Given the opportunity to be in attendance at NCCE 2016 (Northwest Council for Computer Education), students of Renton Prep whom were eligible, volunteered to seize the chance. The chance to experience, somewhat introduce technology in education to attendants. Maybe even contribute to the technology with their own input and thoughts on the subject. The audience of the NCCE 2016 event consisted primarily of teachers, researchers, scientists, and many other people. Yet, us the modern day stakeholders, the students, while here can make available beneficial assistance to the whole conference, as well as useful say about the discussions provided. On the first day of the conference, a group of student volunteers, including myself, were looking for any rooms or workshops in need of more manpower. We were then lead to the Tahoma 5 room, which hosted the Makerspace Summit. The summit consisted of various workshops aimed to help incorporate multiple subjects, such as robotics, art, design, and coding, into student work. Two other student volunteers participated at one of the workshops revolved around reassembling electric toothbrushes to teach the basic mechanics of circuits and the function of motors. With that, we were introduced to Kevin Honeycutt, one of the keynote speakers, and his assortment of student-designed items. His premise while talking in the Makerspace room was to start now, get both teachers and students to begin the connection of showing what they’ve accomplished with their talents, and please not let all your beautiful skills go to waste. Honeycutt then showed unto us his steampunk-esque electric, and acoustic guitar. Of course with his permission, we were obliged to take pictures with the guitar because it looked so epic. He explained unto us the student-driven aspects of the Godium, and the Godium Stool. The Godium and Godium Stool were challenges created by Mr. Honeycutt for students to participate in. The challenge of the Godium had them build a box to transport luggage, which could also turn into a podium when needed. The Godium stool was supposed to be a stool that can be easily disassembled and reassembled so it could fit in the Godium. We had thought he designed and built all of the apparatuses himself by their appearance and overall effectiveness. The others were all modeled by students, with the whole process of outsourcing to generate their structure process again. In addition to a business plan, hence the students themselves marketed and gained income from. To many of us, along with me, this trust and freedom of possible choices were somewhat striking. To be achieving all this so young, as well as gaining actual recognition for it too, was one thought that was simply amazing. Below is a interview of Honeycutt within the Makerspace room, where he describes the Godium and the Godium Stool. Kevin Honeycutt’s Twitter and LinkedIn are listed below, feel to check out more about him there. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinhoneycutt https://twitter.com/kevinhoneycutt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Blog post author: McCoy Palma Co-authors: Scott Nguyen and Jasmine Fernandez The post The Student Outlook: Makerspace and Kevin Honeycutt appeared first on NCCE's Tech Savvy Teacher Blog.

Thirty years ago I left school aged 16, thoroughly alienated and without a qualification to my name. I don’t think I was a bad student but school didn’t really suit me. Somehow, I never found out what it was I was great at or liked doing. The teachers weren’t particularly good and could be brutal. I recall my PE teacher, Mr Perkins, finding me alone in a corridor of the sports hall, picking me up by my neck and flinging me hard against a wall (I don’t recall why). Not that the school was entirely to blame. I could be disruptive and difficult, particularly when I couldn’t see the value of what I was doing. The continuous ego-bashing bullying I experienced throughout the last two years of compulsory education didn’t help much either. The thought of going into school made me physically sick. I stopped going out after school and after a while I stopped going into school altogether. If my parents were at work I would stay at home. If they were at home I would roam around the park adjacent to the school. I couldn’t face my final exams either, though I told my parents I’d sat them, delaying the inevitable fallout by a few weeks. By the time school finished, formally that is (it had finished for me some time before), I was scared, friendless and utterly lost. After a dismal summer spent dreading the day the exam results came out, I began signing on. This wasn’t anything unusual at the time. I grew up in a mining town in a period when the industry was being systematically dismantled by the government and most of our fathers were unemployed. After a while, I was told to attend an interview, for a job with British Gas, I think. When I didn’t turn up (my busy schedule of not looking for work, listening to The Smiths and writing terrible poetry didn’t allow it), I was summoned to a meeting where I was told that my unemployment benefit would be stopped if I didn’t go on a Youth Training Scheme at a local glassmaking firm. A year of making tea and running errands ensued (with a bit of mild sexual harassment thrown in). The poetry got a bit better, I read most of the books in Penguin’s Modern Classics series and I started to think about further education and, maybe, doing journalism