Gästföreläsning hos Åbo Akademi gällande framtidens skola.
Category Archives: Digitalisering i skolan
Tillämpad datateknik för framtidens samhälle! 220829
Dags för gästföreläsning för våra nya studenter på LTU igen. Ämnet är Tillämpad datateknik för framtidens samhälle!
Gästblogg hos Media & Learning
Jag blev inbjuden att skriva en text om lärande online för Media & Learning som reklam för att jag ska prata på deras konferens 220602 i Leuven, Belgien.
Inlägg på deras blogg samt samma text nedan (mest för egen arkivering).
Supporting students’ learning through game-based technologies
4 min read
By Peter Parnes, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.
Today, we take online synchronous real-time education with audio and video for granted, but in the early 1990’s, the only real option was to use dedicated and expensive video conferencing rooms. The students could not attend from home, but rather had to move to local learning centers to attend lectures at predefined times.
In 1995, I joined the newly created Center for Distance-spanning Technologies at Luleå University of Technology (LTU) as a graduate student. Here my colleagues and I worked on the vision of bringing real-time communications for learning and other applications from the video conferencing room to desktop computers. We developed a system called mStar, which was commercialized in 1998 via Marratech AB. The mStar prototype and later the Marratech products allowed us to experiment with how teaching and education online could be conducted and already in 1996, we held our first course online in northern Sweden where teachers from secondary schools could learn more about media technology, while at the same time helping evaluate the mStar tools.
The Marratech products were developed in collaboration with researchers at LTU following the living labs method where end-users were an integral part of the research and development which led to more usable products. By 2007, the Marratech products supported encrypted and secure real-time communications on Linux, Mac and Windows and the application was used by several hundred thousand users worldwide enabling education and other applications. In the same year Google acquired all the technology rights and I joined Google to continue our development efforts.
Since 2010, I have been a Professor in Pervasive and Mobile Computing at LTU, running the ArcTech Learning Lab which I founded in 2019 and where we do research and develop tools to help people learn using modern technologies including e.g., computer game technologies. Here, I currently mainly work on the WalkAbout interactive learning environment which is a distributed game-like environment for fun and active learning where users can express themselves using avatars and animations while moving around in one of several different 3D-environments and communicating using 3D-positional audio and text-based chat. Traditional slides are integrated via web-browser windows or more lightweight notes in the 3D-environments. To help overcome language barriers, all the text communication including the chat and notes can be translated in real-time to a large number of languages. Inclusion is central and users can select how they express themselves using avatars of various forms and shapes including fantasy characters in different ages and skin colors. WalkAbout is available on iOS, Mac and Windows and is currently being evaluated in a couple of courses online to help us further develop the tool. WalkAbout can also be used as a classroom enhancing tool where all participants are available in both the physical room and online at the same time. There are a number of enhancements being developed right now including non-playable characters supported by machine learning that give the students both support and encouragement when needed as well as will being able to answer questions related to their studies. Another example is the planned save and replay functionality where actions in the learning environment are recorded and played back as actions rather than as a fixed movie which means that listeners can interact with the recording.
I foresee that WalkAbout can be used for a number of different learning scenarios including old-style lectures, prepared student presentations, informal and gamified learning where students are encouraged and motivated by the tool to practice and learn more. My goal for the future with this research and development is that we can help students learn better both in the physical classroom and online using tools like WalkAbout. The goal though is not to replace teachers but rather give the teachers and their students tools that help them teach and learn better.
For more information about WalkAbout, please see www.walkabout.se.
Editor’s note: We are delighted to have Peter as one of our speakers for the Media & Learning 2022 Conference on 2-3 June in Leuven, Belgium. He will be giving a talk entitled “WalkAbout – A game based 3D-environment for active learning and student engagement“.
