Not only am I introducing a guest blogger, but Jill Duffy is the new senior editor at ACM responsible for eLearn Magazine. Meet Jill and learn about her skills and background:
When I was an undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo, a tech-savvy friend of mine helped me land a work-study gig doing something that he claimed would one day boost my resume. He introduced me to Martha, a woman who had a passion for technology that I could see burning behind her eyes. She was the kind of person who was both on top of current trends in technology, as well as able to see exactly it was headed, and it was her mission to move the university to the bleeding edge.
She hired me to be a tech operator for two nursing classes that were participating in distance learning pilot programs. My job was to hook up the video and audio feeds that connected the two sites, and then make sure they stayed connected throughout the class. This is how Martha explained the job to me: “You’ll basically be making sure that seven beefy telephone lines are staying open for three hours.”
She added, “If the lines drop, reconnect them. If you can’t reconnect them, hit the record button so at least we’ll have a VHS.”
I was also in charge of manipulating the cameras, cutting between shots of the teacher’s face, shots of the students’ faces when they spoke, and shots of the reference materials. “The most important part of your whole job,” Martha explained, “is to make sure the camera is never stagnant. Make it look like a movie or a television show, not a class. That’s the only way the people on the other end will be interested enough to get anything out of it.”
That lesson – that technology-based education should embrace entertainment standards – has stuck with me.
It’s funny, but for a long time I had forgotten entirely about that work-study job. It came rushing back when I started investigating serious games while writing and editing for Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, two professional video game development publications. I spent a good five years talking to developers of games for health, education, military training, business training, and social change.
The biggest problem in the serious games sector since its inception is that content experts all too often want to spoon feed information to their audience. And while I’m sure most eLearn readers will agree that neither students nor education are usually best served in that manner, the problem that remains is, well, “How do we do it?”
I’ve been on yet another side of the e-learning equation, too. As a graduate student studying English Composition, I read and wrote about the effects of technology on students who are not adept writers. What happens when a student, who is already not confident in his or her writing ability, is forced to communicate with other students primarily online? What happens when students who are technologically confident finally get to take a Comp 101 class that actually encourages them to blog, post comments, and chat online? Are students more or less likely to ask questions in an online learning environment? Are students more or less likely to answer one another’s questions and figure things out for themselves?
I’ve just joined the staff here at ACM as senior editor of eLearn (in addition to a few other publications), and I hope to continue exploring many of these questions, from the theoretical to the practical to the technological.
Jill Duffy, Jill.Duffy@hq.acm.org