for a living. I enrolled at the local technical college, taking the A-levels and GCSEs I needed to get onto an NCTJ ‘pre-entry’ journalism course. It was at the college that I encountered great teaching for the first time, and a brilliant English teacher who made me see myself in a new light. She was smart, funny, interesting and different. She dressed differently and she spoke differently, all of which was pretty inspiring to a lad who was desperate to find a way to be different. Most of all, she was interested and encouraging, quick to see the value in the work her students did and to support them in doing what they did well, better. And she made it plain that we were her equals, jointly negotiating the terms of our learning. That was such an importance difference for me. This was a time when it was still possible for a working-class kid to get a foothold in a profession like journalism without contacts, parents with cash to splurge on an internship or even a university degree. I had no idea, though, that I was part of one of the last waves of working-class, non-university educated entrants to the industry. The lecturers who interviewed me for a place on my chosen course, at Preston Polytechnic, were both sharp-witted, working-class newspapermen who had got into journalism through local papers and gone on to work for the nationals with some distinction. This was still a well-worn and very common path in the eighties and it wasn’t unusual for people like Harold Evans (who edited the Sunday Times up until 1981) to have emerged in the industry from working-class backgrounds, progressing through regional newspapers, to edit national newspapers, often very brilliantly (as in Evans’s case). And the newspaper industry was all the better for it, reflecting society and its concerns much more roundly than does the present cohort of senior journalists and commentators, most of whom share very similar backgrounds (many also being friends and university contemporaries of the politicians they are charged with holding to account). My course was full of working-class teenagers, school leavers, with a few older adults who were looking to retrain. Within a year, pretty much all of us were employed in regional papers around the country, learning on the job, which is where most journalistic educations really begin. I served my ‘apprenticeship’, gaining an incredibly wide array of really useful skills, including important ‘soft skills’ such as tenacity, the ability to listen and a respect for deadlines - which have been incredibly useful to me since, both academically and professionally - as well as the knowledge, technical skills and general storytelling know-how necessary to become a senior journalist. I was lucky enough to have a few hugely enjoyable years as part of a terrific team of reporters and editors at the Shropshire Star, most, if not all, of them with social backgrounds similar to mine. Since then, however, journalism has, increasingly, become a profession for middle-class university graduates. Alan Milburn, in his 2009 report, Unleashing Aspiration, described it as ‘one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century’ - quite an astonishing shift in such a relatively short period of time. This trend was confirmed in this week’s Sutton Trust report, which found that more than half (51 per cent) of leading print journalists attended fee-paying schools, while 54 per cent attended either Oxford or Cambridge. The private school sector, it is worth remembering, educates just seven per cent of the total population, and Oxbridge less than one per cent. I fear that many working-class children would now think of a career in journalism as something beyond them, socially and economically. And I suspect that, given the longstanding recruitment profile of both the BBC and the Guardian, senior positions in both of which are dominated by the privately educated, many working-class journalists would now not even consider applying for posts with either of these supposed bastions of liberal, democratic values. I sometimes wonder if I would have made it into the profession at all if I were starting from the same place today. I think it’s pretty unlikely. It might have been conceivable, in the eighties, that I would find a way to university (as I eventually did) and onto a graduate journalism course. Higher education was free at the time, and that was a crucial factor in my decision to give up work to take a first degree. But I think it pretty unlikely, given where I started from and what my expectations were (i.e. not high), that I would have been prepared to take out a loan for my studies, and incur huge debts that would take years and years to pay off. People from working-class backgrounds, with no safety net to fall back on, tend to find it difficult to see the spectre of mounting debt as an investment in their future. Nor, fairly obviously, would I have been in a position to work for free for a period to get a foot on the ladder, as so many new entrants from wealthier backgrounds do; and certainly not in a city as expensive to live in as London. Does this matter? I think it does. First, it matters because it diminishes journalism and undermines democracy and the civic life of the country. An industry in which high-level new entrants have usually graduated from an elite university, know someone or have parents who know someone, or be wealthy enough to work unpaid for a time, is clearly not going to be very