Friday 9 March 2012

Reflection on DML 2012 Conference

Digital Media and Learning (DML) 2012 is the first academic conference I attended in the US. It is participated mainly by teachers, educators and educational researchers around the world, especially those servicing the US education system. The first thing that struck me was the enthusiasm shown by participants, because the conference managed to keep participants away from enjoying beautiful outdoor scenes of San Francisco—which is very rare in conferences organized in Europe and Asia.

The theme of the conference is “Beyond Educational Technology: Learning Innovations in a Connected World”. Conference with this theme, if held in Europe would normally start by debate on “what is educational technology”, which academics would attempt to identify their current position before thinking and talking about future, i.e. what is beyond the state quo. To my surprise, this is not the case in DML 2012. The keynote speech, titled “Cultivating the entrepreneurial learner in the 21st century” presented by John Seely Brown touched straight into the vision of future--what will educational institutions look like in 5 or 10 years from now?  

John highlighted that 
Just being able to learn as individual is not enough, the question is how we start to scale this type of learning system.”
What I am doing now in Knowledge Nation Inc (KNI) is indeed an attempt to scale the current learning system through the use of pedagogic wrapper. This approach is parallel with what John proposed in the conference--a blended epistemology.

While agreeing with the idea of blended epistemology, I doubted its practicality because the existing and leading educational systems are very much dominated by quantitative assessment and evaluation methods. Thus, I asked John in the Q&A session (see 1:21:26 in YouTube video below) how the assessment or evaluation could be blended in the proposed blended epistemology? His quick reaction of this was that "proof is in the eyes of the beholder". He suggested that by using portfolio and abolishing the transcript would be the ideal evaluation methods. I agreed with the use of portfolio but I think transcript need not to be abolished, instead it could be blended into the portfolio through meaningful ways.


I carried this idea of blending transcript and portfolio into KNI and further developed the concept. The outcome of it is what I call "experiential portfolio" or ePortfolio, which contains accumulated game playing experience in the sense of soft skills. I would replace the list of "subjects" in academic transcript by a list of games played. In addition, the results (it is called the metrics in game playing) would be mapped into a pre-determined soft skill set. The mapping of soft skills set is actually what all academics in Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) do in all teaching practices, i.e. upon the completion of a degree programme, our students get not only the academic transcript, but also a soft skill transcript. 

Fig 1: John's idea of blended epistemology

To me, transferring the teaching practice in UPSI to game playing would make the soft skills mapping meaningful and at the same time recognising the knowledge and skills students gained through game playing explicitly. Moreover, players cum learners can show off their achievement in social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

John said the following:
It’s not the technology that matters, it is how we take these technologies and invent new type of institution forms, new type of social practices, and new type of skills to be able to leverage the capability of technology. The technology is the easy part, the hard part is what are those social practices around these, and also the institutional structure. What will the schools, universities and research institutions look like in 5 to 10 years from now. If they look the same like what we have now, we have problems.
And I am glad that I have a vision of what the education system in the US would be like if what KNI tries to achieve become a reality.

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