learning world the students are exploring - similar to the StarLab Concept (with a rectangular configuration). along the lines of a CAVE - however simpler, mobile, and relatively in-expensive by comparison."

The project is at the beginning prototype stage.

Below is a demo of the virtual world as it is projected on two screens that are placed next to each other at a right angle, with the center of the virtual-world view positioned where the two screens meet:

This might be a great way of reaching students who have autism!

More about EduSim:

EduSim, for those of you haven't seen my previous posts on the topic, is a multi-user 3D interactive environment used in classrooms with interactive whiteboards:

Information from Rich White's Greenbush blog about Edusim:

Wikipedia entry:
"Edusim is a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment based concept of lesson driven 3D virtual worlds on the classroom interactive whiteboard or classroom interactive surface. The Edusim concept is demonstrated by the Edusim free and open source multi-user 3D Open Cobalt virtual world platform and authoring tool kit modified for the classroom interactive whiteboard or surface. The Edusim application is a modified edition of the open source Open Cobalt Project and relies heavily on the affordances of direct manipulation of 3D virtual learning models and Constructionist Learning Principles."

History of Edusim:
"The Edusim project began in September 2007 at the Greenbush Education Service Center in Southeast Kansas as an effort to bring an engaging 3D experience to the classroom interactive whiteboard. Pilot groups were established with 6th and 7th grade middle school students throughout Southeast Kansas to observe how students would be engaged through the software, and how the user interface would need to be augmented to account for the affordances of the whiteboard, and the usability of the students."

Here is a virtual world in Edusim in COBALT, showing how a drag and drop function is used for in-world VNC application sharing:

The Cobalt 3D metaverse browser has been modified for multi-touch interaction by some of the members of RENCI, a collaborative venture of Duke University and several other North Carolina universities. The video below is Dr. Xunlei Wu, demonstrating how gesture and touch is used to manipulate items and navigate through two Cobalt virtual worlds:

Some of the members of RENCI built a multi-touch table in addition to the collaborative multi-touch wall. For more information:

RENCI: Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall and Table using TouchLib: More about UNC-C's Viz Lab

(Cross posted on the TechPsych blog.)

Microsoft's Photosynth: Immersive Learning Possibilties

I just came across an interesting article in the on-line MIT Technology Review, written by Jeffery MacIntyre, about Photosynth, developed by Microsoft's Live Labs:

Microsoft's Shiny New Toy: Photosynth is an application that's still a work in progress. It is dazzling, but what is it for?

I think that the PhotoSynth application would be very useful in education settings - K-12 and also at the university level. More classrooms now have interactive whiteboards that connect to the Web, providing a broader range of possibilities for educators to create engaging, immersive learning experience for their students. Young people would have the opportunity to experience virtual field trips and collaborate with students around the world. An application such as PhotoSynth, coupled with an information/data visualization component, would be quite useful in high school and university classrooms.

From the TechReview Article:


"You are here: Photosynth, an application in development at Microsoft’s Live Labs, offers an immersive way to view photos of a given thing or place. The software has not yet been released, but Microsoft is demonstrating it online with photo collections such as this one of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square." Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft Live Labs

Below are links from the TechReview article:

"Watch Photosynth stitch photos together." "View images from Photosynth and see how it works."

From Microsoft's Website: "Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space." "With Photosynth you can: walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle; seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size; see where pictures were taken in relation to one another; find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing; explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or send a collection to a friend."

If any readers have thoughts about the use of PhotoSynth in educational settings or situations, please leave a comment!

Microsoft's PhotoSynth website

Johnny Lee's Wii Hacks: Can the Wii be configured to provide immersive learning experiences?

Thousands of people have been following Johnny Lee's progress as he hacks Nintendo's Wii system. Johnny Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie-Mellon, and he has come up with the most amazing, creative uses for the various components of the Wi.

Take a look at Johnny's recent video of his work creating desk-top VR using a large-screen display:

"Head Tracking for Desktop Virtual Reality"


Although the Wii is a game system, the possibilities for the Wii as a platform for immersive educational experiences in the classroom - as well as in the family room - are endless, provided that a few people in educational technology are willing to contribute to this effort at the same level demonstrated by Johnny!

Since more classrooms are getting large-screen displays in the form of interactive whiteboards, there might just be a chance for teachers to use a few more tools to invigorate and engage their "digital native" students!

I think that learning activities utilizing the power of the Wii and Johnny's present (and future) hacks might also be very effective in reaching the needs of students who have disabilities. Visual and kinesthetic learners would also benefit, as well as kids and teens who are considered to have hyperactivity.

Johnny provides the code and instruction for all of his hacks on his website at http://johnnylee.net

You can subscribe to project updates at http://procrastineering.com

Johnny Lee's work is creative interactive multimedia technology at its best!