reflective of the concerns of the general population. And, indeed, it is not. What you might expect to result is precisely what we have ended up with: an out-of-touch commentariat of senior journalists who largely share the backgrounds and core beliefs of the political elite and are deeply hostile to or pointedly amused by anyone who doesn’t. Little wonder so many ‘ordinary’ people feel under-represented by the media, angry that their views and the views of those they voted for are routinely derided, under-reported or ignored altogether. But, of course, if you never meet any ‘ordinary’ people, you wouldn’t know that, would you? If your children go to different schools than theirs, you’re probably not going to feel as outraged as I do when I see how the state school testing regime distorts children’s education and alienates young people. If you’ve never been inside an FE college and don’t know anyone who did, you’re probably not going to be overly exercised when government policy pushes the sector to the brink of extinction and all but destroys what must surely be a key part of the mission of any institution offering further education: lifelong learning. It matters also because it reflects the more general attenuation in opportunity for people from working-class backgrounds, captured, again, very starkly, in the Sutton Trust’s report. It found that the UK’s top professions remain disproportionately populated by alumni of private schools and Oxbridge. In medicine, for example, nearly two-thirds (61 per cent) of senior doctors were educated at independent schools, while 40 per cent were educated at Oxbridge. Only 16 per cent attended comprehensive schools. In politics, nearly a third (32 per cent) of MPs were privately education while over a quarter (26 per cent) went to Oxbridge. Almost half (47 per cent) of the current cabinet attended Oxbridge. In law, 74 per cent of the top judiciary were privately educated and the same proportion attended Oxbridge. And in the senior civil service, almost half (48 per cent) attended independent schools and more than half (51 per cent) Oxbridge. The same trend is also increasingly evident in sport, entertainment and the arts, where it is difficult these days to swing a Bafta without striking an old Etonian. It is hardly surprising that applications to private school remain high big despite increases in fees, when the simple fact of which school your children attend can make such a huge, life-defining difference to their future prospects. Despite decades of ministerial hot air about improving social mobility, rungs in the social ladder are being hacked away with increasing frenzy, not least by the present government, which appears set on consigning many of this country’s greatest social achievements to history. The education system, which ought to be at the vanguard of challenging unearned privilege and increasing social mobility is, in fact, reproducing privilege and reinforcing social inequality. As Danny Dorling put it in a recent article, education in England ‘is expanding into new extremes of elitism’. Its covert message, ‘that a small elite, made up of superior individuals, should lead us’, gains greater popular assent the more inevitable and immutable privilege appears to be (as does the belief that those at the bottom are there by dint of their own failings). We end up with a self-reproducing ‘meritocracy’, with privilege passed on from generation to generation, all by awfully nice people who are just doing what anyone would do in their position to secure the best for their children. I don’t blame them. The extent of inequality in this country means the stakes are incredibly high, too high to be healthy. But we need, and deserve, an education system which challenges rather than facilitates this. Our schools continue to fail the poorest children while subjecting them and the schools in which they learn to an extraordinary regime of continuous testing, fake ‘rigour’ and accountability, all of which is extremely harmful to our kids, our teachers and our communities. State-maintained schools are subject to constant reform, with policy - criminally, in my view - written to secure headlines rather than to serve our children (I’d like to think there is a circle of hell for secretaries of state who put headlines before kids). It is here we see, more clearly than anywhere else, the truth of Dorling’s charge that the people running state education think of it as ‘education for other people’s children’. The same is true of further education, so often treated with contempt and ignorance by ministers, despite the hugely important role FE colleges have played in our communities for decades. At the same time, in higher education, government policy has engineered a two-tier system, with elite universities, which remain dominated by the privately educated, offering the kind of rounded liberal education wealthy parents expect for their kids, and the others offering, increasingly, vocational education of one sort or another, to meet the more rudimentary needs of the rest. The ‘complex and intimidating’ Oxbridge admissions system seems almost designed to deter working-class applicants. Education for them, training for us. Calcifying patterns of privilege are not the sign of a healthy society. They are like those spots you see on the leaves of dying trees. They are the warning signs that something is not right, something rotten that, left untreated, will bring down the whole tree.

