My problem with "just-in-time" learning

May 23, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in education, technology, videogames

"Just-in-time (JIT) learning" is the newish buzzword you hear often in association with video games and learning. It's a deceptively simple idea suggesting that learning is better when it is "on-demand." You encounter a problem, you're given the information to solve it, and you solve it then and there. No need to memorize a set of facts ahead of time that you may or may not use in the future, no need for abstract concepts that have no bearing on the immediate demands of the situation, no need for decontextualized facts and figures. As far as I know, this concept is assumed to be right and I have never seen the concept criticized before, but I'm going to go ahead and say: I have a problem with JIT learning on two levels: 1) It's overly vague and 2) It often doesn't work.

Recommended: The Glamour of Grammar

May 20, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in communication, linguistics

I came across The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark while looking for an approachable guide to grammar for my graduate students. Grammar is something that everyone struggles with, regardless of whether you're a native speaker of English or not. Many things you've learned as a student may or may not have changed over time. Any student of language would also realize that grammatical rules evolve, so rules such as "never end your sentence with a preposition" are one of those rules that are falling out of use. (I also read this right after Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable's brilliant A History of the English Language, which went in depth into many other issues, and focused a lot more on the historical evolution of language since its beginnings, and its foreign influences over time.)

A role for exogenous games?

May 11, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in education, games, linguistics

Last year, I was offered to teach a class called on grammar and structural linguistics, which I accepted with some hesitance because I considered it a bit outside of my comfort zone. I've taught sociolinguistics and communications courses before, but this is hardcore linguistics, requiring knowledge not just of grammar but also of how to analyze the syntactic structure of sentences using grammar trees. What made it even more intimidating was that these were four hour courses, and I had to make it interesting to the students. Games, then.

The Self-Imposed Challenge

May 05, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in education, games

I've often experimented with assessment in my classes. I once--somewhat masochistically--asked students to come up with questions for me to take as a midterm. (The point of it was to turn the idea of a midterm on its head, not to find out what students know, but what they don't know, and why. It's a very effective way of finding out gaps in their knowledge and be able to fill it quickly. It was a small class, fortunately, and I changed the format the next time round, asking the students to make their own midterms for each other.)

For all the talk about games-based learning and gamification of the classroom (not sure about the latter yet, will blog about it in due time), I'm surprised the question of assessment hasn't come up as often as it should have. If it does come up, it's usually in the form of using games as assessment (e.g., designing a game that demonstrates your understanding of something). Having worked with some assessment gurus in the past, I'm always pushing myself to rethink assessment and to avoid traditional forms of assessments like the plague, so a few ideas inspired by games have seeped into my head over the years.