Last month I had the opportunity to attend and present at the EARCOS Teachers Conference in Kota Kinabalu. It was the first non-tech focused conference I’ve been to in a while, and it brought up a topic that previously hadn’t been much on my radar: libraries. I’ve always been a fan of libraries: my mother is a librarian, and I love their mission of freely giving away knowledge and education to any who wish it.

However, like many people I associated libraries with physical books, or perhaps a place to get on the internet if you don’t have a computer. In a 1:1 school environment like UNIS Hanoi, neither of those roles seemed particularly critical for middle and high school students. Yes, they still need to read books, but the idea of checking out 5-7 books on a subject to do a research paper are just ramblings of old-people, as far as most students today are concerned. It’s the equivalent of when my mother would tell me how she had to type her papers on the type-writer a week before it was due so she could edit and re-type it. Quaint.

from Doug Johnson’s wiki

At EARCOS, however, I heard presentations from both Doug Johnson, influential librarian and tech director of Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district in Minnesota, and Ron Starker, the MS Librarian at Singapore American School. Mr. Johnson introduced to me the notion of a 3rd space. If our 1st space is home, and 2nd space is work/school, most people find it beneficial to have a 3rd space where we can think, collaborate, create, read, explore, play, etc. The classic example is the Cheers Bar, but it varies for different people and can be a coffee shop, living room, restaurant, gym, park, workshop, etc. Mr. Johnson argued that libraries can and should fill this need for students.

When I went to the Singapore American School presentation, I saw an example of this in action. Mr. Starker had designed the library with inspiration from Howard Gardiner’s theory of multiple intelligences. They had a quiet side (introspective intelligence), collaborative side (social intelligence), a ‘Top 10 Den’ for reading (literary intelligence), a room of plants and natural light with their science books (naturalistic intelligence), a music studio (musical intelligence), a recording studio (visual intelligence), a maker space (technical intelligence), and more.

Between the two, I felt deeply inspired. I tried to synthesize my own ideas on the subject, and created a presentation with in collaboration with our MSHS librarian, Debby Wells-Clinton. In it, we argued that not only the role of libraries should change, but even the term ‘library’. The root of the word library is from the Latin librarium, which means a “chest of books”. Debby and I feel strongly that this is no longer the central organizing principle of these spaces, and that terms like ‘Learning Commons’, ‘Learning Hub’, or ‘iCommons’ are more accurate.

Debby and I gave our presentation to the Hanoi Ed Tech group, a monthly meeting of teachers and techies. In the discussion that followed, we talked about the ways in which a Learning Hub is different from a traditional classroom. Probably the most important difference is that in both libraries and learning hubs students have a high degree of autonomy to pursue their learning. Whether it is through an informal study group, a quiet corner to read, or tinkering with robotics, students set their own agenda and schedule.

Similar to recent trends in blended learning, gamification, and problem based learning, the notion of a Learning Hub focuses on creating a student-centered learning environment (rather than one that is class or teacher centered). Yet what if we were to take it a step further. Instead of the Learning Hub being a space where students can relax and learn on their own outside of the classroom, what if the entire school was a Learning Hub?

This sort of thinking about education is progressive, but it isn’t knew. From Dewey to Montessori to Papert, educators have been trying to articulate what this sort of learning environment could look like for over a hundred years. The question is whether technology will be able to bring together the best of both worlds: high quality content that is crafted and scaffolded for students who are mentored by teachers; learning that is given meaning in a variety of project and problem based contexts.

Although the Flipped Classroom model is only one aspect of Blended Learning, it is a particularly important one because it is one of the more accessible models for most teachers. In fact, it is also one of the most conservative models of Blended Learning.

As most people know at this point, Flipped Classroom instruction is based on taking a classroom model of classroom lectures and problems for homework, and then flipping it so that the lectures are delivered by video at home and the homework is done in class with teacher supervision. Keith Hughes is a flipped classroom history teacher and has posted a good video for those getting started with it:

The problem with this, as Kim pointed out in this week’s COETAIL blog post, is that the method is still focused on lectures to deliver content. When I teach, even if I am doing a ‘lecture’ I still try my best to ask questions of the students and make the process as Socrative and interactive as possible. How does this fit in with a Flipped Classroom model?

There are a few tools that have come out to help teachers with this. The two that I like best so far are Curriculet and Edpuzzle.  I learned about Curriculet from Jill Bromenschenkel at the EARCOS Teachers conference in Kota Kinabalu. At first I thought it was somewhat interesting, but then I saw this post by Beth Crawford on how she used it to get her kids more engaged with poetry. Curriculet lets a teacher take a text, whether a book, poem, or newspaper article, and add a layer of interactivity to it. The layer can be text annotations, videos, or questions for the students to fill in.

The value of structuring a lesson like this comes from several aspects. As many flipped classroom teachers have noted, it ensures that students actually read their homework because they have to answer one or more questions about it. It also helps teachers model techniques of textual interrogation and critical thinking. Beth used it to embed videos that were needed by some students for background material but less useful to others. By structuring this in a flipped classroom context rather than doing it in class, students were able to receive varying levels of scaffolding and support.

The other tool that I has similar functionality is EdPuzzle. What Curriculet does for text, EdPuzzle does for videos. Teachers can take a video from YouTube or Vimeo, then add a layer of text or voice annotation, or a question to the video itself. Previously, these features were available only through somewhat expensive software like Camtasia; now they are free. You can see Jill’s example of this on EdPuzzle if you enter her class example code: aMwoxB.