If you need to deliver compliance training, you’ll have specific requirements that an LMS can really help with. Because compliance training is mandatory and often legally enforced, it demands a more formal process than other Learning & Development activities. LMS features that manage course content and reporting make the delivery and completion of compulsory training easier. Without an LMS, it’s harder to prove which courses were completed by which learners and when. Giving users access to an intuitive system also helps them to engage with training. The results are higher completion rates and time and money saved from inefficient processes. Here are some clever ways an LMS can help meet compliance needs created by external regulations or internal policies.   Compliance courses Compliance course content usually includes online text, audio and videos elements, along with a corresponding risk assessment. The purpose of the assessment is for employees to flag any potential risks or problems they might experience in the situations described. Compliance courses must typically be completed one month after an employee has taken up a post. They’re often followed by a refresher period of 1-3 years, depending on regulations.   Examples of state compulsory compliance training DSE (Display Screen Equipment) In Europe, DSE training is often a state requirement and must be completed by all employees who use a computer for daily tasks. DSE training must also include a risk assessment that’s used to identify any problems the learner may have with their current setup, for example issues with the hardware or chair they use at work. Failure to comply with DSE regulations can result in state-enforced fines. It can also expose the organization to insurance claims based on employer negligence if an accident occurs.   Manual Handling Depending on the sector, manual handling training can also be a compulsory requirement for employees in Ireland and the UK. In Ireland, manual handling must include an element of "face to face" training. In the UK, all manual training can be conducted online. But manual handling training is not just conducted as a mandatory requirement. Some organizations use the training as an effort to prevent injuries and reduce related costs. Employee injuries can generate many costs, including: Cost of finding, hiring and training a replacement for an injured employee Court costs accrued through legal proceedings Cost of compensation and pay-outs if a case is successful.   5 LMS features that simplify compliance training An LMS that can effectively manage compliance training will include the following five features. Course content delivery The most essential feature an LMS must offer is to provide an intuitive and reliable platform learners can use to access the course content they need. A feature that manages resources will allow you to make documents available to all learners or specific groups of learners. Given the importance of tracking compliance training, the LMS you choose should also be fully SCORM and Tin Can-compliant. How it works in LearnUpon: LearnUpon allows you to upload, not only documents, but also rich media content, like video and audio. LearnUpon’s module editing features allow you to fully customize a course for your organization. You can use LearnUpon’s built-in text editor to embed code and insert media like YouTube videos directly into a course, for example. Assessment The LMS should also make it easy to conduct employee risk assessments, for example the manual handling assessment for risk of load. A survey tool will allow you to gather feedback to assess employee concerns about workplace practices that weren’t addressed during compliance training. How LearnUpon helps: LearnUpon’s assignment features allow you to create workflows that simplify assessment for compliance training. Internal exam features can be used to knowledge check learner understanding of course content and reinforce key takeaways. Learners can upload their risk assessment, which may be an export of results received from a compliance assessment. The upload is given a default status of "pending review" to remind managers who they need to speak to. Managers can conduct desk visits if necessary and use assignment feedback to offer advice and resolutions. Managers can also print a learner’s answers to assist discussion. Reporting A compliance report differs from other kinds of eLearning reports in one important way. Compliance reports are usually based on required completion dates (also known as due dates) and refresher periods. These reports allow admins to identify which learners have yet to complete an assessment and which are not currently compliant. How LearnUpon helps: LearnUpon’s reporting features make it easy for admins to identify and review outstanding risk assessments and take action as necessary. LearnUpon also allows you to automate internal compliance reporting, reducing the manual workload of admins. Scheduled reports can be automatically emailed to managers, compliance officers and HR staff. Recertification A recertification feature allows you to re-enroll learners a specific number of days after they have completed a compliance course. This feature can be incredibly useful if internal training standards stipulate that a course must be completed every 2 or 3 years to remain compliant. How LearnUpon helps: LearnUpon’s recertification feature automates enrollment based on a set number of days, reducing the amount of administration required. LearnUpon also allows sends an automatic recertification email to inform learners that they’ve been re-enrolled for refresher compliance training with the ability to indicate a due date by which the training must be complete. Notifications & reminder emails Notification and reminder emails also allow you to use due dates to help learners meet completion deadlines. Reminders can be essential for attaining high compliance rates and delivering successful training outcomes. How LearnUpon helps: LearnUpon allows you to search and filter learners that meet, or don’t meet, specific conditions. You can then prompt learners to take an action by emailing a notification or reminder. LearnUpon also allows you to schedule notifications that automatically remind learners to complete outstanding training by the compliance due date. You can even copy in other users on reminder notifications, for example an employee’s supervisor or a compliance officer.   These five features take the manual work, and resulting headaches, out of delivering compliance training. See how LearnUpon could work for you, sign up for a free trial.   Try LearnUpon free for 30 days .learnupon.com Agree to Terms of Service Start my free trial The post How to use an LMS for compliance training appeared first on LearnUpon.

