Category: Ideas

I am looking for a Research Assistant (RA) to assist me with a project. If you know anyone that you think fits the profile of the person I am looking for and may be interested in a short-term position as described below, would you be kind enough to encourage them to send me an email at veletsianos \AT\ gmail.com? The only limitation to this is that the person needs to be based in the UK and have a national insurance number (but not necessarily be based in Manchester)

The project

To investigate the feasibility of adventure learning projects as vehicles for peace, intercultural understanding, and conflict resolution by conducting research on (a) adventure learning, and (b) technology for peace.

Adventure Learning is an approach for the design and delivery of online and hybrid learning that provides individuals with opportunities to explore real-world issues through authentic learning experiences and collaborative learning environments. Adventure Learning was developed by Dr. Doering and refined by Drs. Doering, Veletsianos, and Miller at the University of Minnesota. An example of Adventure Learning can be seen at http://www.polarhusky.com

Expected project outcomes

Two co-authored manuscripts to be submitted for peer-review and publication.

Desired Research Assistant qualities

Ideally, I am looking for someone who:

• Can work collaboratively and independently
• Has good writing skills and enjoys writing
• Is creative
• Has experience with academic writing
• Has conducted academic research in the past
• Enjoys academic research
• Is comfortable with using online databases for research purposes

Compensation

In monetary terms: £2,058 GBP (paid as £14/hour x 7hrs/week x 21 weeks)
In value terms: The two publications which will open future doors : )

Lots of my work has to do with “pedagogical agents.” These are virtual characters employed in electronic learning environments for instructional purposes. But what lies behind the lingo? These are images of beings (humans or inanimate objects) that appear in learning modules or tutorials and “do something”. Some of them can hold a conversation with a learner (conversational pedagogical agents) while others present information, decorate the learning environment, or represent some sort of a persona. The second type of agents I call passive or non-conversational pedagogical agents. This is the type that gets employed the most in pedagogical agent research and this is the type of agent that I am going to bash in this post! :)

Pedagogical agents represent one of those technologies that have been presented as greatly beneficial to teaching and learning. Yet, the difference hasn’t been made explicit. Conversational agents, for reasons that I won’t explore here may be beneficial. Passive pedagogical agents however will not have any lasting impact on learning or any lasting impression on students. This is because:

* Pedagogical agents who merely present information to students are boring. Boring is bad. Let me say that again because educational technology researchers/designers might not have got it the first time around: Boring is bad.

* Pedagogical agents who don’t allow from deviation from the given task are “oppressive”. To be clear, “oppression” here is compatible to (or derived from) Freire’s description of classroom oppression and democracy.

While I do believe (and have empirical evidence) that the pedagogical agent’s representation influences how people interact with them, passivity isn’t the way forward.

Apologies for the negative post – but to move forward we need to talk about these things too :)

Those of you that know me, have heard of my work during the past 3 weeks to design my course at the University of Manchester. Well, I’m glad to say that it’s ready! This is a face-to-face course with distance learning students (DL) signed up for it as well. The DL students will participate online via a variety of tools and methods. This course has it all. We are using WordPress to guide our weekly meetings, Blackboard (or Webct Vista for those of you who are in the US) to hold various discussions, audio and video podcasts for updates and inforation,  and screen-capture videos for software demonstration. The students (regardless of whether they are studying face-to-face or at a distace) will be engaged in semester-long collaborative assignments surrounding the design, development, and evaluation of electronic learning environments. This is going to be fun!

The course is located at: http://edes0809.wordpress.com/

Feel free to follow along if you wish!

This day is dedicated to dissertation writing, but I couldn’t pas up on this piece via my RSS feed:

Trying to Design a Truly Entertaining Game Can Defeat Even a Certified Genius
Yep, designing with your users in mind, with an open perspective towards the user/learner experience, and with the understanding that what is not fun it will probably be boring (! great insight, i know!), will (probably) yield some good results. Virtual worlds, and video games, also suffer from the same things that traditional ID suffers from – ignoring the learner experience for “effectiveness” and “efficiency.”  Talking about  the  problems of ID, there’s an interesting discussion over at ITFORUM today where people are at grips with regards to a list of the “Best IT programs” –  I’ve always said that there’s no such thing as “best” and i’d love to contribute to the discussion, but I won’t… I need to write :)