The Limits of Natural Intelligence: How Smart Might Aliens Be?

by Hap Aziz

If you consume a lot of Science Fiction (like I do), you will see a lot of depictions of alien life, whether it has come to Earth or we have encountered it in space or on other planets. There was the unstoppable Blob, consuming everything in it’s path. The very human-like Klaatu who came here with his interplanetary police robot, Gort. The terrifying Alien, with acid for blood and who planted its offspring inside of people. The cute and mysteriously powerful E.T., able to heal with a touch and carry bicycles through the sky. Master of logic and mental discipline, Mr. Spock from the planet Vulcan. Frail and spindly Martians (not to be confused with Uncle Martin), come to wage a War of the Worlds. Predators here to hunt humans for sport. A fallen to Earth David Bowie. Alf.

I’ve only named a few, but you get the point. There are thousands upon thousands of fictional aliens that we have encountered and gotten to know, quite well in some cases. Some have strange and unusual physical or mental abilities. Others are super-smart. And many are very much just like us, only with more advanced technology to make them appear much smarter than we are. But what about real aliens, if there are such things? How much different from us could they be? And more specifically, since this is a learning blog after all, how much smarter could they be? Obviously there’s no way to test or make measurements at this time. Perhaps some day in the future we’ll come across some real aliens and can ask them, but until then we’ll have to make some assumptions and try puzzling things out on our own.

The first assumption I’ll make has to do with the origins of life and subsequently intelligent life. Let’s break the possibilities into two potential origin stories: creation and evolution. If we go down the creation path, organic intelligence likely cannot be benchmarked. In other words, God (or whatever we want to designate as the creator) could give life any starting level of intelligence. In that case, it becomes impossible to come to any meaningful conclusions regarding the level of alien intelligence humans may encounter in the universe. So let’s put that possibility aside for this discussion. Now, if we establish a premise that says God created life, but God created the rules that life (and the universe) will abide by, then we are able to settle on the evolutionary premise both from the believer’s and atheist’s perspective, and then build from there.

So what is (or should be) the evolutionary premise regarding the development of intelligent life? If we think of evolutionary development, or more accurately natural selection, as incremental or “micro-adjustments” to external circumstances and stimulation, then it is reasonable to expect that these adjustments will rise to the level of response to these circumstances and stimulations but not much further. That’s a complex thought, but let’s think of it in terms of physical evolution specifically, which should provide a little more clarity:

A giraffe’s neck will evolve to the height of the leaves it wants to eat, but not higher.

If we’re talking about intelligence, what this means is that life will self-select to be just as smart as it needs to be in order to be successful in its environment. Now, if we think of natural laws as being the same throughout the universe (and for the most past we have no reason to believe otherwise), environments on planets that would support earth-like life are not likely to be wildly different than our own. Consider this as the first stage of intelligence setting for animal life. (Life that evolves in more challenging environments may be more capable than humans would be in those environments, but I won’t address that here.)

The second stage is not about the physical environment but rather survival competition from other animals. This is where things get interesting, as the most physically successful animal will not be the most successful regarding intelligence. It makes sense that an animal that can run down its prey, kill it with superior strength, and then tear it apart and eat it will not have to go to extreme lengths to outsmart it. And the animal that is on the top of the physical pyramid has the need for only as much intelligence as it takes to find and hunt its prey. It’s going to be those animals below the physical apex that will develop other mechanisms to either take down their prey hunting in packs. or defend themselves using tools or weapons from stronger and faster competition. (It is worth noting that the discovery of tools is also thought to have led to an increase in the size of the human brain. For a much more in-depth dive on this subject, look up Acheulian technology.)

Match up a lion and an unarmed human on the open plain, and we know who wins that fight. But try the same match-up when the human has tools or perhaps there are several humans working together, and the outcome is not assured in the lion’s favor. If there is competition between species of similar intelligence and physical prowess, there will be some differentiator that will ultimately give one species an advantage over the other. But again, it will be an incremental advantage (and possibly some luck) that leads one species to prevail. The intelligence competitors will be eliminated, while the physical competitors will be subjugated or kept at bay. At that point, the need for incremental improvements to intelligence are no longer being driven by environment and other species. The top dog is set, and barring a giant asteroid strike that triggers a reset, there will be little brain change moving forward. The refinements that come over the next tens of thousands of years are in the refinement of available tools, including the tool of language, after it is invented.