Guest Blogger: René Tanner, Life Sciences LibrarianWikipedia, the free, open, online encyclopedia has the potential to share information and knowledge with people around the world. However, the use of Wikipedia in higher education is often discouraged because, in general, encyclopedias are not adequate sources for college-level research. Also, anyone can edit Wikipedia, so outdated and erroneous information may be present; But what if, the tables were turned and instead students were encouraged to be contributors and given credit for editing and improving Wikipedia?  What might they learn and how might their critical thinking skills be improved? Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, would like more experts to be part of the project. Wales notes that often enthusiasts develop entries of personal interest and that someone with a deeper understanding would add nuance and improve the quality of articles greatly. However, the number of scientist/editors in Wikipedia appears to be low. In 2005, Nature polled 1,000 published scientists and discovered that only 10% of them had edited Wikipedia (Giles, 2005). In an effort to give students an opportunity to contribute to a widely viewed online resource and receive credit, educators have developed a number of different Wikipedia assignments. One such assignment focused on improving topic pages pertaining to chronobiology. At the conclusion of the project, 12 pages were edited, 3 new pages were added, and 347 citations to peer-reviewed literature were added. Students noted that they personally benefited from the editorial process and their comfort level with reading, critiquing, and summarizing original research increased (Chiang et al., 2012). In a separate assignment, after six semesters, student’s enrolled in law related courses produced 106 new articles and improved 37 existing articles (Carver, Davis, Kelley, Obar, and Davis, 2012). These case studies demonstrate that students have potential to add substantially to the public knowledge.Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thonWikipedia Edit-a-thon eventsBeyond student assignments and editing Wikipedia yourself, another way to improve the quality of Wikipedia is to organize Wikipedia Edit-a-thon events. During these events, editors, novice and expert alike, work side-by-side to address subject matter gaps and other weaknesses within Wikipedia. Topics of interest to women have been identified as particularly lacking. In response, events are being held around the globe to increase content by, for, and about women. One such event, Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, is scheduled for March 18, 2016 at ASU’s Hayden Library from 1-8pm. The associated exhibit "In the Stacks: Print Wikipedia," will be on display at Hayden Library through May 21, 2016.BibliographyCarver, B. W., Davis, R, Kelley, R. T., Obar, J. A. & Davis, L. L. (2012). Assigning Students to Edit Wikipedia: four case studies. E-Learning and Digital Media, 9(3), 273-283. doi: 10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.273Chiang, C.D., Lewis, C. L., Wright, M. D. E., Agapova, S., Akers, B., Azad, T. D., … Herzog, E. D. (2012). Learning Chronobiology by Improving Wikipedia. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 27(4), 333-336. doi: 10.1177/0748730412449578

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. @girlziplocked - "The current economy has no place for intellectuals and is desperate to make entrepreneurs the socially recognized genius." @matthewsyed - "It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own." @atduskgreg - "Machine learning is automated bureaucracy. It spits back the systemic biases we feed it in feature vectors, training sets, reward functions." Who killed Nokia? "Despite its enormous R&D firepower, its technical prowess and foresight — Nokia’s patents still generated about US$600 million a year paid by its thriving rivals like Apple and Samsung — Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on." Employment (In)security and Shame: Working Hard on Soft Money - via @14prinsp "My working class background, coupled with my long term history of precarious employment has left me feeling ashamed and guilty. I am angry at my own perceived childishness for investing in the seemingly naïve notion that hard work is always recognised and rewarded in due course. I am angry at myself. I am angry at being in this position yet again." Gig Economy Attracts Many Workers, Few Full-Time Jobs - via @RossDawson "The study found that online platforms typically provided a modest boost to incomes. For renters and goods sellers, they earned about 7% more during months they participated. For laborers, the gig earnings helped offset a decline in other sources of income. That finding suggests the gig economy could hold the most promise for workers with irregular incomes. JPMorgan found that 70% of Americans ages 18 to 24, and 74% of those earning in the bottom 20% of incomes, experienced an average change in their month-to-month income of more than 30%."

