Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces

Sylvester Arnab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138239753
• eBook ISBN: 9781315295039
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces explores the potential, implications, and impact of game-based approaches and interventions in response to the blurring of boundaries between digital and physical as well as formal and informal learning spaces and contexts. The book delves into the concept, opportunities, and challenges of hybrid learning, which aims to reduce the barriers of time and physical space in teaching and learning practices, fostering seamless, sustained, and measurable learning experience and outcomes beyond the barriers of formal education and physical learning contexts.

Based on original research, Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces establishes trans-disciplinary and holistic considerations for further conceptual and empirical investigation into this topic, with the dual goals of a better understanding of the role of game-based approaches in a blended environment and of the possible structural and cultural transformation of formal education and lifelong learning. This book is an essential guide for researchers, designers, teachers, learners, and practitioners who want to better understand the relationship between games and learning that merges digital and physical experiences and blends formal and informal instructions.

PART 1

Hybrid Learning

1

Breaking the Barriers of Space and Time

Expanding the Horizon

To achieve inclusive, equitable and quality education, and lifelong learning opportunities for all, education needs to be opened up beyond the spatial, temporal and contextual boundaries and restrictions of a classroom. This way, the gap between formal, informal and social spaces can be bridged, bringing learners closer to real-world contexts and applications of knowledge and skills. As learning is invariably becoming more flexible, motivated by the pedagogical shifts from traditional classroom teaching to more hands-on activities (Almeida and Simoes, 2019), educators should be empowered to review, redesign and progress their practices, and be encouraged to implement new solutions as part of these.

The call for non-traditional education is not new. Over three decades ago, Wedemeyer (1981) stressed that the ‘teaching-learning system must work any place, any time, for one learner or many, directly confronts the space-time-elite barriers of the classroom model’ (p. 39). Time and space are identified by many educators as assets to classroom-based teaching. They often view other means of instruction such as digital approaches simply as an alternative delivery system for traditional pedagogy instead of a tool for implementing new pedagogy (Kuriloff, 2005). For instance, the misconstrued application of flipped learning often leads to basic video recording of a physical lecture uploaded online for students to access prior to classroom-based activities. The delivery channel changes but the way content is communicated and presented remains the same.

Learning spaces and contexts need to be flexible in order to respond to challenges associated with the fundamental aspects of learning that are personal, social, distributed, ubiquitous, flexible, dynamic and complex in nature (Chatti et al., 2010). When learning is delivered and facilitated entirely through an online or distance learning mode, educators often regard the absence of face-to-face and real-time interaction a loss. Education is a social-reflexive process (Bingham and Conner, 2010), whereby individual learner’s transformation can be achieved as a result of participation and interaction in a socio-cultural environment (Bilandzic, 2013). Learners become ‘more informed, gaining a wider perspective, and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.’ (Bingham and Conner, 2010, p.7).

Learning and transferability potential is thus most effective when an appropriate blend of learning contexts and spaces is used to enhance learners’ experience, reflections, and application of knowledge (Davies et al., 2013). Space, whether physical or digital, formal or informal, indoor or outdoor, isolated or social, stationary or mobile, can have a significant impact on learning. The limits between ‘work/play, learning/entertainment, accessing/creating information, public/private, and formal/informal are distinctions that have conceptually been clear but currently are becoming unclear’ (Burbules, 2012, p. 2). Spector (2013) suggests that ‘traditional boundaries between students and teachers, between and among personal abilities and types of learning, between formal and informal learning, and between learning and working are changing and becoming blurred in the 21st century’ (p. 24).

Learning as a process should not be confined by the traditional boundaries of formal education but expanded into informal contexts and spaces. How can we engage learners beyond the spatial and temporal restrictions of formal education into discovering purpose, meaning and relatedness of the learning process in different contexts? Current design practices must exploit new techniques, technologies and tools in order to turn these ideals into a reality. Acknowledging that learning technologies are just one component in a complex ecosystem in which learning takes place, academic institutions that hope to successfully leverage their facilities and technology assets will need to progress their approach to learning ‘space’ design (Milne, 2006). They also need to consider how learning experiences could frame the learning process in this space as well as the associated resources that will complement the process.

As educators, we need to place more emphasis on learning experiences that subsequently enable outcomes to be achieved in the learning context, space and process. Learning experience situates new methodology, pedagogy and technology in context. It should not be random and disconnected as per learning outcome. Pedagogically, we can be inspired by contextual, situated, experiential and exploratory learning. It is about innovating with context and how learning is seen as an experience and process instead of a product and outcome. Learning innovation must also not be driven by technologies, but instead the focus of innovation should be on the needs of the learners. Sustainable innovations, which are fit for purpose, can be based on cross-context iteration and increment of existing tools and practices, offering up opportunities for reusability and scalability of education at the speed of need.

With these perspectives, this chapter discusses how education can be opened up, contextualised and situated based on the needs of learners, emphasising the hybridity of learning experiences that crosses spatial, temporal and social modalities through the blending of formalities and pervasiveness. Playful and gameful approaches are introduced as holistic means for facilitating experiential learning with a focus on research development in pervasive gaming and the use of game-making and creation as a learning process.

Opening Up, Contextualising and Situating Education

The concept of ‘openness’ assumes different meanings in different contexts and discourses (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016a), but it is used often in the perspective of education (Hug, 2017). Fujimoto (2017) defines open education as any ‘practice’ that removes the barriers to receiving education and increases educational opportunities. Oliver (2015) stresses that the debates on open education often over-simplify openness, where the focus is usually on ‘relatively discrete problems such as accessing resources, but [the debates often] gloss over what people then do with these’ (p. 365). Open learning as defined by CEDEFOP (2004) refers to giving a learner a degree of flexibility in the choice of topics, place, pace and/or method. Openness in education can thus be understood as a ‘learning experience that gives the learner a degree of flexibility in the choice of what (topics), where (place), when (pace) and how (method) to learn/study’ (Muñoz et al., 2013, p. 172), where learning is accessible, abundant, and customisable for all (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016b).

