Through the ePortals playful activity, instructors will design assignments that harness social media and Web 2.0 programs to generate multimodal ePortfolio content.
Even if faculty agree that ePortfolios help facilitate student learning, many still struggle to design creative activities that create digital media artifacts that support student demonstrations of learning garnered from their coursework and related experiences. Drawing on the model of the Khandu card game, this presentation incorporates a playful activity, ePortals, that we developed to guide instructors through designing assignments that harness social media and Web 2.0 programs to address course objectives and generate multimodal ePortfolio content.
Many contemporary learning theories, like Fink's (2003) Taxonomy of Significant Learning, begin to emphasize the importance of meta-learning and self-awareness. The first three categories of Fink's Taxonomy resemble Bloom's (et. al. 1956) Cognitive Taxonomy: Foundational Knowledge, Application, and Integration (Fink, 2003). The next two expand learning to include a "Human Dimension" that facilitates learning about oneself and others as well as a "Caring," which facilitates "developing new feelings, interests, and values" (p. 30). The final category is the most metacognitive with a focus on "Learning How to Learn" (p. 30). Kalantzis and Cope (2008) also characterize students' "new" learning as a process of "social cognition and collaborative learning" that is fueled by "distributed knowledge, with more people as active knowledge makers" (p. 189). All of these theories are just as relevant to faculty learning new pedagogical strategies.
In short, all of these theories call for and support "active learning;" of which playful pedagogies is one way of enacting. Games provide an immersive educational experience, inviting players to explore, test, and play with their characters and environment. They promote good learning principles that enhance any educational experience (Gee, 2011). Play theorist Roger Caillois (1961) proposed that play exists along a continuum from structured play (ludus) to free play (paidia). This workshop will employ what Judd Ruggill and Ken McAllister (2011) describe as "insistent design" (pp. 40-45), scaffolding the learning process regarding designing creative and effective digital assignments via a playful activity. As Ian Bogost (2007) argues, the structure of these tasks--their inherent procedurality--is one of the primary rhetorical means through which games express meaning. A playful activity such as ePortals thus employs insistent design not only to generate player engagement, but to convince players to take the product of the activity seriously.
Kurt Squire (2011) discusses what makes a "good" educational game. He notes that every game carries its own value set and involves meaning making through its ideological worlds. In particular, "the social experience of participating in particular game communities, which is where much of the reflection, interpretation, and media production occurs as interpretations are debated and legitimized" (p. 30). Participation is central to learning theory and is foregrounded by players' interactions within a game space. As a player interacts with the virtual space, s/he must interpret it in order to make meaning of it through their experience and, through those interpretations, use them as points of departure for discussions of the content and ideology of the games. Players'/learners' participation in the game space gives them the confidence and agency to make these interpretations and carry them over to social situations in which the content of the game is discussed. Squire describes this practice as the "trajectory of participating in gaming communities," essentially noting how it acts as a path that encourages greater engagement with the game and its community as players become more familiar with it. Although ePortals is more "playful" than "game," it is definitely "social"--asking faculty to share, even collaborate while designing, their activity.
The ePortals game consists of cards in four categories: Learning Challenge (based on the AACU Value Rubric outcomes), Tool (social media and Web 2.0 programs/applications), Context (the learning environment and/or course context), and Support (learning and student support services). After each participant selects one of each, beginning with the Context card, they will then create their own Assignment Activity on their own player sheet. In the final phase, participants exchange feedback on the assignments. In this way, participants engage in a playful design process, and receive feedback so that they have an assignment they might implement. Through the exchange process, they also encounter a variety of possible assignments that are engaging. Moreover, the event will conclude by discussing strategies for connecting the material produced from digital/social media-oriented assignments to an ePortfolio.
After playing with the ePortals activity, participants will be able to:
*construct multimedia assignments that promote essential learning outcomes;
*compare the affordances and constraints of using different social media and digital applications for learning activities;
*generate assignments that promote the construction of creative digital media artifacts that support student demonstrations of learning garnered from their coursework and related experiences.
Participants will be provided with digital materials that would allow them to print and produce ePortals game materials.
In the Innovation Lab, we will (45 minutes):
*Discussion (5 minutes): We will introduce the activity and how/why it emerged (including its theoretical framework).
*Demonstration (20 minutes): We will break groups into 3-5 people who will then "play" the ePortals game. Groups will deal out the cards and individuals will develop multimedia activity/assignment prompts.
*Innovation (20 minutes): Individuals will share their resulting activity/assignment prompts and discuss how and why they think the activities will work, or not, in their classes/environments. We will conclude the discussion with whether or not participants found using the ePortals game a useful strategy for designing multimedia activities/assignments.