Every once in awhile a technology comes along that has the potential to cause a profound change in an existing system. Kodu might be that disruptive when it sees widespread use. Video games have become one of the most powerful entertainment systems around, and the intellectual capital invested in solving problems via these games is incredible. What if children started putting all of that intellectual capital to use by creating their own games, instead of passively playing them? They would make the leap from being consumers, to being producers.
Kodu is a new system created by Microsoft Research that can teach programming and logic skills to kids as young as 8 (3rd grade) with a simple visual interface. XBox 360 controllers are used for input, enabling kids to edit and create their own games (it also works on a PC). Words cannot describe the actual user experience, you have to watch this video to fully understand the implications. The quality of this video is pretty bad, but the reaction from the audience is telling.
Blue Sphere is sponsoring a Kodu project at Explorer Elementary in Kentwood, Michigan. I am volunteering to help with implementing the technology with students and teachers.
There is still a bit of secrecy surrounding Kodu, which is similar to the Sony’s Little Big Planet. Apparently there are only two schools in the US who are getting a first taste of this technology.
Eyes are opening to the world of open systems, the movement started by open source software, that has the potential to revolutionize leisure, education, government, and a myriad of other not for profit projects. Wikipedia, Mozilla, YouTube, and other open systems have shown that group efforts, organized around open systems, are extremely effective at generating organic effort and innovation.
Research has consistently shown that educational results improve when students percieve that their work will make a difference. An engaged learner is more likely when results matter.
So how do we make results matter in learning situations? Meritocracy in it’s purest form is the answer. By connecting open groups to performance measurement feedback in real time. Cognitive efforts become aligned with intellectual captital, expressed in the form of scoring via project results.
The content used for learning systems can become one of the many creations of the contributors. Advanced students become the producers and maintainers of open content repositories. The circle is complete with rewards, content, parameters, contributers, leaders, and innovation.
Electronic open systems (likely expressed as social networks) allow for the all participants to see and understand the contributions of all other participants. Copying work from another is no longer possible, as original content and contributions are recognized in real time by leaders. Trying to cheat your way to the top of an open system? Not likely, the other contributors will make sure you are exposed.
Organizing learning objectives and course content around open social network systems will be challenging, to say the least. But the rewards could literally change the face of learning:
- Problems solved online and graded instantly by the system
- Fingerprint recognition touch screens prevent cheating during testing
- Engaged participants working hard to outdo their peers
- Testing and assessment results shared with peers instantly
- Peers commenting on success and failure
- Feedback on questions and answers to other learners and teachers
- Third party interaction as appropriate (parents, other faculty, friends, etc)
The intrinsic motivation that results from collaborative social networks to compete and contribute for the good of the group is viral. When groups are competitive, and individuals within those groups are rewarded by the group for contributions, super human results are often obtained (think ant colonies).
Not all of these activities will take place online, but the results of each activity need to be tracked by the leader and recorded in the system, in order to make them available to students, who use them to measure the net worth of each others efforts.
This is the appeal we need to genearate within collaborative learning systems. Project and task based group activites focused on common purpose, with feedback loops that encourage participation via competition. In addition to test scores, measurement of achievement needs to reflect the collaborators contribution to the group, and that feedback needs to be available in real time.
The user interface to enable this revolution is taking root in smart phones. Touch screen, texting, iPhone/Android, and netbook devices are greeted eagerly by excited students given the opportunity to interact directly with sophisticated systems. We are about to embark on a new phase in learning, as online collaboration goes mainstream.
All that time we spend watching tv, movies, surfing the web, tracking sports and playing games can be classified as passive cognitive activity. Passive activity (also known as consumption) is not inherintly evil, but the opportunity that technology offers to produce and share, instead of consume, could change the dynamics of work and learning.
Clay Shirky has made it clear that the cognitive surplus out there is huge:
How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.
There are millions of American’s out there spending billions of man hours on tasks that are passive, instead of active and creative. Are they just waiting for someone to invent a cause that could motivate them to start producing, instead of watching or playing?
We can harness the surplus of cognitive activity in our educational systems by re-architecting the core rules of engagement. We need to enable open, social networking systems as the platform for new educational systems. Purpose driven learning projects will take root if we plant the seeds. Thought leaders and teachers will become subject matter experts leading teams of doers, who just so happen to be learning.
Open social systems encourage collaboration and group participation organically. These systems, defined by collaborative applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, will foster exponential improvements in learning. Group exposure to results, delivered to the group in higher quality and quantity (compared to existing systems), will add to the experience via competition and natural cognitive engagement.
Steve Goulet co-founded Blue Sphere, a software consulting firm in West Michigan focused on collaboration, business intelligence, and custom software development. More...
