Articles

Reach for the Sky: GSATC founder helping tech companies to 'dream big enough'

By Tim Ronaldson

Upstate Business Trends

September 2010

Sometime in the near future, the Greenville Spartanburg Anderson Technology Council might have to change its name.

The organization is no longer an “Upstate phenomenon,” as founder Phil Yanov called it. It is now a mainstay in the Midlands, Charleston and, in September, it will expand to Charlotte. Through its weekly luncheons and Tech After Five events, the GSATC is seeking to connect technology professionals in a way they’re not often connected – offline.

“We are relentless advocates for technology and entrepreneurship,” Yanov said.

Much like technology itself, the GSATC is expanding at a rapid pace. In September, the organization will celebrate its eighth birthday and venture into its fourth city.

“Our success baffles me,” Yanov said. “It’s a very simple idea. We’re very careful how we frame the conversation. We’re really trying to help (our members) get something done.”

The GSATC accomplishes this by taking the extra step for its networking attendees. In advance of the event, the group asks attendees what they’re looking to get out of the event, and they publish that on each person’s name badge. They also print a brochure with who’s attending to let others know who they can expect to see at the meeting. Following events, Yanov and his team follow up with attendees to share their stories about their experiences, and opportunities both capitalized on and missed.

The core members of the GSATC are tech professionals who are working inside another “non-tech” business. A company such a BI-LO, for example, needs a sophisticated IT network in the background that happens on the end-point to move its groceries, so while it wouldn’t be considered a tech company, it is sinks or swims based on the functionality of its technology.

“The fact is that tech is a lever for many businesses,” Yanov said. “Sometimes, it’s simply the price of doing business, but very clever companies are using it to leapfrog others.”

In the Upstate, this can be seen first-hand with the University Center of Greenville. Last fall, the UCG was inducted into the Virtual World Consortium to expand access for faculty and students into virtual world platforms. This spring, the University connected through Clemson University to Internet2, a private high-speed fiber network. And this month, the UCG plans to launch SimHub, an immersive technology center, to serve as a connection site to support and experience simulated environments, augmented reality applications with smart phones, gaming applications and expand virtual world use.

Above is a screen shot inside the virtual world platform in which the University Center of Greenville's member institutions have classes or projects. The various outlets can simulate more traditional settings like a board meeting room, as well as more abstract or imaginative settings, such as a 3D shape outlining a complicated process.

“Combining the resources of Internet2 with the VWC will exponentially increase the quantity and quality of teaching and research possibilities at the University Center,” said UCB President & CEO Fred Baus. “This partnership allows UCG to remain at the forefront of technologies for teaching and learning, as well as advance new models for immersive learning in virtual environments.”

Projects such as SimHub are helping to build the information technology industry’s leaders of tomorrow – people who could one day follow the path of Yanov.

Yanov has been a techie for as long as he can remember. He built his own information technology company that he eventually sold to Kyrus Corp. – a firm that sold computers, cash registers and networks for large grocery store chains – and became that company’s e-business executive and CIO.

While he was working professionally at his regular job in 1983, he started the first IBM PC users group in the Upstate. While it was simply a hobby group at first, his interest in “getting tech people together” grew, which lead to him founding the GSATC, his current full-time job, in September 2002.

The GSATC’s “strongest reach” is with information technology professionals. While the organization has reached out to other areas of technology, such as GE wind experts, the IT professional is its core demographic because Yanov believes it is a great platform to build business and build wealth. A smart person with good people and the right skills can build a great technology business, he said.

“IT is the world’s longest-running IQ test,” he said. “It continues to get more sophisticated.”

The ever-advancing nature of the technology business is both a blessing and a curse to industry professionals. While it allows for continual advancement, it also forces people to re-train quite often.

Plumbers do their work quite similarly to the way they did it 20 or 30 years ago, Yanov said, but computer programmers are constantly forced to learn new computer languages that may only have a 10-year lifespan.

“The problem I see in what we’ve done is you have to re-learn your toolset regularly,” he said.

What Yanov would love to see technology professionals do is stop thinking too small, and that is one goal of the GSATC. He tells a story of a member of the IBM PC users group who used to bring his kid to meetings as a way to bond. Today, the two have built an international tech company because they were able to think big and take chances.

