Snow Leopards and Poetry- Reflections on EDIT 762 Week 3

What Bobby May Have (Thought He) Looked Like
Photo of Cape May Zoo Snow Leopard Cubs by Dale Gerhard 

"I'm a snow leopard!", Bobby exclaimed, with absolutely no context whatsoever, kind of like the opening to this blog entry. I was sitting in a classroom at Lake Braddock High School in 1990, waiting for the meeting of the Wargamers club to start. This was something of a ruse... we were there to play role playing games. The problem was that at the time, role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons had something of a bad reputation (see, for example, The Great 1980s Dungeons and Dragons Panic), so technically clubs for role playing games weren't allowed in Fairfax County Public Schools. It wouldn't be the only time FCPS embraced an idea not substantiated by research (another, perhaps worse example is  Learning Styles Based Curriculum), but fortunately one of the history teachers agreed to turn a blind eye and be our sponsor as we played "war games".

Apparently A Cool Band Though
Captains of the Chess Team Logo found here

In reality, though, we were just a bunch of nerds, and this was, unfortunately, back before these kinds of things became cool. Bobby had just made a character in some game or other, and apparently that character was a snow leopard. Or something. It seemed weird, even to us, who were hardly paragons of cool. I for example, happened to be the captain of the chess team. As I explain to my students now, the difference between the captain of the chess team and the captain of the football team is that when the captain of the football team walks down the halls, all the girls scream and run towards him, whereas when the captain of the chess team does so, they just scream and run.

Probably More Fun Than a CS Class at Stanford
Zork cover image found here

In any case, working through module 3 this week, I was reminded of this as I was doing the reading, because shortly after leaving high school, I began playing an early internet game called a MUD, Multi User Dungeon, which is a text based game that many people can play at once, kind of like a group version of Zork . The revolutionary aspect of a MUD is that it allowed large numbers of people to play what was effectively a role playing game, meaning one need no longer find a small group, with a leader willing to run the adventure, often in the privacy of one's own home (or university computer lab in my case).

Basically, it was an RPG version of one of the topics I reviewed this week, which was the MOOC, Massive Open Online Course. Such an approach has similar advantages... Many thousands of people can take a course at once, from a variety of places, and at least theoretically benefit from something that would normally require a leader (instructor) and a small group of people (the class), without the cost and difficulty associated therewith.

Of course, there are downsides to a MUD too. Even though one can interact with other players, the adventures were pre-scripted by the people that coded the game, and lacked the joy and spontaneity that can arise from having a skilled storyteller lead an adventure and react to what the players are doing. Similarly, although I have not taken an MOOC, I suspect similar disadvantages apply... The course is the course, and it's not like the designer is going to be able to interact with a student who has a question or idea with thousands of such students participating. It seems like the ultimate extreme of online learning, and I would imagine the downsides are therefore magnified.

One thing we have learned in the BOLS program, for example, is that online programs require students that are motivated and self-regulated, and in many school districts the course completion and graduation rates are drastically lower than in brick and mortar schools, so I was not surprised to see  one of the articles report that completion rates in these classes are low... there are even few supports and staff interactions than even a normal fully online school (Hill, 2012). Hill reports that some schools are considering adding instruction interaction in smaller groups, but I don't really see how it's an MOOC at that point (ibid).

Photo of a Burma -Shave sign found here

The other thing I discovered is that I have some kind of compulsion to write Burma-Shave poems even outside of the assignment we had this week. One of my colleagues even challenged me to do a peer review in the other course I'm taking, EDIT 767, in the form of a Burma-Shave poem. My initial comment was that if I had the solution to the problem he was describing in the document, I wouldn't share it... I'd quit my job, become a consultant, and rake in the cash. He replied with the challenge, so I shot back with:

If I had the answer
I'd be exultant
I wouldn't tell you
I'd become a consult
ant
Online Learning Quality Assurance League

So perhaps that particular assignment has created a monster.