NECC 2009: PlacePuzzles

Notes from Bernie Dodge’s Wednesday morning session. He’s a confessed map nerd.

How can we use maps in a way that takes pedagogical sense and doesn’t take a lot of effort to do?

It’s all about place, it’s a powerful idea. It’s a way to glue things together and a motivator.

Spatial ability is located in your hippocampus in the brain.

Method of loci: memorization by association, by connection with place.

Geocaching and scavenger hunts as a way to use place.

PlacePuzzle: a way to do it faster and easier, but does not require the project-based and higher level work that a traditional WebQuest does.

map-based activity designed to encourage close reading of a complex text. It uses a limited physical space to provide a context for learning and includes short answer clues that require recall and creative interpretation.

Critical attributes:

• resources to be studied ahead of time
• map of a related place of limited size (walkable distance, maybe short drivable)
• clues on the map that relate the map to the resources and require both recall and ideation

Optional attributes:

• scores kept based on speed and accuracy
• roles to divide up the reading
• publicly posted leaderboard
• clues made available one at a time based on performance
• communication channel allowing players to communicate in real time.

Example: “chaos in Tehran”. Become familiar with significant places and people in the capital of Iran.

Structure:

• Intro
• Links to read first
• Map
• Communication channel (tinychat)

The real shoe-string way is to use tools like Google Maps, Google Sites, Google Docs, tinychat (and maybe Google Wave in the future).

Example: Watergate

Clue Possibilities:

• Visual: Google Street View
• Visual: Photos from panoramio
• Text: wikipedia
• Proximity: What’s nearby

Resources for writing clues for scavenger hunt clues galore on the web: it’s like backwards design.

Curricular opportunities:

• historical events
• math: distance, area, shapes
• literature: think about Google Earth literature trips
• language learning
• field trip prep

Implementation:

• timed special event
• self-promotion
• interschool competition/collaboration

Design steps:

• Pick topic
• Identify resources
• Pick locations
• Define clues

Dodge is working on an interface for this.

Inside or outside? It can be done in both ways (but I think the outdoor version will have more of an impact). The indoor version is being developed first. Dodge added to this the fact that we may be raising a generation of kids that tend to be indoor people. However, he did say that the power of PlacePuzzles will be the outdoors version, with the projected growth of mobile learning.

PlacePuzzle.org will have tutorials, examples, authoring tools, and a forum. Will be live on July 21, 2009, 3:59 pm PDT (really!!).

Image credit: ClipArtOf.com: http://images.clipartof.com/small/26970-Clipart-Illustration-Of-A-Grunge-Textured-Background-Of-An-Incomplete-World-Map-Puzzle-With-The-Last-Piece-Resting-On-Top.jpg

NECC 2009: SIGML Forum (We Found Kilroy!)

We held our SIGML Forum (NECC 2009) at the World War II Memorial in Washington DC this afternoon. The weather helped us out as a thunderstorm moved through BEFORE we started. Using a set of QR codes we had created to provide about 25 participants with digital content related to various parts of the memorial, we asked them to do the following:

The U.S. National World War II Memorial is a National Memorial dedicated to Americans who served in the armed forces and as civilians during World War II. While many people agree that this is an important monument, critics have argued that

• •its location breaks up the view between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial;
• •the monument takes up space historically used for demonstrations; and
• •that its architecture resembles the architecture of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

Your task is to come up with a compelling argument that demonstrates the importance of the World War II Memorial today.

Use your mobile phones to access supplementary digital content, using the QR codes in this booklet. In addition, you may use your mobile phone to collect evidence in and around the memorial. We will leave it up to you as to how you want to do that.

Participants noted that the experience they had at the memorial was very different from just walking through it. They tended to spend more time at different parts of the monument, and I think they got a better understanding of its importance and its meaning, judging from the discussion we had afterwards. I also noticed that during the debrief nobody talked about what didn’t work (and we did run into some glitches during the event), but all feedback focused on the learning that had taken place. Some other comments that were made included the importance of becoming more literate and fluent in the use of audio and video (not just text), and that the event showed some real possibilities of mobile learning.

We shot a bunch of video and took pictures, and will create a short video of the event in the next couple of days. We’ve posted the QR codes online. More on this to follow shortly.

Oh yes, and we did find Kilroy