Author: onewheeljoe

Why are you reading this post when you should be reading Susan Watsons? Or, why is Twitter Marco Polo so fun? #clmooc

What follows is the text of a comment I left on Susan Watson’s blog post “Can’t Talk Now Boss Fight or Go Rogue – My Week’s Twitter Games.” I found her post important because she shared a game design failure (or, more appropriately, a first iteration) and a success, albeit a silly, inside joke kind of success. I’m posting my comment to highlight the importance of commenting for me in this type of open online learning. For me, it fuels my thinking, deepens my connections with other participants and, because I try to evoke an appreciative tone, rewards me the way random acts of kindness can. Here’s hoping you’ll read Susan’s post, offer suggestions for improving Twitter choose your own adventure, and weigh in on why Twitter Marco Polo is so undeniably fun. 

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Susan,

Thanks for this post. I appreciate how you included the attempt at choose your own adventure. This focus on game design in #clmooc turned out to be an opportune space to think through how else Twitter might engage learners beyond the mainstream uses. I personally hope you keep trying with the choose your own adventure, since these make cycles are supposed to extend as long as you want them, and because I think you’ve got a group that will play test willingly.
The Marco Polo game was fun and trying to figure out why it was is also part of the fun. (See, complex!)
My first thought is that by taking a game children play with their eyes closed in pool and situating it on Twitter, the game really became an inside joke. The longer we played along, the more we were in on the joke pretending that the game worked on social media as well as it might have in the pools of our collective youth.
I found myself laughing at the contrast between tweets that just said “Marco” and some of the more deliberate and “formal” Tweets we encounter all the time. I often see thoughtful folks Tweet things like “for the next hour I’ll be tweeting about #edcamp”. The opposite of that sort of politeness and consideration of audience is the ridiculous (and maybe obnoxious) digital footprint of marcos, polos, and POOOLLLLOOOOS.
For me it was fun to momentarily take the discursive channels of Twitter and use them for playful mischief. There were no rules to our game of Marco Polo and when we play Marco Polo on Twitter, we test the rules there, too.

photo: Los viahes de Marco Polo by Pilar Rubio Remiro on Flickr. CC By 2.0

Not life proof, water proof

People on the lazy river,
seeing me float around
 with my phone in my hand, have begun to ask questions.
Is that thing waterproof? a man asks.
Yes, I respond.
A boy floating behind me asks a follow-up,
 Is it life proof or just water proof?
Life proof?
You know, like if you drop it on the ground
…life proof.
No, it isn’t life proof,
just water proof.

Experiencing a remediation

Kevin Hodgson’s working definition of remediation and how it is different than remix works for me.

Since I read his tweet, I’ve been thinking about the distinction between the two words and how remediation is something that deserves consideration when I’m composing digital texts. When I have something to say and an audience I want to address, the affordances of digital tools provide me with a choice of media through which to express myself. Any effort I might make to remix content to achieve my purposes necessarily involves a consideration of media, and I can remediate content in an effort to arrive at a decision, or I can remediate content a few different ways and present them together as a remix.

At least this is how I understand the terms today and the way I put the working definitions to work. This morning I experienced a remediation when I read yet another article in the New York Times about President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. In her piece, Obama’s Eulogy Which Found its Place in History, author Michiko Kakutani endeavors to place the eulogy in its historical context, recalling Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” speech and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, just to name the most famous orations she references. As I read the article, it nagged me that I’d only read the transcript of the eulogy which was published in the Washington Post. When I read it, I didn’t realize that the president sang part of Amazing Grace. Only later did I read that his singing was part of what made the eulogy so moving and even then, I didn’t cue up the video. I was in an airport or something.

So it wasn’t until this morning- after reading Kakutani’s piece – that I watched the President deliver the eulogy and heard him sing. Unlike when I read the transcript, I was moved by the way the church leaders stirred and smiled when our president, a black man addressing a black church about America’s legacy of racial hatred and violence, broke into song. It gave me pause to hear, “Sing it Mr. President,” in one of Obama’s pregnant pauses.

In watching the video on YouTube I realized that the transcript I’d read days before had stripped away the emotional electricity in the church that the video captures and without viewing it, I might miss a big part of the importance of the historic eulogy.  