“I think we don’t dream big enough. Our concept of money and success in this community is sometimes kind of limiting,” Yanov said.

“We’ve had some beautiful, great big wins. We need more of them. We need more people to see them.”

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom

By Jeffrey R. Young

The Chronicle on Higher Education

July 24, 2010

Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard U., helped write the Department of Education's new National Educational Technology Plan, which challenges educators to leverage modern technology to create engaging learning experiences for students.

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

"If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they've ever been prepared to."

And poor teaching can have serious consequences, he says, when students fall behind or drop out because of sleep-inducing lectures. Colleges have tried several approaches over the years to spur teaching innovation. But among instructors across the nation, holdouts clearly remain.

Mr. Dede's arguments (in more bureaucratic language) form the basis of a new National Educational Technology Plan, issued in draft form in March by the U.S. Department of Education. "The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures," says the plan, which he helped write. The title of the report, "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," suggests that the country's teaching methods need a reboot.

It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn't the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm.

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using "clickers," or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades. The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide, did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Should colleges do more to push new technology? Should professors throw out those yellowed lecture notes and start fresh (or at least update their jokes)?

Here are three suggestions for next steps based on interviews with experts.

Focus on the Non-Techies

The least-wired faculty members make the best advocates for high-tech teaching. That's according to a session at last week's Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

The session's title promises a world where every professor works to teach better: "Faculty Motivation and Technology Integration: How to Bring 100% of Non-Techie Faculty On Board."

The key is to enlist longtime professors with no particular interest in technology and get them to try the latest online forums, videoconferencing, or clickers, said the two presenters, from Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. Then encourage the professors to give a lunch talk for their colleagues.

And their peers' eyes will light up as they imagine their own experiments, said one of the presenters, Dan Lim, assistant vice president for educational technology and distance learning. "Their minds will start working, thinking, 'I know I can do this,'" he said.

One of Mr. Lim's non-techie converts is Lenore S. Brantley, a professor of psychology, who taught an online course with audioconferencing tools last year. "It's always a little frightening because people from my generation did not grow up with technology," says the professor, who has been teaching for more than 40 years. "I was willing to try it because I like to try new things."

Things didn't always work perfectly—she had to trek to campus to teach the online classes because she couldn't get the software to run on her home computer. But the technology came in handy when she wanted to leave town for a church conference: She could still teach from the road.

At her lunch talk to colleagues in February, she gave a PowerPoint presentation titled, "My Journey in Teaching: From Then 'Til Now." She kicked it off with pictures of the tools that were standard back in the day: typewriters, adding machines, film projectors, and a paper grade book. She doesn't miss them.

"I'm very surprised how well I like it and how well you get to know your students," she says of her experience in an online classroom.

Administrators said at least one other "non-techie" professor showed up for a college-sponsored tech-training workshop soon after Ms. Brantley's talk.

Watch Your Language

Summer is prime time for professors to go back to school themselves, to attend short workshops on how to teach with the latest technology tools.

Typically, colleges give seminars with titles like "5 Ways to Use a Wiki in Your Class" or "Getting Started With Blackboard."

Too often those stress the technology more than its goals, though, says Mr. Dede, of Harvard.

"Those technology sessions are useful, but often they're marketed the wrong way," he told me. "What you want to do is deal with issues that keep faculty up at night. The titles should be, How do you keep students coming to your class rather than just copying the notes off the Web? or, How to get students to respond really deeply rather than from CliffsNotes."

Donald Williams, senior vice president for academic administration at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences, says his institution goes out of its way to hire tech-support staff who speak teaching rather than technology. "None of them are salesmen for technology—they're all educators," he says. "They're not the geeky type of tech person who can't really get down to the level of the everyday user."

Look to Disciplines

Some professors attend one workshop, try one new trick, and consider their teaching reinvigorated.

But a number of teaching experts hope to encourage professors to think of their teaching as something that needs constant care and feeding.

"I like to think about it as an ongoing process," says Pat Hutchings, senior associate with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Scholarly disciplines, rather than colleges, may become the best drivers of teaching reform, then, because scholars already turn to disciplinary organizations and journals to keep up with research.