Going back to the original premise, given an earth-like environment the intelligent species that ultimately rises to the top should be in the neighborhood of human intelligence. It would not likely be too much more, as nature would not likely have created an apex predator of overwhelmingly great power beyond what is needed to overcome environmental conditions. And environmental conditions are set by the laws of nature.

Now, none of the above is to say that there are not environmentally harsh planets floating around with the potential for life unlike our own. There’s the planet K2-141b which has oceans of lava, rains rocks, and experiences supersonic winds bursting to over 3,000 miles per hour. Can it support intelligent life? Likely not, the way we understand it, but who is to say there aren’t lava people there? In any case, that’s beyond the conjectures I’m making here.

So barring life that evolved in conditions vastly different than those we consider favorable, is that it, then? Is there a cap to natural intelligence? Perhaps, but we need not stop the thought experiment. What about intelligence augmented by the inventions of intelligence? In other words, what about all the science-fiction constructs with which we’re familiar such as brain-computer connections? Enhancing the mind and thought processes with cybernetic implants that are tied into some 8G network of the future? Interestingly, that kind of augmentation may be necessitated by the environmental conditions that we humans are creating for ourselves and will need to overcome as a matter of survival.

Consider Artificial Intelligence. Without going into detail here, AI is being recognized as a potential threat to human life. Karen Hao writes about it in the MIT Technology Review here. Steven Hawking believed that AI’s impact could be cataclysmic unless it was strictly controlled, “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization.” Elon Musk is convinced that AI is far more dangerous than nukes, and he’s told audiences, “it scares the hell out of me.”

Then there’s the “singleton hypothesis,” that predicts AI combined with a totalitarian government, able to control everything. And if you’re interested in a fictional take on what that could be like, check out the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project (released in 1970!). We won’t go any further down that path here.

It would seem, then, that humanity has created the need to go beyond “simple” evolutionary methods of enhancing intelligence to artificial methods of our own invention (bringing us to stage three). Again, Elon Musk has thoughts on the subject, and he proposes the idea that humans will need to merge with AI to develop a symbiotic super intelligence, preventing us from lagging behind our AI creations. At that point, a potential singularity-like inflection point for human intelligence, it becomes impossible for us to know how far intelligence might go.

But that does bring us back full circle to the original question of how smart aliens might be. My guess is we’ll see cybernetically enhanced biological intelligences that have solved the challenges of interstellar space flight. Imagine the Borg from Star Trek. Whether or not they’re friendly to purely biological intelligence (if we haven’t yet enhanced ourselves) is the big question. And if they’re not cybernetically enhanced, then they’ll probably be a lot like us.

A Failure of Imagination

by Hap Aziz

I strongly believe that most of the world’s challenges go unanswered not because of a deficiency of skills or lack of resources, but because of a failure of imagination. Clearly, I like to channel my inner optimist, but am I convinced that with enough brainwork and sufficient time, people are at least able to conceive of solutions to the problems they face. That’s not the same as implementing a solution, especially if there are significant risk barriers–for example, it’s not a stretch to think that a COVID-19 vaccine could be released in the next several months, yet the majority of the population might refuse to take it. But the larger points still stands, that solutions are there to be discovered or invented.

The challenge of effectively teaching something while also continually improving the teaching process is one of those challenges that seems to be stuck in neutral, spinning its wheels faster and faster and going nowhere, or at least not very far. For the past several years, standardized test scores have either stagnated or dropped in both the reading and mathematics domains. However, this isn’t an outcome issue as much as it is a process issue in the way we (society) approach the teaching and learning endeavor. If the definition of insanity is continually banging your head against a brick wall and expecting a different result, why should we continue educate future generations pretty much the same way year after year and expect improved results?