Once you have your baseline and your target architecture, it is time to create the roadmap or, what I would like to call, the "To Do" list.To build the "To Do" list, we needWhere we are at (the Baseline Architecture)Where we want to go (the Target Architecture)The list of projects and service delivery activities currently in progress directly impacting your architecture - I would go to our Incident Management and Project Management systems for this information.Any information about the architectures that interface with your architecture - so for the Learning architecture in my environment, I will collect baseline and target architectures + project activities for:CommunicationsIdentityHRISDocument ManagementAcademicsFrom here, I would start figuring out what needs to happen.---------------------TOGAF defines 11 steps in this process.Determine or confirm key corporate change attributes - A handy tool for doing this is a Factor Assessment and Deduction Matrix. Factors include Risks, Issues, Assumptions, Dependencies, Actions and Impacts.  Determine business constraints for implementation - Take a look at business drivers (internal and external) and any constraints at both the line of business and corporate levels.  What does your environment look like?Review and consolidate gap analysis - This is where you look at the business, application, data and any infrastructure architectures you have and analyze the difference between where you are at and where you want to be.Review consolidated business requirements across related business functions - Otherwise known as looking for trends and patterns across your requirements. Do you have multiple people asking for the same thing?Consolidate and reconcile interoperability requirements - Otherwise known as figuring out how the pieces of your system need to talk to each other.  Hopefully, you are working with a knowledgable IT buddy for this.Refine and validate dependencies - Analyzing what needs to happen when.  What is the order and priority of activities to get you from here to there?Confirm readiness and risk for business transformation - Risk analysis can be a big deal. Especially in risk-averse organizations.  Make sure you are really clear about the risks involved in the transformation you propose and that you are able to clearly communicate a mitigation strategy for these risks.Formulate implementation and migration strategy - High level to-do listIdentify and group major work packages - More granular to-do list. This should include the list of projects that you wish to initiate and complete to get from baseline to target.Identify transition architectures - Create the steps between here and there.  Where are our "pause" points?  Ideally, this is where we have something operational as we move to the next thing.Create the architecture roadmap and implementation and migration plan - This is the final deliverable and the plan you will execute against.  This sounds like an awful lot of stuff, but really it is about figuring out how you want to get to where you want to be.Essentially, it is project planning.Defining the why and what.Providing a path to help minimize distraction.