Untroducing myself to #clmooc 2015

Participants were invited to “untroduce” ourselves in the first Make Cycle of #clmooc. My contributions felt hurried this week but looking back, I find some substance in what I shared digitally.

First, I hastily created this Pokemon card. It might reveal that I’ve been drawn into the world of Pokemon by my daughters and my students. It might reveal that I believe in #kidwatching as an important strategy for learning about education.

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In #clmooc’s first official Twitter chat, I untroduced myself this way:

This tweet might reveal my interest in games and characters within those games. For those parents or teachers participating in #clmooc who’ve become fluent in Pokemon card reading, the way I have, maybe Snorlax’s “attacks”- Stir and Snooze and Sleepy Press- prompt a smile. When I’m suckered into a game of Pokemon by my daughters I usually identify with this pudgy, sleepy pocket monster.

Then, I contributed this tweet to #clmooc and KQED’s #donow.

The household object that defines me this morning is the magnifying glass my girls left lying on the couch. I’m a magnifying glass when I surf and skim through the channels of #clmooc looking for posts to inspire my participation and spur my creativity. When I find something that strikes my eye, I slow and study what participants contribute. The hundreds of posts above or below I tune out in order to pay intentional attention to the people in #clmooc, one or two at a time.

I also chose the magnifying class because my daughters spent the night at Grandma’s house last night. The house is quiet now without them but they are still with us, represented by childhood clutter.  With the girls gone my wife and I enjoyed a needed date night- one that began with sushi at Sushi Den in Denver and ended with me sleeping through a movie on the couch. See… Snorlax strikes again.

Good Morning #clmooc

The traffic on familiar channels lured me into #clmooc today. I read through the Google + Community, the participant map and the Facebook group, among other explorations as I endeavored to orient myself and thought about how I might engage. I was reminded of the potentially massive reach of the networked interaction that takes place during the MOOC. At last count our sign-ups for this summer were still south of 600 but the Google + Community, which has endured through the first two summers and will be an important channel this year as well, boasts more than 2000 members.

The digital footprint in that space already includes Picasso head avatars, memes, and straightforward text introductions. A post from a newcomer, Karon Bielenda, who commented that “Everyone seems so excited, it is a little overwhelming,” illustrates how the networked interaction can inspire creativity at the same time it might spook the uninitiated. To be sure, there’s a lot to take in.

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And a lot to get drawn into, like the Google map below. I went from placing my pin and linking pictures to clicking around the map to see how participants are introducing themselves. I laughed out loud when I saw the pin marking where we can find dragons. This marker was consistent with the playful nature of the interaction we’ve seen over the years, and the relaxed facilitation style that invites folks to come and go as they wish and create what they like. Sarah Honeychurch confessed to placing dragons on the map, marking herself as someone who signed up to play as well as connect and create. Even before I discovered who was behind the map mischief, I joined in, placing the Kraken on the map between Norway and Greenland, since that’s where Wikipedia says he lives.

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The clmooc Facebook group that sprung up last summer has grown to 150 members and it was there I found a blog post by friend and colleague Antero Garcia about the South Central LA Game Jam. Tripping over that reading material caused me to slow down and spend a minute on the Facebook group. The Star Wars intro by J. Gregory McVerry struck me. It’s a playful declaration about how evil forces are at work on the web and #connectedlearning is a new hope. We #clmooc participants are appropriately cast as the rebels. I admit that I think what McVerry’s written is true, in addition to being a great appropriation of a mentor text. Last year, Peter Kittle argued that education needs better memes. The Star Wars intro is something I plan to remix as I get pulled into the #clmooc buzz and maybe the Star Wars intro that declares why educators must collaborate online will become an important education meme. In my spin I’ll want to address how public schools are under siege by software vendors who steal student data and fill the coffers of Pearson, Apple and Google while leaving our education system just as inequitable as it currently is. In my remix, #techquity might be the force. In any case, #clmooc and its creative contributors will stay cast as the good guys.

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Backchannel Game

After co-facilitating the Make With Me Hangout for Game Week, I looked at the chatroll where viewers of the livestream had their own conversation. I snapped a screenshot of a sequence where they played the same story building game we tried in the Hangout.