Perhaps that is a controversial question, but it shouldn’t be. For a bit of perspective, compress the timeline of learning history and look at the past 200 years, from 1820 to 2020. What has fundamentally changed? Smartboards instead of chalk boards. Computers instead of quills. Kindles instead of books. The Internet instead of libraries. It would seem that our new inventions are purposed to mimic our old tools, for the most part. Sure, there have been some “new” developments: virtual reality, computer simulations, and online learning. But they have not had any significant impact in either practice or outcomes. Consider the framework that hasn’t changed: Basing academic cycles on the calendar year. Grouping students of the same chronological age together for content mastery as though they are all at the same point of their cognitive development. Building one-size-fits-all curriculum for all students. Even with the forced changes as a result of COVID-19, at-home schooling for many students appears to be little more than a broken and sub-par classroom experience, with “teachers” often ill-equipped to provide any true learning support. Keep in mind that this comes after decades upon decades of education research and hundreds of billions of dollars spent. What has all the time, effort, and money bought?

Dr. David Porcaro, Director of Learning Engineering at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was recently interviewed on the topic of “Learning Science” and why investing in it is a good idea. If you’re wondering what learning science is, Dr. Porcaro says this:

“Learning science research helps us to create tools and resources that do what we really hope they will-—improve students’ ability to learn. And in an increasingly noisy world of edtech, products that really help will be those that teachers, parents and students adopt.”

The premise behind learning science is to take the data from how learners interact with edtech products, and use that data to build better edtech products. That’s one way of operationalizing the CZI mission to help individual learners achieve their potential. As Dr. Pocaro frames it, learners vary, and that variability needs to be accounted for in edtech and in teaching practices. I emphasize the phrase and in teaching practices because Dr. Pocaro does not address what I consider the broader teaching practices which have gone fundamentally unchanged, as I mentioned above. And it is the broader teaching practices that that would significantly address student variability. I would suggest examine three particular practices if student variability is a consideration.

Competency Assessment
When the typical student begins kindergarten, the lesson plan is the same for all students, as though they all have the same or very similar academic skills. However, this is not at all the case–some students may be able to read while others cannot; some may know simple math facts while others do not; some may have difficulty recognizing colors and shapes while others do not. Yet all students start in almost the same place. A better practice would be to assess student competency, and then provide a custom curriculum from the beginning allowing for variation in student competency. (More on this below.)

Curriculum Customization
No matter the grade level and the class, the curriculum is the same for all students (with larger groupings for advanced or developmental classes, for example). Not only should curriculum be customized based on competency assessments, it should be customized based on student interests, longer-term goals, and so on.

Calendar Adjustment
The standard academic calendar is based on a school year, divided into semesters or terms. The model says that whatever subject matter mastery a student has after the allotted time, this is where the learning switches to the next topic and moves on. Rather, there should be mastery goals, and students should be able to stick with the subject matter until the desired mastery level is obtained. Some students will move quickly through content at some points, while other students may take more time. The result will be variation in what students learn over specific time intervals, but the interval is not the defining metric; mastery is.

These three practices would work in combination to provide a very rich and customized experience for each student. Competency assessments would take place frequently throughout a student’s academic career to ensure there is sufficient feedback on where the student is, and so that appropriate “course corrections” may be made during schooling. The type of edtech tools required in these situations would be able to customize the curriculum and the calendar individually. Some students may master the desired subject matter in 10 years. Other students may take 13 years. Some students may spend six months on Trigonometry, and other students may need a year to work through the same material. The idea is that at the end secondary education, students should all be closer to mastery on all the subject matter areas they covered.

There is actually quite a bit more space to explore in these three practices, and I may do a deeper dive in a future post. In the meantime, though, I wanted to present these ideas as some thoughts for consideration, and to touch on the idea that it’s the practice and not the education technology that will need to change if we are going to see real changes in the way students learn.

What We Learn from Science Fiction

This morning I had the pleasure of being a guest on the radio program To A Certain Degree which airs on WPRK in Winter park, 91.5 FM. Hosted by Nick Georgoudiou, the show covers a lot of offbeat ground that tends to interests geeks like me. Today’s topic involved Science Fiction concepts and tropes, and it did not disappoint. (I’ll post the podcast here when it becomes available.)