Author
Peter Parnes, Professor at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
Samhällets utveckling i digitaliseringens spår – gästföreläsning 220420 LTU
Inspelning av min gästföreläsning i kursen D0028E Programmering och digitalisering vid Luleå tekniska universitet 220420. Jag ger en introduktion till digitalisering, internets historia, framtidens arbetsmarknad, GDPR/DSF med mera.
Presentationen hittar ni här.
ArcTech Learning Lab – Film
En färsk film om ArcTech Learning Lab som Caroline Graeske och jag driver. Vill ni jobba med LTU runt lärande med digital teknik?
Dataspelsteknik för ökad social interaktion 211207
Kort presentation om Läslust och Afasi (Dialogica och WalkAbout) som stöd för social innovation.
Läslust
Vi har precis avslutat projektet Läslust som löpt under 2019-2021 med målet att hjälpa barn och unga att träna läsning och läsförståelse via dataspel. Vi har genom spel sett ökad delaktighet hos eleverna, vilket vi ser som jättepositivt.
Film om Dialogica och Afasi-projektet
Vi gjorde en film till Vinnova som slutredovisning i vårt projekt “När orden inte räcker till – avancerad kommunikation genom teknisk innovation för personer med afasi.” Projektet löpte under 2019-2021.
WalkAbout 211110 – Workshop Universeh
Curious about WalkAbout and how it can be used for higher education? 211110 1400-1600 we arrange within the Universeh project a seminar and workshop about WalkAbout. It is online via Zoom and everyone is welcome. If you do not want to be active, you can just listen to the first half, which is more of a presentation. The presentation and workshop is in English.
How should education be organized in an ideal world?
The basis for compulsory school education in Sweden goes back to 1842, but before that from 1723 it was the parents’ responsibility that all children learned how to read and write. The current school system has not changed much since the end of the 19:th century when the main motivation was that we needed an educated workforce for the factories as part of industrialization. I.e., the main motivation was not political in the sense that everybody should be educated, but rather financial, to support the industry. Since then, the school system has changed somewhat in how it is organized, e.g., responsibility moved from state to city level and we have many more schools and universities, but the educational format itself is still the same. In the end, it is just a group of children sitting together in the classroom and learning a specific subject at a specific time.
How could education instead be organized? Do we need to put every child/student in a specific group based on age even though we know what people and specifically children learn at different rates? There has also been talk about using modern technical tools in education for a long time and some progress is made, but here it is mostly a question of moving the learning material from physical to digital format. In the end, it comes down to: What is the motivation for learning from a societal perspective?
In an ideal world, everybody should learn everything they need to live a successful and prosperous life in a modern society, but unfortunately not everyone is motivated by the same things and can not learn at the same pace.
Right now, there is a big push in Sweden for life-long learning mainly motivated by new growing base industries like modern iron/steel-production and battery factories for electrical vehicles. These are mostly industry jobs with specific requirements and do not always fully match available educational programs. Instead, special cases with MOOCs and specific short programs are created by universities, but the main educational effort is still on the classical education.
The educational system overall needs to be refined/changed to support a life-long learning thinking where the learners are not finished learning at the stage they end their learning at. Most see a person that has finished a program at university level to be “finished”. Changes could include the following:
- Compulsory learning time for everybody every year. In Sweden we have compulsory vacation, which the employer must pay and why not use the same principle for learning where we all get 2-4 weeks paid learning time.
- Educational financing at university level should be shifted to include more of the life-long perspective and not only focus on basic educational programs.
- On compulsory level (year 1-9) followed by secondary school, the learning should be more integrated where several subjects could be read together and with shifting learning groups where the classical class is removed (we need to think about the social impact though).
- The school system should utilize technical tools to support the learners where technology is used to identify learning levels and learning motivation and adapt both the curriculum per student and the learning system itself. The tools would provide clear and direct feedback to the learner and help the learn more and finally help them get more motivated to continue to learn.
So, why is change so slow or non-existent in the school system? How can we make something happen?
/Peter Parnes