History is one field leading the approach to reform, says Ms. Hutchings, pointing to the work of David Pace, a history professor at Indiana University at Bloomington.

In a 2004 essay in The American Historical Review, Mr. Pace, as Mr. Dede has done, compared college professors to doctors operating on patients without proper training.

"Why is the classroom a place for the uncritical perpetuation of folk traditions, when the operating room is not?" he wrote. "Most of us care passionately about teaching and believe that it is vitally important that students be exposed to the kinds of reasoning and the knowledge of the past that members of our profession have developed. But until very recently, it was believed that no formal training was necessary before historians began thinking about teaching and learning, no examination of the efforts of other scholars, no collective effort to ground knowledge as firmly as possible."

Notice there's no mention of technology there.

Indeed, the National Educational Technology Plan has long sections with little mention of technology at all, Mr. Dede says.

And there doesn't have to be, he says, because the role of technology in classroom innovation is a given. "Most of those changes are almost impossible to make without technology," he says. "Technology becomes the handmaiden of the change."

Avatars to Teach the Teachers

Inside Higher Ed

By Steve Kolowich

July 7, 2010

Monique, the eager-to-please girl with the chirpy alto, is raising her hand again. But I’m more interested in drawing Maria -- who hides in the back row and avoids eye contact -- out of her shell.

“She don’t wanna talk to you, man,” says Marcus, confidently flip as usual. “She don’t talk to anybody.”

Vince, the pallid kid with dark hair who sits at Marcus’s left, chuckles -- just like he did earlier when Marcus told me he “found” the Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, now draped around his neck, “in the parking lot.”

So I try engaging Francis, the shy but willing young man in camouflage shorts and a T-shirt. I ask him what he wants to learn about. “Uh … music,” says Francis, before launching into a beat-boxing exhibition that he says he learned from YouTube. I compliment him on the routine. Noting this, Monique raises her hand with redoubled urgency.

This is my class.

Well, sort of. I’m not really a middle-school teacher. But then again, the kids are not really middle-school students. They’re not even humans.

They are avatars. Not the blue kind from the James Cameron film, or even the sort of avatar most often used in higher education: the fantastical, flighted characters that professors and student embody when learning in Second Life. To the contrary, the point of these avatars, created by a team at the University of Central Florida, is to be as realistic as possible.

They have to be if they are going to revolutionize teacher training, says Lisa Dieker, coordinator of the special education program at Central Florida’s college of education. That, after all, is the goal of the TeachME project: to effectively eliminate the trial-by-fire approach to classroom-management training, and replace it with something more instructive and less dangerous.

Dieker and the TeachME team -- which includes members of the university’s education, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and theater departments -- believe they have created a virtual classroom so real-seeming that it could drastically improve how prepared novice teachers are by the time they venture into the blackboard jungle as student teachers -- and in so doing, reduce teacher turnover by weeding out likely candidates for burnout.

Perhaps more importantly, it could limit the students’ exposure to underprepared, ineffective teachers. And, the team assumes, improve learning outcomes.

Without a Script

Here’s how it works: The teacher-in-training stands in a room in front of a projection screen depicting five students in two rows. The student avatars are being controlled by “interactors” -- acting students from the university’s fine arts school and sometimes hired professionals -- who have studied the behavior of the students they are embodying.

The fact that the teachers-in-training are interacting with avatars that are being controlled in real time by humans, as opposed to artificially intelligent personas, is the key to the whole project, says Dieker.

“The first scenario they built, they said ‘Lisa, come in here, stand on this spot, and say this,’ ” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s not teaching -- I should be able to walk in and say whatever I want.’ And they said ‘You’re crazy! We don’t have simulators that do that!’ ”

The presence of human interactors eliminates the parameters that would make an artificially intelligent simulation a poor training tool for actual classroom teaching, Dieker says. “Teaching,” she observes, “is not a scripted activity.”

The interactors doing the live sessions are across campus in the university’s Media Convergence Lab, where they can see and hear the teacher-in-training via Skype. A second puppeteer, Angel Lopez, a teacher educator at the graduate school, controls a series of knobs that can prompt non-speaking outbursts, such as giggling -- or, in Francis’s case, beat-boxing.