Interestingly, there was some cross-talk between Science Fiction and learning (even touching on the recent admissions scandal involving a number of players including celebrity parents). The topic intersection is significant to me from the  perspective of how Science Fiction can fire the imagination and inspire some fairly lofty human endeavors. As such, the genre holds a promise of moving humanity forward from multiple perspectives. Science Fiction serves very much as a testing-ground for a wide variety of “What If?” questions, and these questions often get to the core of what it means to be human. How do we treat “the other” from our own cultural perspectives? What right of life and existence to other life forms have if they do not echo my own values? Sure, Science Fiction is well-positioned to show us the future of our existence, but it’s also really good for revealing what’s currently in our hearts by telling us stories we might not listen to if they’re told in relation to every-day life today.

I may revisit this thought in more depth later on, but I wanted to mark it now for some public consideration. It’s a lot easier to see ourselves in others, if the other isn’t someone we already hate.

The Commonalities Between People Should Be the Easiest Things to Learn

Sometimes many of us living in the formal and professional worlds of education tend to lose sight of the fact that most learning takes place outside of classroom environments, and the most important lessons to be learned are not necessarily about the subjects found in school catalogs. It is important to revisit and reinforce this understanding regularly. Even as the circumstances of cultural frameworks may change and as our technology certainly will, people remain the same no matter where on Earth we go. Which brings me to this topic about how we learn about each other as fellow travelers in life’s journey.

In the summer of 1985, Sting released his first post-Police solo album entitled The Dream of the Blue Turtles. I remember that it was one of the first CDs I purchased, as CD players were relatively new back then. Being an idealistic young man at the time, one of my favorite cuts on the album was the song “Russians,” which was about the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the potential that it could lead to an actual, devastating nuclear was between the two superpower nations. You can find the lyrics of the song here, but the basic underlying theme was fairly simple: while the ideology of the two nations may be completely opposed, neither side could be completely correct, and the individual citizens of each nation have enough in common to transcend the posturing and rhetoric of their leaders. Consider this verse:

There is no monopoly on common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology

The Cold War was at its peak. Both countries had enough nuclear warheads pointed at each other to completely destroy the world multiple times. The United States and the Soviet Union were enemies in almost every sense of the word. Yet Sting encouraged us to see that neither side could be the sole arbiter of what was good and right in the world.  The point on which Sting’s entreaty rests is the song’s refrain telling us that there is hope because just like us, the Russians must love their children too.

What was the takeaway for us? Yes, it was the lesson that the people of a country that had posed the greatest existential threat to the United States loved their children as much as we do, and that commonality was enough to offer hope to the world that we could step back from the brink of nuclear war. What is the implication here? That a people is not simply a reflection of its leadership or ideology, and that our commonalities bind us together more strongly than political differences may work to pull us apart.

In the years since, we haven’t seemed to have learned that lesson. Take a look at our internal political conflict now, and we see a level of rhetoric, acrimony, and even violence that eclipses what took place during the Cold War. Neighbor against neighbor. Family members against each other. Hate and condemnation against the “other side” as though each individual is directly responsible for the impending “end of the world as we know it.” What happened to our commonalities? What happened to the fact that our same biology transcends our different ideologies? Give that some serious thought. We are more angry today at those we are convinced voted the “wrong” way than we were at the country that was poised to wipe us off of the face of the planet.

I wonder what changed. Because as far as I can tell, we all still love our children.

Leveraging the Online Learning Space for Actual Benefits

One of the quickest ways an institution can fail in online learning is by trying to replicate the traditional on-ground learning environment. This mistaken approach disregards the strengths of digital technology and asynchronous modality. It’s like trying to turn a book into a movie without leveraging the strength of the visual story-telling medium. (See David Lynch’s Dune.)

The good news is that not all institutions are going down that path. Many institutions are doing great work in the online learning space, and the University of Central Florida could be considered a poster child for success. Late last year, Bill and Melinda Gates visited the UCF campus in Orlando (my backyard), and he had some positive recognition for the work going on there. His blog entry is worth the read.

