Educator Studio Manual
The focus of the educator studio is on tasks of the educator and new technologies to support, train, and develop learning media and facilities. This room represents the back-end services that are of relevance for creators and providers of distance learning in new media scenarios. It highlights the conditions, tools, methods and processes for realising mediated learning arrangements by teachers, content developers and tutors.
The educator studio supports following scenarios:
#ES1 Content Engineering for Education
New ways of creating, presenting and retrieving information in the web also influence the way we learn. These new ways of learning also demand for new ways of producing learning media. In the educator studio shows state of the art examples and innovative approaches towards collaborative content engineering for the web2.0 age.
When interacting with the demonstrators of the educator studio, you can experience different ways of creating learning content. You can explore different tools and collaborative setups, work in different roles and thus gather experience about these evolving technologies.
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#ES2 Experience Multi User Gaming
An interesting development in educational technology is the use of games for learning purposes. This concept has existed for a while now and is often referred to as serious gaming. Latest technologies, however, have opened a massive amount of new opportunities in this field. For once, obviously there have been massive improvements in the performance of hardware that make sophisticated graphic environments feasible and fluent to use. Another aspect is the ability of using distributed services, to enable collaborative learning scenarios.
The educational objective is to use this technology to generate immersive content presentation, make use of collaborative functions and to use a mix of physical interfaces and virtual reality in order to contextualize learning content more flexibly for game based learning enironments.
Test the engaging effects as well as new forms of content delivery. Just start the four machines in the heart of the room and get immersed.
Demonstrators:- Genres selected are Ego Shooter (Unreal Tournament), Realtime Strategy (Starcraft), MMORPG Game Scenario (WOW)
- Communicate over our TeamSpeak server (using headsets) to extend multiplayer voice communication beyond the room.
- Project the screen contents of all four test computers on a central screen to allow an outside perspective.
- Record the activies by using screen motion captures for later evaluation.
- You can also use Second Life in this room to collaboratively create Web3D content or experience existing content.
ES#3 Negotiation Game: Multi-user canon building
Because of the lack of historical awareness amoungst newer generations of citizens, the ministery of Education decided to appoint a special working force to find a solution. In the Netherlands recently agreement has been reached by this working force on a historical ‘canon’ of 50 most prominent events being typical for our inheritage (see http://entoen.nu/). This canon will be used for all primary education schools. There are similar initiative for a science canon, maritime canon, catholic church canon, and others.
What is typical for building such a canon, making it a powerful scenario, is that it entails generation and selection of possible solutions, including consensus building and collaboration, because there is no single clear solution to the problem, media literacy, and other relevant competences.
Demonstrator: Limburg Canon
This brings us to the scenario of building a Limburgian canon, using the EMERGO toolkit. The scenario consists of following steps to be executed within about an hour.
- 1. (5 min) After a short instruction about the step-wise procedure, 4 participants (learners) are given the assignment to collect or make minimally two pictures of ‘something typically limburgian’.
- 2a. (15 min, short-term option) Gathering information by googling and or searching local databases (within the lab), and / or using Google maps
- 2b. (30 min, longer-term option) Gathering information by using mobile devices (outside the lab), could be combined with scanning previously tagged objects in the environment, and /or using Google maps
- 3. Pictures (source + description fields) and their argumentation (another field) have to be uploaded into the ‘groepsbronnentool’ of EMERGO. Possible formats are video, audio, RTF, stills, URL, ... Every participant can see others’ contributions.
- 4a. (automatic vote, rating) Now it’s time (can be dynamically adjusted) to select the most popular top3 items by awarding 3, 2 and 1 points to three pictures contributed by the other three participants. Each individual makes his/her vote. This way a picture can maximally earn 9 points.
- 4b. (moderated vote) Using a moderated group chat (beyond EMERGO) participants can try to convince others to choose their contributions. The moderator (another role!) will make the final votes, using the same points mechanism.
- 5. Because contributions are dynamic (can extend or change over time), all participants are allowed to have more voting rounds, t.i. submit their 6 points again.
- 6. In a seperate a special top3 room, we will dynamically publish the ‘Limburgian canon’.