Gamificaiton is finding its way into almost all walks of life. At GamEffective, we’re concentrating mainly on solutions for the enterprise, but we’re always keeping up to date with the latest innovations and advances in our field. One of the most fascinating areas that could be transformed by gamification technology is education and the school system. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? School is all about discipline and hard work. We want our children to know that there’s a time for games and a time for seriousness, and muddling the two seems quite strange, or even dangerous. Well apparently, for no good reason. One of the things that games are best at is achieving a state called ‘flow.’ This is described as a state of total focus on the task at hand and was initially described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For flow to be achieved, several conditions need to exist. Firstly, a clear goal, or a set of several goals. This allows for structure and a sense of direction. Secondly, it is important that immediate and accurate feedback exists, since it allows people to change their actions in accordance with the desired results. Finally, in order to achieve flow, a person has to be dealing with a challenge that is at an appropriate level. If it will be too easy, they will be bored, yet if it is too difficult they will become frustrated. Imagine going through school while experiencing this state of ‘flow’, and having education feel like a playful and enjoyable endeavor, that contributes to growth and development. Many education innovators believe that the experience of school can be one which resembles this, instead of the stressful and anxiety ridden experience many of us might remember. Many educators see gamification as a great way to achieve flow in schools, where many times classrooms are crowded and noisy, and attention is easily disturbed. Gamification also helps teachers in getting children out of their normal routines, which in itself can help students achieve a state of novelty and flow. When you think about it, gamification has existed in education for ages. What are ‘gold stars’ if not a gamification mechanic? And how about the competition between different ‘houses’, prevalent in parts of the British education system? What’s new here is that technology is being used to gamify different parts of the educational process on a larger scale than ever before. One great example of an education institution which is trying to implement gamification into different elements of their process is the Institute of Play. The institute is based in New York City and aims to create learning experiences which are rooted in game design. They also help teachers in implementing different gamification mechanics into the regular education system. The institute’s’ first major initiative was Quest to Learn, which is a fully public school that teaches 662 students from ages 10 to 18 and is designed and supported by the Institute of Play. What institutions like the Institute of Play and others are seeing, is that using gamification has several major benefits, which can be viewed as four major ‘freedoms’ that one can achieve through gamified experiences, and this is also where is becomes super relevant and interesting for those of us who are interested in learning in the enterprise: The freedom to fail. Games allow players to experiment, push their boundaries, act out of their normal character, etc. All this comes with no consequences, as it is all within the game. The freedom to experiment. Players can try different strategies, and utilize different pieces of information in different ways. This creates curious and inquisitive players who seek to acquire as much information as they can. The freedom to assume new identities. One of the hardest things we are all required to do is to view the world from someone else’s perspective. In games, this comes naturally. The freedom of effort. Games allow for controlled periods of effort, which are usually followed by times of inactivity or rest. This allows for players to focus for relevant, limited periods of time. They know that they can be "on" when it’s important and switch off when it isn’t. Gamification in education is a movement which is only beginning. For those reading this who are part of organizations that include many training sessions for employees, I am sure that the difficulties described here are somewhat, if not very, familiar. At GamEffective we’re hoping to ease those difficulties. We believe that training at work doesn’t have to be something that people dread. Rather, we think that it can be a facet of work-life where people feel that they’re developing and acquiring new skills. This can create organizations which are constantly growing and improving, and where there is no need to constantly be looking for new talent because the talent that already exists in the organization is on a constant improvement path. This post dealt with ‘flow’ and the freedom that gamification and games in general allow. In this post’s second part, I’ll elaborate on what can hinder gamification interventions, and what should be avoided for successful gamification implementation.

In the last post, I spoke about how gamification is changing education as we know it, both in workplace-related training and in ordinary education systems. I felt it was important also to mention several hurdles that may arise when trying to implement a gamification solution. None of these are very complicated to avoid, as long as you are aware of them and are able to spot them as soon as they appear. Employee interest Some employees will not like the idea of parts of their job being likened to a game. Some have never quite enjoyed video games, and being asked to participate in a platform which has a resemblance to these games may put them off. Other employees, who enjoyed the previous way training were conducted in the organization might be disappointed to see the changes occurring. To prevent these types of negative feelings, we always recommend investing in preparing employees for the upcoming gamification implementation. This can be done through a newsletter that incorporates an exciting countdown until the gamification solution is launched, or creating a competition within the company to see who will be performing the best on the new platform. Also, it is very important to communicate to the workforce what the advantages of the new solution are, and how they will help both employees and the organization as a whole improve and go forward. Misuse Gamification is an extremely powerful tool, and we see how it is affecting organizations every day. At the same time, it is important to use gamification where it is most appropriate. In other words, gamification is the most effective when it is used with quantifiable and measurable parameters. Although we believe that even aspects of work that may seem very difficult to quantify (things like good customer service habits, for example), can be taught through gamification, it is important to translate the traits you are looking for, even if they are a bit general or amorphous, into something that an employee can be measured on and see progress in. An easy way to get around this is to start from gamifying the more quantifiable parts of your activity, and then moving on to the other areas. Once you do move into areas that are less clear cut, it is important to determine what would be considered success and how it can be measured. Inappropriate implementation When first attempting to introduce gamification into your organization, and especially when the implementation is in the area of elearning and training, it is important to emphasize not only the mechanics and the competition but the underlying content that you are interested in helping the workforce getting better at. It’s also important to communicate to employees how gamification can help them become better at what they do, and show examples of previous successes. With every day that goes by, we see gamification become implemented in more and more verticals and fields. When done right, gamification can really transform a process, and sometimes, even an organization. In order for this to happen in your organization as well, put effort and thought not only into what you want to solve with gamification, but also how you will introduce it. This will help you reap the benefits and see results much faster.  