Beginner’s Guide to Inklewriter

by Hap Aziz

I developed this brief tutorial to help people get up and running in Inklewriter fairly quickly. (If you’re not already familiar with it, Inklewriter is a web-based authoring tool that lets you create Choose Your Own text adventure games. It can be used for many purposes, especially prototyping simulations based on branching choices.

Introduction

Inklewriter is a web-based software that is used to create Interactive Fiction in the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) format. Interactive Fiction (IF) is a type of computer game that lets the player read a story and make choices that can change the direction and outcome of the story. Using Inklewriter for education purposes, abstracted (text-only) simulations may be created for a variety of learning assignments.

Because IF games are mainly text-based, IF games were among the first kind ever written for computers. CYOA games are a type of IF that give the player specific choices at the end of each section These types of games are also a form of branching scenarios. The player chooses what he or she would like to do, and the branching scenario moves forward based on the player’s selections. Although no longer at the height of their original popularity, CYOA branching scenarios are still quite engaging, and they can be used on their own, or they may be developed as proof-of-concepts for more graphically-intensive simulation.

There can be many different outcomes in an CYOA branching scenario, or the story can lead the player to a single ending. It is up to the creator to decide what the player is able to accomplish. To direct the player’s path through the scenario, the creator must develop a “map” of the story. The map is an outline of the story narrative along with the decisions a player is allowed to make and the places in the story that those decisions may be made. More instruction on this will be provided later in this document.

Inklewriter is freely available. To get to Inklewriter, all you need is a computer with access to the Internet using a standard web browser. You will go to the URL http://www.inklewriter.com and your screen should look something like this:

You will be able to create your own account by clicking the “sign in” button to get to the following screen.

Here, you will click on the Create New Account link.

Once you sign into your Inklewriter account, you will see the screen below.

This is your “blank sheet of paper” for creating your branching scenario. You will learn how to create a basic scenario using Inklewriter, but first we will talk about planning the scenario. It is very important to have an outline of how you want your scenario to “flow” and the choices you want the player to be able to make.

How to Design a CYOA Interactive Fiction Game

The key concept behind creating a CYOA branching scenario is that you must give players the opportunities to make choices during the scenario. These choices should in some way change the actual flow of the scenario. In a traditional story (such as in a book you might read), the story flows in one direction (linearly) from start to finish, like this:

There are no choices to be made, because the storyteller, author, or instructional designer has already decided what will happen and in what order everything takes place. In a CYOA branching scenario, however, certain places in the story allow the player to choose the direction.

The above diagram is an example of a story that branches after the beginning into two different paths. The player may select one of two options, and the result be a different ending. It is possible to have many options in the middle portion of your branching scenario, and this may result in more possible endings. Below is an example.

We see that after the beginning branches into two paths, those two paths branch into two more paths before getting to the four possible endings. You can imagine how big this map could become if you added several more levels that branch in between.

Your map can be as simple or as complex as you like. And it is even possible to have the branches of the scenario come back together instead of always separating. On a map, that might look something like the following:

You can see in the above diagram that there are multiple paths that will take the player to the different endings. Although this is a more challenging scenario to create, it is often the most satisfying to play because of all the choices a player may make.

Planning the Story

When planning your story for the scenario, you will need to do the following things:

• Gather your materials, just as you would for a formal report or presentation. You will want to find good sources, especially those that might depict a narrative regarding the subject matter you expect to cover.
• Since your scenario will be in the form of a story, you may want to identify key figures with whom your scenario player might have “conversations,” such as an HR manager, professor, or characters from an historical event.
• You may want to think about a particular event or activity for your story, such as an employee review, a meeting between colleagues, or even a past war.
• You will want to decide the location in which the events of your game takes place. That location may be inside a building like a library, a government building, a city, or even a combination of places.
• You will want to identify objects that might have significance to the story you want to tell. For example, there may be a set of forms that contains information you want your game player to know, or there may be a policy manual to be reviewed.
• You should create a navigation map on paper first, outlining the story and the action choices where the story branches. Index cards might be a good tool for you to use.