Lopez can use the dials to “crank up the chaos” if a teacher-in-training starts to rub the students the wrong way. By way of explanation, Dieker calls up the virtual classroom and begins to do everything wrong: She antagonizes the students, and tries punishing minor disruptions by making them write “I will respect the substitute teacher” on a piece of paper 50 times.

“I can only do this for so long,” says Dieker, interrupting herself. “These are real kids! It’s hard to be mean to them.”

Harder for some than others. That is where the TeachME system can detect potentially unfit teachers early, hence reducing teacher turnover, through what the team calls the “after-action review.” If a teacher is consistently rattled by the chaos that can inhere in a middle-school classroom, that person might be advised to pursue another career. Likewise, Dieker says, if a teacher provokes chaos and exhibits no empathy or remorse, that person might not have what it takes either. And for student teachers who have what it takes but also have plenty to learn about teaching in practice, TeachME affords them the perfect environment in which to make mistakes.

Keeping it Real

In order to recreate a realistic classroom dynamic, each of the students is meant to fit one of the four types cognitive psychologists use to classify personalities.

Monique, of the perpetually raised hand, is aggressive-dependent, always seeking affirmation from her teacher; Maria, the unresponsive one, is “passive-independent,” shying away from contact with her teachers and peers; Marcus, of the hood-ornament neck chain, is “aggressive-independent, constantly asserting an authority in contradistinction to the teacher’s”; Francis, the reticent but responsive beat-boxer, is a “passive-dependent.” Vince, the one who really gets a kick out of Marcus’s subversive behavior, is also a “passive-dependent,” but he looks for affirmation from Marcus, not the teacher.

“You’d see those personality types in every middle school in the country,” Dieker says. “We still have these specific types as we move into adulthood, but we tend to blend in other types that allow us to keep our jobs and not get fired and all those things. But in middle school, when kids go through those horrible years of adolescence, they tend to be pretty true to a type.”

Needless to say, adhering to these types in an extemporaneous manner requires some serious skill on the part of the interactor. Kate Ingraham, an doctoral student in the university's instructional technologies program, is the one pulling the strings during my session. She has honed her portrayal of the characters over two years. (Update: An earlier version of this article misidentified Kate Ingraham as a UCF faculty member with a similar name.)

Seeding Teacher Colleges

The rub is that TeachME cannot fit into a neat little package — not yet, anyway.

In order to use the program, there needs to be an interactor in the lab and on the clock. The TeachME team has slimmed down the operation: they used to use five interactors per session (one playing each student); now, in an effort to make the technology cheaper and easier to deploy, a single interactor juggles all five personalities. The students’ body language is pre-recorded by interactors in motion-capture suits; they go on autopilot when not speaking.

Charles Hughes, the director of the Media Convergence Lab at Central Florida, says he is working on ways to reduce the load of the interactor. For example, the team is working to automate more elements of the system, so that interactors can work from home instead of in the lab (although the team is cautious of automating too many elements, so as not to compromise the verisimilitude of the virtual classroom).

Dieker says the goal is to make the system as cheap to implement as possible. From a hardware perspective, the system is theoretically inexpensive. Hughes estimates the hardware would cost about $5,000 to $7,000, and notes that the typical graduate school would probably own many of the necessary components already. The interactors currently bill at about $120 per hour, Hughes says.

There is also the matter of interactor training. Telecommuter or no, an interactor needs to be extensively trained to take on the roles of each student and be able to transition fluidly between those personas. Ingram says she is currently designing a program to train more interactors as more colleges of education implement TeachME pilot programs.

So far, Central Florida is working on partnerships with several colleges to deploy and improve TeachME. Utah State University is running a TeachME pilot that focuses on disabled, illiterate, and autistic students (Ingram has trained herself to play an autistic character, named “Austin”); another partner institution is working on a truncated program aimed at Teach For America, which has been criticized (and even satirized) for placing burnout-prone teachers in underprivileged schools; another partner is focusing on students in rural schools. There is no need to build new labs on location; the teachers-in-training at each far-flung college can preside over their simulated classrooms via Skype (which is what I did during my demo from Inside Higher Ed’s Washington office).

