Getting Back to the Real World, Ultimately

Often when reflecting on pedagogical practice that incorporates the use of technology  it seems like I am on the subway getting hustled in a game of Three Card Monty. There is so much going that it is difficult to follow what is really important. The cards move back and forth and the brain just can't quite make sense of what has happened. It is refreshing to know that there are educational researchers that are sorting through the tools being created to seek their impact on student learning. Ultimately it is about the impact on the student’s ability to build capacity for further learning.

Assessment of student capacity is difficult. “We cannot directly inspect what students know or do not know. Like Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries, assessment involves indirect reasoning from evidence – developing a model of cognition reflecting the knowledge a learner is to master, collecting observations of statements and behaviors match the expert model.”   (Clarke-Midura, Dede 2010) Indeed, educators can only make a general prediction about the skills that students will need for their futures. More than ever educators should focus on the development of student capacity and not measure content knowledge. On this, most educators agree.

I am interested in the “five designing principals for ‘designing a learning environment for a classroom’: integration, awareness, empowerment, flexibility, and minimalism” ( Cuedet, Bonnard, Dillenburg 2013) in terms of how they work together to provide an effective learning environment. It is not any one aspect of the design that is paramount but rather how they are synchronized into a real life learning experience. Augmented reality(AR) delivered via a tangible user interface(TUI) is only as effective if the learner experience is sensible. The AR experience cannot be isolated from the overall experience. “Take a large number of simple actions and add them up, and the overall result can be complex and confusing: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” (Norman, 2011, p64) The role of the educator must be to provide a learning experience that allows the student to focus on the core learning and not be distracted by the learning environment. They should not fall prey to the distraction card.

An effective learning environment is when the student is focused on the learning and is able to reflect on that learning. “Games make learning easier and faster, as they provide real-life feedback and help players succeed in the different game activities.”(Berns, Gonzalez, Camacho 2013) The role of purposeful designed instruction is to provide experiences that scaffold the difficulty and scope of the learning so that students can grow to gain greater capacity for understanding and interacting with the real world. We must be cautious to always keep this as the ultimate goal and not use the most entertaining tool because it is entertaining. The creation of fun and easy to use games in education is only a tool and should not be one of the distraction cards of the hustler.

The teacher must make sure that the student is growing in their capacity to understand how the game is being played,, difficult as that is. Science games and simulations may motivate informational learning in similar ways, if they allow the user to modify the game or situation, similar to modifying one’s robot.” (National Academy of Sciences) Experts are created when a deeper understanding of how a system functions is obtained. Giving students the ability to modify the game is like showing them how to execute three card monty. Once they are empowered with understanding the rules of interactions they have the capacity to think critically, create, communicate, and collaborate on new systems capable of representing models of the real world which are effective in accomplishing prediction and correlation with complex problems that need to be solved. These problems include disease, environmental management, and cognitive science. These are the realities, not augmented, that our students must understand and have the capacity to impact positively.