Bouncing Games

playdateThe trampoline that now sits in my backyard was brand new in 1976. I was four then and in some of my earliest memories neighborhood children sat around the edges in a queue to jump, crowding my older sister Jen and I off of our new treasure. I remember Tim, a teenage boy who patted my head before climbing on to the trampoline to do impossibly athletic feats at astounding heights. His front flips seemed to reach their peek somewhere in the clouds high above our suburban Milwaukee neighborhood. Mostly I remember the games the older kids played. I spectated and listened while they spent their afternoons on my trampoline

 

In the game Add-on, each player added a trick to an ever-lengthening series of tricks. The challenge was to remember all of the tricks and perform them in order without error before adding your trick. Miss a trick, you’re out. Forget to add a trick, you’re out. Less capable jumpers would lose their momentum and flop around on the mat trying to perform the tricks without the requisite height or bounce. Observers would laugh and call foul.

In the game Eye Spy, another popular game, the goal of the game was for the players was to cheat without being detected. Two players bounced on opposite ends of the tramp, repeating a series of tricks over and over. A third player, the spy, sat on the side of the trampoline at the midpoint with his back to the jumpers, looking under his arms to “spy” on them in the hopes of catching them straying from the pattern. This game held our neighborhood’s attention for hours. Observers would encourage the players to take more risks and chide the spy for missing so many obvious offenses.

I watched the play in total fascination back then. It was all wonderful to me- the acrobatics as well as the negotiation about what games to play, how to interpret the rules, and how to manage turns. Since I was too small to play at first, my turn became the intermission when everyone would get a drink or cheer me as I bounced up and down with a smile. I always thought my turns always ended too soon.

bouncingMuch older now, I watch my own daughters play on the same trampoline. Of course the springs, pads, and the
mat are new, but the frame is the same one that used to hold all the neighbor kids. The girls are just eight and four, a little too young for the dexterity required by Add-on or Eye Spy. They draw lines on the trampoline with sidewalk chalk. Usually Hailey, my oldest, invents and sells the rules to Madison on the fly while drawing. The image below shows a game they came up with. They have to jump in the circles they’ve assigned to themselves and their stuffed animals lay in smaller circles. The goal of this particular game is to be the first to bounce your sister’s animal out of its circle.

Madison, my youngest, and I create games together, too. After a recent successful play session she came to me with pencil and paper, explaining that she had a plan for our next trampoline game. As soon as she started to explain, I pulled out the voice recorder to capture her plan (embedded below). Listening to it now, her plan for the game makes me laugh. It also reminds me that when we begin to design games together, it gets the wheels turning, the chalk moving, and the dialog flowing.

Reflecting on a Minecraft tutorial

For make cycle #1, I made a Minecraft tutorial called “4 ways to write in Minecraft.”

My process began with the inspiration prompted by the newsletter that launched the make cycle. (A make cycle is the amorphous unit of organization in our massive online collaboration.) Chris Butts and Rachel Bear, the facilitators of this week and co-authors of the newsletter, reminded me that how-to guides are everywhere and I liked the notion that I might introduce my interests by creating a tutorial. I immediately thought of one of my favorite tutorials which I’ve embedded below, in which Kulopto, a youthful sounding YouTuber, demonstrates how to make different logic gates using the blocks in the game to create circuits. I like how he begins by listing objectives for the video and advice for players hoping to develop proficiency creating circuits. He pays attention to audience by soliciting comments about the video, prompting commenters to tell him how the video could be better. In the pop up annotations, he even tries to redirect his invisible audience by advising them to stop saying that the circuits he makes aren’t advanced. The video below illustrates how seriously youth take their how-tos on YouTube and also shows the complexity of the things they teach each other, and the world really, using the popular sandbox game Minecraft.

Like Kulopto, I tried to make a video that would be useful for an audience of educators and parents. I aimed to show quickly the different ways I’ve seen to write in Minecraft. Since I was presenting four ways to write, I wanted those ways visible before I modeled them so I set up the chest with a book, the sign, the blocks in the sky and the chat transcript before I shot my screencast. After three or four rough takes I completed the video, a little long but effective.

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The success of the tutorial for me is really determined by the network interaction around the video. To date it has 28 views and the comments below the video (pictured above) show that the topic resonated with five educators who commented. While that number five can seem small in a “massive” online collaboration, I spent a while on the video and having five people respond positively almost right away reminds me about the value of sharing and reminds me that the audience for the things I make in #clmooc is comprised of actual thoughtful educators.