Even so, the real power of the flipped classroom model does not come from a one-size fits all lecture, even if that lecture is made more interactive with tools like EdPuzzle. More sophisticated tools like Khan Academy, with help from the Gates Foundation, are working to create adaptive learning environment where learning algorithms are used to create playlists for students that are unique to them.

This principle is expanded in pedagogical approaches like Teach to One, which (as far as I understand it) create individualized playlists for students each day that consist of skills development, independent and group projects, discussions, and other activities that reinforce their learning. If a student does not understand a concept with a particular modality, that concept is retaught the next day with a different modality. Approaches like this are not really possible to implement in a single classroom, but take more of a schoolwide approach.

Similar to this is the Quest to Learn charter school in New York, which takes Blended Learning on a Gamification bent. In this case, the school uses a mixture of blended and classroom learning to help students ‘level-up’ in different areas. They do 2-week intensive ‘boss-levels’ to demonstrate their learning, much like traditional schools do with final exams (but a bit more fun and creative).

Recently my boss shared a video with me by Diane Tavenner from the Summit School system in California. In it she talks about the importance of rapid prototyping in developing school change along these lines. I don’t know if and when big international schools like UNIS Hanoi will follow this sort of example, but I think that the writing is on the wall when it comes to changes in traditional schools.

In his book Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen argued that the tipping point for blended learning would be in 2017, and that after that we would see mainstream adoption of blended and online learning models on a rapidly increasing basis. When I get excited about my job, it’s not because of someone flipping their class with a computer and a webcam. It’s because I think the whole teacher-centered pedagogic approach may very well crumble within the next few years.

One of my good friends (also COETAIL instructor and 2015 Vietnam Tech Conf keynote presenter) Rob Appino is focusing his PhD in education on the subject of game-based learning and gamification. He was the first to point out to me the differences between game-based learning and gamification. This distinction appears again in Elizabeth Corcoran’s article, The Gamification of Education. Corcoran also talks about student created games as an additional, and highly important, aspect of games and education.

Game Based Learning

This refers to the use of games to teach educational skills and knowledge. Although, as blogger Scott McLeod points out, many educational games have woefully poor gaming mechanics and graphics, the realm of game based learning is larger than ‘drill to kill’ flashcard games. It also includes games like Civilization, SimCity and other fairly sophisticated strategy games. Even if these sorts of games often fail to teach history directly, they familiarize students with many historical elements that then can be developed.  I once had a student who knew who the Chinese female pirate (and badass) Ching Shih was because he had played her in a strategy game.

Although most game-based learning has a fairly static set of game-play rules, this is not always the case. When I was teaching economics seven years ago, I used the classic game Monopoly to teach macro-economic principles. Specifically, I as we studied various elements of the world of finances, I had my students design corresponding gaming elements for Monopoly.

Gamification

Although the specific formulation of this is relatively new, gamification has been around a long time. It is used by kids to teach each other how to run, used by elementary teachers when they reward good behavior with gold stars, and is used by high school teachers when we do Jeopardy style quiz nights.

The difference is that now gamification is more intentionally based on ideas from the video game world.  Experience points, levels, badges, and scoreboards all began in offline games, were adopted and popularized by video games, and are now entering back into the world of education.

In addition to using these sorts of game mechanics, building a compelling narrative is also critical in gamification. In Monopoly you are imagining yourself to be a capitalist tycoon.  In a role playing video game like World of Warcraft you create an actual character that has history, depth, strengths and weaknesses. In gamified education settings, teachers are adding both narrative and gaming mechanics to build student engagement.

One of the first examples of a gamified lesson that I encountered was last year at ASB Unplugged. I met Eric Nelson and learned about a game he had built to teach about infectious disease that was modeled on zombie movies. When I got back from the conference, I worked with Kelsey Giroux, a humanities teacher at UNIS, on gamifying her unit on the industrial revolution (which happened to be her Course 5 project for COETAIL).

She had already added gaming mechanics to the lessons, but after we talked she went back and added narrative elements as well. She set the story in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have been forced to abandon the Earth and are establishing a colony on Mars. As we develop the beginnings of a new industrial age, the leaders of the colony are hiring historians to research the first industrial revolution and report back on the causes, issues, and consequences of it.

According to the University of Minnesota Hype Cycle predictions, gamification is slowly rising up the “Slope of enlightenment”, although mainstream adoption is still 5+ years away. I think that it can be an incredible tool in the hands of a good game-maker, but building games like these is a skill that most teachers were never taught.

DIY: Student Created Games

Scratch (http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Category:Images) Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

These are also games, but come more from the DIY and maker-space movements than from that of gaming.  The most notable example of this is Scratch, but one could argue that building robots with Legos, Arduinos, and other tools also counts as a type of gaming.  As others have noted, these games, for the most part, attract students who are already interested and motivated. However, in looking at the rise of movements like Hour of Code I wonder if these sorts of games will become more main-stream in the near future.

As should be clear by now, I believe game-based learning, gamification, and student-created games have all been around for longer than typically understood and will continue to be around for the foreseeable future. The bottom line is that we all learn better when we are interested in a subject, when we care about it. In order to find ways to build engagement, it makes sense to study phenomena that many kids find utterly engrossing, like video games. Not every teacher who seeks to incorporate this will be successful – just as there are plenty of unsuccessful video games. However, once the hype has settled we’ll see which games are left and how they can make a difference for kids.