The current goal is 10 university partners, which Hughes says he thinks could grow more ambitious once the TeachME team implements more advances this fall that he says “could change the economic model substantially.”

The biggest question at this point is whether the TeachME teacher training system actually improves student learning. “We can prove it changes teacher practice,” says Dieker, but longer-term studies will be necessary to see whether the students in classes taught by TeachME-trained teachers actually learn better, and whether that success gap can be traced to the TeachME system.

Monique, the eager-to-please girl with the chirpy alto, is raising her hand again. But I’m more interested in drawing Maria -- who hides in the back row and avoids eye contact -- out of her shell.

“She don’t wanna talk to you, man,” says Marcus, confidently flip as usual. “She don’t talk to anybody.”

Vince, the pallid kid with dark hair who sits at Marcus’s left, chuckles -- just like he did earlier when Marcus told me he “found” the Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, now draped around his neck, “in the parking lot.”

So I try engaging Francis, the shy but willing young man in camouflage shorts and a T-shirt. I ask him what he wants to learn about. “Uh … music,” says Francis, before launching into a beat-boxing exhibition that he says he learned from YouTube. I compliment him on the routine. Noting this, Monique raises her hand with redoubled urgency.

This is my class.

Well, sort of. I’m not really a middle-school teacher. But then again, the kids are not really middle-school students. They’re not even humans.

They are avatars. Not the blue kind from the James Cameron film, or even the sort of avatar most often used in higher education: the fantastical, flighted characters that professors and student embody when learning in Second Life. To the contrary, the point of these avatars, created by a team at the University of Central Florida, is to be as realistic as possible.

They have to be if they are going to revolutionize teacher training, says Lisa Dieker, coordinator of the special education program at Central Florida’s college of education. That, after all, is the goal of the TeachME project: to effectively eliminate the trial-by-fire approach to classroom-management training, and replace it with something more instructive and less dangerous.

Dieker and the TeachME team -- which includes members of the university’s education, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and theater departments -- believe they have created a virtual classroom so real-seeming that it could drastically improve how prepared novice teachers are by the time they venture into the blackboard jungle as student teachers -- and in so doing, reduce teacher turnover by weeding out likely candidates for burnout.

Perhaps more importantly, it could limit the students’ exposure to underprepared, ineffective teachers. And, the team assumes, improve learning outcomes.

Without a Script

Here’s how it works: The teacher-in-training stands in a room in front of a projection screen depicting five students in two rows. The student avatars are being controlled by “interactors” -- acting students from the university’s fine arts school and sometimes hired professionals -- who have studied the behavior of the students they are embodying.

The fact that the teachers-in-training are interacting with avatars that are being controlled in real time by humans, as opposed to artificially intelligent personas, is the key to the whole project, says Dieker.

“The first scenario they built, they said ‘Lisa, come in here, stand on this spot, and say this,’ ” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s not teaching -- I should be able to walk in and say whatever I want.’ And they said ‘You’re crazy! We don’t have simulators that do that!’ ”

The presence of human interactors eliminates the parameters that would make an artificially intelligent simulation a poor training tool for actual classroom teaching, Dieker says. “Teaching,” she observes, “is not a scripted activity.”

The interactors doing the live sessions are across campus in the university’s Media Convergence Lab, where they can see and hear the teacher-in-training via Skype. A second puppeteer, Angel Lopez, a teacher educator at the graduate school, controls a series of knobs that can prompt non-speaking outbursts, such as giggling -- or, in Francis’s case, beat-boxing.

Lopez can use the dials to “crank up the chaos” if a teacher-in-training starts to rub the students the wrong way. By way of explanation, Dieker calls up the virtual classroom and begins to do everything wrong: She antagonizes the students, and tries punishing minor disruptions by making them write “I will respect the substitute teacher” on a piece of paper 50 times.

“I can only do this for so long,” says Dieker, interrupting herself. “These are real kids! It’s hard to be mean to them.”

Harder for some than others. That is where the TeachME system can detect potentially unfit teachers early, hence reducing teacher turnover, through what the team calls the “after-action review.” If a teacher is consistently rattled by the chaos that can inhere in a middle-school classroom, that person might be advised to pursue another career. Likewise, Dieker says, if a teacher provokes chaos and exhibits no empathy or remorse, that person might not have what it takes either. And for student teachers who have what it takes but also have plenty to learn about teaching in practice, TeachME affords them the perfect environment in which to make mistakes.