Daily, many of us in these roles expect teachers to be open to learning new technology…new ways of doing things. I’ll admit that it’s sometimes frustrating when learning something new becomes so much of a hassle that it’s completely unreal.  At the same token, I also have to admit that our version of "this is important" differs greatly from that of the users that we serve and knowing that part is half the battle.  I’ve been reminded since June by my staff that I "speak tech" a mile a minute and that often the tools seem to overlap, creating a haze that novice users can’t seem to see through. Knowing that, I’ve walked on eggshells, making sure to not mention specific technologies, even in casual conversation, because when I do, the people around me are overwhelmed with feelings that they have to learn it too. The harsh truth here is that if you are in a tech leadership role, you do. You have to pay attention and you have to learn…constantly. You have to do this even when you don’t want to or feel like it. You have to do it…not because the tech is the answer or because we have to know all of the things…but because you need to be able to speak with clarity on whether or not certain tools meet criteria of whatever the need is. It’s a way of the beast…like it or not. This doesn’t mean that I’m open to cold calls from Edtech sales, LinkedIn messages or emails trying to show me the latest or greatest tool.  Please don’t. This is also not a statement that somehow the tech matters more. It doesn’t. I still believe in focusing on outcomes and the intention of the learner.  I do not believe that we can ignore trying new things on a "beta basis" in this role, even if they never make it to a conversation outside of our tech leadership teams. I’m also not saying that we have to use every single tool or idea. That’s nuts. We do, however, have to know and learning is central to that.  …especially when we need to support learning in the classroom. …especially when that learning is coming from our students and teachers. 

For those not familiar, edX is a non-profit MOOC provider founded by Harvard and MIT. They offer free online courses from universities around the world and new ones get added every week including over 100 free computer science courses. They've got some excellent upcoming courses that could be great for students and teachers alike. Check them out below... Introduction to Computer Science Harvard UniversitySelf-Paced, Freehttps://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x Introduction to Computer Science CS50x, from Harvard University, is one of the most popular computer science courses online. The on-campus version of this course was Harvard’s largest course as of Fall, 2015. The course is free, online, open for anyone to enroll and is a great introduction to the art of programming.  English Grammar and Style The University of QueenslandStarts February 29, Freehttps://www.edx.org/course/english-grammar-style-uqx-write101x-1 This course aims to introduce students to key concepts and strategies related to grammar and style including grammatical principles, word usage, writing style, sentence and paragraph structure, and punctuation.  The Science of HappinessUniversity of California BerkeleySelf-Paced, Freehttps://www.edx.org/course/science-happiness-uc-berkeleyx-gg101x-2 This is the first MOOC to teach positive psychology. Learn science-based principles and practices for a happy, meaningful life. Created by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the course will zero in on a fundamental finding from positive psychology: that happiness is inextricably linked to having strong social connections and contributing to something bigger than yourself—the greater good.  Working in Teams: A Practical GuideThe University of QueenslandStarts March 14, Freehttps://www.edx.org/course/working-teams-practical-guide-uqx-teams101x#! Learn how to build effective teams, be a great team player and manage team conflict. It covers why teams are important, the roles of individuals in a team, systems and processes for effective teamwork and communication, and methods for addressing team conflict.  Framing: How Politicians DebateDelft University of TechnologySelf-Paced, Freehttps://www.edx.org/course/framing-how-politicians-debate-delftx-frame101x This is a great course for members of the debate team or anyone interested in learning the science behind delivering a winning argument. This course is especially relevant during the election cycle. Analyze how politicians debate and what the underlying patterns are in the game of framing and reframing.