Living in other time zones in the rooms off the corridor

"Magnet for Misadventure", and "Have Just Got To Stop Making Those Prank Calls" and I are  meeting tomorrow to plan the start up professional learning experiences for one of our ict_pd clusters. 

We are framing this cluster around two questions.

• What are the conditions of value for teaching and learning when “students are researchers”?

• How might these conditions be enhanced (or betrayed) through ICT?

And I am imagining myself in a Calvin Klein g-string, as I plan how we might address these.

[I know, I know what you are thinking, oh imaginary friends of the Artichoke - that the  closest I will ever get to a C K g-string experience will be by squeezing those flamboyant and plumptious Artichokean buttocks into XL instead of XXL cotton tails – but it would be unkind to break the visual flow of the post for Jo  with comments to this effect, and anyway for some of us the C K g-string index will always have to be metaphorical, so desist.]

Observing what students are doing online when out of school has encouraged me to look at  the thinking processes used in “students as gamers”, since that is how my day started at 4am  this morning.  The two World of Warcraft™ guild members who live with me commonly start their raids  at 6pm server time (which just happens to be 3am my time).  And 4am is often when the  celebrations, recriminations and accusations mean they forget those who live in other time  zones in the rooms off the corridor, and let rip.

Computer gaming, unlike Shakespearean Extreme Sports, Calculus for Cultural Studies, and Newtonian Physics for the Sandpit, is a consistently undervalued domain in schools.  (Unless  you consider the replication of pre-existing and numbingly simplistic platform style games  using FlashMX, when the initiative is held in the highest regard by all those who are  unfamiliar with FlashMX – aka the Digerti).

Yet as Papert observes,  "Game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers.”  (Papert cited in Prensky 2001, p131). 

I have always claimed that learning to think through gaming has been around so long it should rank as traditional pedagogy. Yet we are currently flooded with edu_speak rhetoric about the innovation in gaming.  Even claims of “cutting edge” ICT  initiatives in educational computer gaming are put in  perspective when you realise that Scriven (1988) was arguing over 17 years ago that

"Computer games, including arcade-type games, represent the most important educational  software resource available today. If one includes reasonable extrapolations from the  present examples, they could become the most important educational resource (for the  schools) of all kinds, not excluding books.  Even the most-condemned commercial games are  strongly focused on educationally significant skills and attitudes and offer unique opportunities to teach them." (Scriven, 1988, p1.)

So it is not surprising to discover that Gee's four part virtual world probing process,  “probe, hypothesise, reprobe, rethink” cycle (Gee 2003, p.90)  readily aligns with the  generic inquiry process models for science, technology, statistical thinking and inquiry  learning currently used in New Zealand classrooms.

"Students as gamers" aligns with "Students as researchers” (ie those used in inquiry and  problem based learning), aligns with “Students as scientists” and with "Students as design  technologists" and with “Students as statisticians”.   

So where do we go with the ict_pd cluster teachers this year? How can I show them that ICT  can enhance students working as researchers, just as it can be used to enhance students as gamers? I need to unpack how each process starts ...

1. Students as gamers: The player starts by probing the virtual world (which involves looking around the current  environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action).
2. Students as scientists: Students will identify and analyse the problem, and gather relevant information. (Focusing  and planning).
3. Students as statisticians: Students recognise the need for data, and then capture measures and representations in order  to seek meaning from, and to learn about observed data. (Transnumeration)
4. Students as researchers: Student explore information surfaces around the topic to find the question/s, for their  inquiry - question finding. Then they retrieve information in response to their question/s

If the generic process starts with - Probing, gathering relevant information, capturing measures, retrieving information, Then I'm going to start by thinking about how ICT might enhance these processes.

I might start with explorations of Search Engines. And reckon Blogbar the  free search engine bar you can include in your own blog or website will be useful in that it is going to allow teachers to easily play with, and compare a  range of major search engines  [Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Exalead], and major blog search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Blog Search, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Feedster, and Del.icio.us.] And I think I might follow up with explorations of The Question.