Keeping it Real

In order to recreate a realistic classroom dynamic, each of the students is meant to fit one of the four types cognitive psychologists use to classify personalities.

Monique, of the perpetually raised hand, is aggressive-dependent, always seeking affirmation from her teacher; Maria, the unresponsive one, is “passive-independent,” shying away from contact with her teachers and peers; Marcus, of the hood-ornament neck chain, is “aggressive-independent, constantly asserting an authority in contradistinction to the teacher’s”; Francis, the reticent but responsive beat-boxer, is a “passive-dependent.” Vince, the one who really gets a kick out of Marcus’s subversive behavior, is also a “passive-dependent,” but he looks for affirmation from Marcus, not the teacher.

“You’d see those personality types in every middle school in the country,” Dieker says. “We still have these specific types as we move into adulthood, but we tend to blend in other types that allow us to keep our jobs and not get fired and all those things. But in middle school, when kids go through those horrible years of adolescence, they tend to be pretty true to a type.”

Needless to say, adhering to these types in an extemporaneous manner requires some serious skill on the part of the interactor. Kate Ingraham, an doctoral student in the university's instructional technologies program, is the one pulling the strings during my session. She has honed her portrayal of the characters over two years. (Update: An earlier version of this article misidentified Kate Ingraham as a UCF faculty member with a similar name.)

Seeding Teacher Colleges

The rub is that TeachME cannot fit into a neat little package — not yet, anyway.

In order to use the program, there needs to be an interactor in the lab and on the clock. The TeachME team has slimmed down the operation: they used to use five interactors per session (one playing each student); now, in an effort to make the technology cheaper and easier to deploy, a single interactor juggles all five personalities. The students’ body language is pre-recorded by interactors in motion-capture suits; they go on autopilot when not speaking.

Charles Hughes, the director of the Media Convergence Lab at Central Florida, says he is working on ways to reduce the load of the interactor. For example, the team is working to automate more elements of the system, so that interactors can work from home instead of in the lab (although the team is cautious of automating too many elements, so as not to compromise the verisimilitude of the virtual classroom).

Dieker says the goal is to make the system as cheap to implement as possible. From a hardware perspective, the system is theoretically inexpensive. Hughes estimates the hardware would cost about $5,000 to $7,000, and notes that the typical graduate school would probably own many of the necessary components already. The interactors currently bill at about $120 per hour, Hughes says.

There is also the matter of interactor training. Telecommuter or no, an interactor needs to be extensively trained to take on the roles of each student and be able to transition fluidly between those personas. Ingram says she is currently designing a program to train more interactors as more colleges of education implement TeachME pilot programs.

So far, Central Florida is working on partnerships with several colleges to deploy and improve TeachME. Utah State University is running a TeachME pilot that focuses on disabled, illiterate, and autistic students (Ingram has trained herself to play an autistic character, named “Austin”); another partner institution is working on a truncated program aimed at Teach For America, which has been criticized (and even satirized) for placing burnout-prone teachers in underprivileged schools; another partner is focusing on students in rural schools. There is no need to build new labs on location; the teachers-in-training at each far-flung college can preside over their simulated classrooms via Skype (which is what I did during my demo from Inside Higher Ed’s Washington office).

The current goal is 10 university partners, which Hughes says he thinks could grow more ambitious once the TeachME team implements more advances this fall that he says “could change the economic model substantially.”

The biggest question at this point is whether the TeachME teacher training system actually improves student learning. “We can prove it changes teacher practice,” says Dieker, but longer-term studies will be necessary to see whether the students in classes taught by TeachME-trained teachers actually learn better, and whether that success gap can be traced to the TeachME system.

'Augmented Reality' on Smartphones Brings Teaching Down to Earth

Chronicle on Higher Education

By Sophia Li

At the University of New Mexico, some students in second-year Spanish classes become detectives. They travel to Los Griegos, an Albuquerque neighborhood 15 minutes northwest of the campus, on a mission: Clear the names of four families accused of conspiring to murder a local resident.

