Current Work (& frustrations)

Name: John Martin
School: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department: Curriculum and Instruction
Major Program: Educational Technology
Specialization: Games, Learning, and Society
Minor Program: Learning Sciences
Advisor: Dr. Kurt Squire
Status: passed prelims, starting proposal
Tentative Research Title: "Sociocultural Learning in the Play and Design of Place-Based Augmented Reality Games"
(the title needs work)

My Elevator Talk

Question

My specific research project takes the appeal of good video games (and the significant in-game and out-of-game learning they compel), and brings it outdoors with handheld GPS-enabled computers for a more fully embodied game in culturally meaningful physical spaces. After the game, players critique and redesign the game for peers. The experience of playing and redesigning the game requires understanding and examination of cultural mores, whole-body physical activity in a geographical space that through the game has become even more culturally relevant, and the employment of strategies in problem posing and solving in order to come up with a peer-worthy game.

I ask the question: What would a compelling game experience that incorporated design, tools, community, and place look like, and how could it be developed?

The Roots of My Research
The four strands of life experiences, skills, and interests that I am braiding together in my research are: design, tools, community, and place. Together they incorporate sociocultural learning --- mind, activity, and culture.

Design
I have 20 years of experience as an outdoor educator. From my first year as a summer camp counselor, through years outfitting and leading canoe trips, to the past 13 years as Assistant Director for a deep woods camp in Maine, I have come to understand that learning is incredibly effective when learners are embodied through the act of design within a supportive community of learners.

Deep woods camping is a staggering collection of design problems. By design, I am not referring to a purely aesthetic process, but to the inspired and disciplined processes involved in finding a good solution to a problem. There is no single right way to pack, to hike, to set up a campsite, to start a fire, to canoe a river or lake, to bake a pie in a Dutch oven -- or to be a friend to a fellow camper who is having difficulty. Solutions to each of these vary according to the dynamics of the group, place, weather, gear, and interactions of the other. Starting a pie-baking fire on a rainy night is an extraordinary design problem that requires group collaboration and experience, but offers a tasty incentive for success.

Tools
Learning tools, often narrowly framed as Educational Technology, excite me. After a Masters in English, I taught two semesters of "Computers in Education" at the UW-Eau Claire School of Education where curriculum was limited to learning application-specific technical skills. I altered the curriculum, providing hands-on learning, posing problems and challenging pre-service teachers to come up with creative and effective solutions in basic office applications, digital photography, video, and websites. Throughout, we moved solutions between Mac and PC computers in order to scale learning beyond specific software skills to larger principles that would not soon be outdated.

Doing master's work in Educational Technology, I realized the definition of 'technology' I had been employing was limited to sophisticated electronic tools. When broadened to include simpler technologies, it opened many venues for the type of experiential learning environments John Dewey promoted -- letting experience motivate and guide one's learning. I applied an expanded notion of educational technology to what was building into a passion of mine -- Flying Moose Lodge. In short, I was beginning to apply broader concepts of educational technology to informal learning.

Community
As I examined experiential aspects of the camp, I noticed that campers and counselors learned skills more from each other's stories and sense of community than through pre-trip instruction, and I began to recognize that learning is inextricably tied to cultural norms. To better understand its culture, I explored the camp's narratives -- collecting stories, songs, photographs, and film clips -- and analyzing their common threads. I came to realize that issues my peers experienced teaching in the classroom were symptoms of deeper issues of one's identity in communities. Essentially, my interest within experiential education moved from focusing on the individual alone, to considering individual within their overlapping cultures.

Place
One of the most taken-for-granted elements of learning, and an instant common denominator for many learning cultures, is the environment it occurs within. Because we are physically bodied beings, our physical environment shapes the nature of what and how we learn; it underpins the language we use. Our cultural understanding of space -- place -- offers value-rich comprehension of space, adding to the effectiveness of what is learned there. In camp terms, hiking or canoeing from point A to point B means more when you are following the footsteps of a narrative your culture values, or the path of Thoreau's paddle.

My Research Writ Small
At a fine-grained level, my research looks three aspects of place-based Augmented Reality games -- as a design tool, as a tool for learning culture, and as a tool for connecting oneself to physical geographies.

The specific case study looks at the development and use of Augmented Reality Games in the informal learning environment of a deep woods camp in Maine. Veteran campers design game content specifically for the surrounding woods and waters. I use their design to create a game with the MIT-developed River City game editor. Then new campers play the game, and offer their feedback for a redesign of the game. The iterative nature of this experience -- create, play, reflect, modify, play, etc. -- is rooted in Design-based research strategies, and connects different areas of study.

As a design tool, this promotes acquisition and development of digital literacies, as well as artistic and aesthetic components of design. As a tool for learning culture, it draws on research in sociocultural learning. As a tool for connecting oneself to physical geographies, it draws on research in Embodied Cognition, Human Geography and Physiology -- areas largely overlooked as education has increasingly focused on the important-but-not-all-important role of Virtual worlds.

My Research Writ Large
Access to this type of experience is currently a problem. The technology requirements are steep to design and run the current place-based Augmented Reality games -- a GPS receiver, a handheld PocketPC computer that can couple with the GPS (most cannot), and Windows computer to design the game on. Additionally, the current game editor is somewhat complex (a simpler one is in development). If one considers Google and Yahoo!'s January 2006 announcement to bring their services to mobile phones (over two billion currently in circulation), and one considers also that all mobile phones in the U.S. (since 2002) have location-aware technologies built in for emergency medical services, it becomes clear that the digital divide -- for example, between those who have access to GPS-enabled handheld computers and those who do not -- is about to get a significant bridge. Within a year, access to this type of game-based inquiry could be as ubiquitous as the mobile phone and World Wide Web -- in the pockets of millions worldwide.

Theoretical Framework
I believe that learning is informed by sociocultural traditions personalized and negotiated by experiences inside and outside of one's various communities of practice. As such, I use Lave and Wenger's Communities of Practice, situated action, Activity Theory, and other flavors of sociocultural learning to understand the goals and processes of one's on-going development.

Methods
Design-based Research, including rapid-prototyping and iterative design, suits my need for a flexible methodology. At this point, I intend to use Discourse and narrative analysis on video, interviews, questionnaires, and journals. I have site permission, parental and participant permissions, and have passed the IRB approval process. I will be collecting data in Summer 2006.

Need
My current role as a technical support PA allows unique interaction with faculty, staff and students that has taught me much. However, it does not offer a direct connection to my research. With the fellowship, I could continue volunteering for a local middle school class that is creating a Greenbush neighborhood history game experience, finish my data analysis and dissertation, and develop, present, and publish a sample of this important, and quickly-developing area. Mobile technologies are opening opportunities that educators would be remiss to ignore. I intend to explore, develop, and disseminate work that could situate deep iterative learning opportunities in the cell phone pocket.


There are short slideshows of this vision as well (but no soundtrack), here and here.

Next Steps

I need to write my proposal, publish something, and present at conferences. I've not published or presented at conferences (or written a proposal for publishing or presenting), so I don't know how. Like many faculty, my advisor is too busy to hold my hand and help me learn these things, and I sense a culture of "well, you're in grad school now and need to learn these things on your own." This flies in the face of the theory of sociocultural learning, and upon closer examination, the practice of things. Generally the most successful academics have had close and supportive mentors to "show them the ropes" -- those who are left to fend for themselves via trial and error, I suspect, have a much much harder time succeeding.