Hug (2017) suggests that there have been implicit dimensions of openness if you look through the history of education, such as how children educate themselves through free play and exploration, which can be interpreted as a prototypical example of openness in education. Free play and openness in education cross formal and informal contexts (Hug, 2017; Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016a). They align with aspects of lifelong learning (Muñoz et al., 2013; Blessinger, 2018) and the concept of hybridity in open education (Dalsgaard et al., 2017), empowering learners to learn at the speed of need (Pontefract, 2013). Hug (2017) emphasises that ‘the dynamic interrelationships of dimensions of opening and closure are essential for a differentiated understanding of the various aspects of free play, open education, and its conditions and constraints’ (Hug, 2017, p. 73). In the case of playful learning, the introduction of intentional rules can provide a structure and context for when learning is deemed to start and how a player could then level up in the experience as part of the ‘action-feedback’ cycle. Free play and exploration could still be embedded within the ‘magic circle’ (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004). Playfulness as a characteristic of hybridity in open education relies on the value of joy, creativity, curiosity, exploration and experimentation in learning to promote agency and autonomy (Dalsgaard et al., 2017).

Aligning with the need for agency and autonomy (Dalsgaard et al., 2017) through the flexibility of choice (Muñoz et al., 2013), open education covers a range of practices aimed at broadening access to education for those wanting to learn. Existing focus is mostly on the practice of reuse and sharing, which often includes Open Educational Resources (OER) and open licences, such as Creative Commons (Weller et al., 2018). Apart from OER, open education ‘also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues’ (The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, 2007¹).

It is important to provide access, but it is more important to equip learners with the competencies that will allow them to contextualise their learning. Learning to learn in this case is essential to ensure that the needs, contexts and meanings associated with the learning process transcend the formality, spatial, temporal and technological boundaries. The way learners learn and access learning resources is changing, fuelled by the convergences of existing and emerging technologies. Open education should thus focus on the discourse around how learners can be prepared to be more discerning and context-aware when it comes to engaging with learning resources in the midst of an abundant access to resources, i.e. the ability to choose what, where, when and how to learn. In this case, learning is at the speed of need rather than driven and/or defined by the enabling instruments and availability of resources.

How can we then open up education in a way that exploits intrinsic intentions, interests and goals to ensure a more contextualised and connected learning experience? Challenges and barriers to address include the motivation for learners to take an active role in and responsibility for their own learning. This aligns with the perspective of intentional learning, which is generally defined as learning that is motivated by intentions, purpose and is goal-directed, where learners self-plan, perform, oversee and regulate their learning processes as well as learning strategies (Blumschein, 2012; Hung, 2014). Such learning is often described as a process of metacognition – a reflective process, where learners constantly monitor and evaluate their progress during problem-solving. Learners can reflect on whether their current level of understanding is sufficient, which often occurs in formal and informal settings throughout their lifetime (Hung, 2014). Within this reflective process, learning resources that are openly available can be strategically assessed for relevance and reliability, and configured into the learning process to complement the problem-solving.

Intentional learning often relies on the interest of the learners in the learning itself. When access to support within the learning ecosystem is also openly available, either from teachers, peers and/or the community, learners are able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of others. They will in turn be able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement (Ito et al., 2013). Such a connected learning broadens access to learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational opportunity, based on the evidence that ‘the most resilient, adaptive, and effective learning involves individual interest as well as social support to overcome adversity and provide recognition’ (Ito et al., 2013, p. 4). Learning occurs with and through other people in a social-reflexive process (Bingham and Conner, 2010). Playful approach to learning is often regarded as an empathic, agentic and frugal means for engaging young people within a creative inquiry process through social constructivism (Kafai and Burke, 2015; Gee, 2016), intrinsically driven by interest.

Often linked to curiosity, interest can be driven by the identified gap in one’s knowledge (Loewenstein, 1994) – often leading to incidental and exploratory experiences (Keegan, 2013; Ahmed, 2017). Interest contextualises the motivation for learning, providing means for lifting high achievers to a new level, whilst transforming those who are struggling in their learning (Loewenstein, 1994; Kidd and Hayden, 2015). Interest and intention in this case help learners to think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. Whilst learning that is intentional has been found to be effective (Ahmed, 2017), some learning that will happen in the process can also be incidental, effortless and undirected. Curiosity drives intentional learning but also allows the discovery of the new, the unintentional and the incidental. A majority of learning often happens through experiences beyond the formality of education, where free play and exploration as well as social interaction are a growing part of learning. Such a situated approach emphasises meaning-making dependent on real activities (Stein, 1998) that enrich the learning experience through reflective thinking (Shor, 1996). Learners are actively immersed in authentic learning situations, where learning occurs through connecting prior knowledge with authentic, informal, and often unintended contextual learning as well as through social interactions.

When activities are designed into a learning process as intentional, the experiential aspect will be essential for contextualising learning activities to encourage reflection, critical analysis and synthesis. In Kolb’s (1984) experiential model of learning, learners reflect on their actions and consequences, so as to foster understanding and reapplication of this understanding in future actions. The experiential element is also important for games (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004; Schell, 2014), which promotes self and group reflections as well as communal debriefing when used in an educational setting (Garris et al., 2002; de Freitas and Neumann, 2009; Arnab et al., 2013). While learning often occurs as a result of real-life experiences, it can also result f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: Hybrid Learning
• PART 2: Game Science
• PART 3: Transforming Practice and Trends to Consider
• Index