It's a fictional murder mystery, and instead of guns and badges, the students are armed with iPod Touches, provided by the university. When students enter their location into the wireless handheld devices, a clue might turn up: a bloody machete, for example, or a virtual character who may converse with them—in Spanish—about a suspect.

But Los Griegos and the language skills needed to navigate the locale are no fiction. By integrating mobile computing and actual surroundings, the educational game, Mentira—Spanish for "lie" and a reference to the claim of conspiracy the students are assigned to debunk—helps take teaching to a new place outside the classroom: "augmented reality."

Video and computer games are commonly criticized for isolating players from reality, but augmented-reality developers who work in higher education see the technology as a way to accomplish just the opposite.

"Real life is pretty high-res," says David J. Gagnon, a faculty consultant and instructional designer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Augmented-reality games, he says, are a way to help people "get out and see that."

Mobile by Design

Mr. Gagnon is the lead developer of a software tool called ARIS, or Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. ARIS lets designers link text, images, video, or audio to a physical location, making the real world into a map of virtual characters and objects that people can navigate with iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches.

The open-source tool, which is the brainchild of a Madison research group that focuses on games and learning, was built with students and educators in mind. It has not yet been released to the public; developers are aiming for a fall rollout.

Mentira was created by Christopher Holden, an assistant professor in the honors college at New Mexico, and Julie M. Sykes, an assistant professor of Hispanic linguistics at the university. They used a limited-release, early version of ARIS. The software is simple to use, they say, and doesn't call for special programming expertise.

But ARIS isn't the only game in town. Eric D. Klopfer, an associate professor of science education and director of the Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created two similar tools and has worked with augmented-reality games for nearly a decade.

His team used to rely on personal digital assistants, which he calls "clunky units," that received GPS readings only in good weather and with an antenna.

But now the technical challenges are "fading away," he says. GPS systems have become more accurate. And they have become phones. Increasingly popular GPS-enabled cellphones come equipped with cameras and other features that open up new avenues for enhancing reality-based games.

Arguments for Augmentation

The researchers and educators in this small, emerging field see clear advantages to using real-world sites as the backdrop for educational games.

A major goal of Mentira is to motivate students "to get their heads out of the textbook" by showing them that language has a vibrant local context, Ms. Sykes says. By setting the story in a nearby neighborhood, she and Mr. Holden took advantage of its historic sites and folklore to integrate learning about its history and culture into the game.

Likewise, Mr. Klopfer calls place-based learning with augmented reality a "great match" for topics at the intersection of science and society, like public health and environmental issues.

In one of his projects, a game about environmental contamination on MIT's campus, students showed a more nuanced understanding of how to handle a toxin's spill after discovering its source. Unlike students who played an entirely virtual version of the game on a computer, those who played the reality-based version appreciated that they were making choices "influenced by the community reality," he says.

In Mentira, too, students learn to weigh the consequences of their choices. For instance, they select what to say in their "conversations" with virtual characters, and their decisions affect the characters' responses. The setup teaches them how to accommodate the conversational styles of the characters—for example, how to speak politely to an older man, Ms. Sykes says.

Games like the New Mexico murder mystery only scratch the surface of what is possible, says Mr. Gagnon. He has seen a variety of other proposals for using ARIS in courses, including ethnographies that tie interviews to specific places and a scavenger hunt that teaches students to identify plant life.

This year's "Horizon Report," which forecasts tech trends in higher education, named augmented reality as one to watch. According to the report, which is produced in a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and Educause, technology that blends the virtual and the real is expected to enter mainstream use in teaching in the next two to three years.

Teaching with augmented reality is not all fun and games, however. Mr. Holden and Ms. Sykes struggled to find an affordable way to make their game a reality. They chose iPod Touches instead of costlier iPhones. As a result, they had to design a game that would work without GPS navigation and persuade the university to sign a contract for a mobile wireless hotspot.

Beyond the obstacles to getting the technology up and running, the duo say, they are still learning how to fit the game to an existing course. "Spanish 202 classes already have their syllabus," Mr. Holden says. Similar challenges are likely to surface as others look to augment their own teaching.

"The idea of it is something people get really excited about, myself included," Mr. Gagnon says. "The practicality of it is still something we really need to work on."

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