As you write your branching scenario, the places where the story branches into different paths are where the player chooses different actions to take. For example:

You are in a field of rolling hills on a sunny day. Not too far in front of you, you see a jet fighter that has crash landed. The canopy of the jet is open, and the pilot was able to get out of the plane safely. He is sitting on the ground next to the jet.

• You ask the pilot what happened.
• You turn around and run to find help.

The paragraph of text “sets the stage” for this part of the scenario. This particular scenario might be about describing historical actions taken during the Six Day War. After encountering the pilot, the player has two choices to make:

• You ask the pilot what happened.
• You turn around and run to find help.

For each choice, you must decide what happens next. Let’s look at how to do this in Inlkewriter.

On the “blank” Inklewriter page you would type a title for your scenario (“A Pilot’s Tale” in this example), your name, and the paragraph of introductory text. Then you would click on the “Add option” button to type in your action choices:

• You ask the pilot what happened.
• You turn around and run to find help.

To enter text that should be connected to the particular action, you click on the arrow button on the right side of that action. That will bring up another text box for you to enter the next section of your scenario.

To continue the story after the choice of “You ask the pilot what happened,” you should think of the next part of the story and compose the text in a way that makes sense. For example, this could be the next section (as shown above):

The pilot looks up at you and says, “We saw that Egyptian forces were being built up on our border along the Sinai Peninsula. Our air force was given the command on June 5^th to launch a pre-emptive airstrike.” He pauses for a moment, and you notice that his lips are chapped.

• You offer the pilot your canteen.
• You ask what happened to the Egyptians.

As you build out the different areas of your scenario, you may want to check the progress of your navigation by clicking on the “map” link at the top of screen. This will bring up a visual representation of the flow of your scenario such as the one below. The map that Inklewriter displays as you create your scenario should closely resemble the outline you first made when developing your scenario idea.

From here, you will continue to add branches and narrative blocks in the same manner. You may add as many branching choices as you like to each section, but more than three or four choices becomes difficult to manage. You will continue this process until all your branching paths lead to a conclusion in the scenario.

We have only touched upon some of the most basic functionality within Inklewriter so that your first experience using the system is straightforward. There are a number of resources for Inklewriter available, and within the Inklewriter authoring system there is a “tutorial” link in the top menu bar that provides a lot of helpful information.

Where Online Learning May Lead

by Hap Aziz

Several years ago, I attended a CIO conference in Orlando, Florida, and the topic of the day’s sessions focused on the development and delivery of online education. The keynote speaker had done some research on Gen Y and Gen Z student attitudes regarding the online learning experience, and he had brought 14 students for a Q&A session with the CIO audience. While I wasn’t a CIO, my role at the time involved working with CIOs to help them design and implement both the systems and process infrastructures to support online learning initiatives at higher education institutions representing a variety of strategic enrollment and learning outcomes goals.

After a number of questions that skirted around the core matter of interest were asked, someone got directly to the point. “How many of you think online learning is effective?” Of the 14 students sitting on stage, one student raised her hand in the affirmative.

I looked around the room and read the overall reaction to be surprise on the mild end of the spectrum to what I’d most charitably identify as confusion on the other end. The students’ response was unexpected, and I’m sure there were more than a few people rethinking their investment of time and treasure in the online market. I thought to ask a follow-up question.

“How many of you use the Internet to learn new things?” Fourteen hands were raised in response.

My insight was that I understood the difference between “formal” online learning experiences designed according to some theoretical framework and the more informal approach of using the Internet to find information presented in a variety of formats that engage the learner across multiple learning styles. What was revealed in the subsequent conversation was a very simple message. Institutions often develop online learning with very little consideration of drawing the learner into a meaningful interaction.

Learners have discovered how to leverage content on the Internet to construct their own learning experiences. Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facetime—all of these are services and content repositories that provide immediate access to an almost limitless amount of information as well as instruction on how to make use of that information. Do you want to know how to tile a floor? Watch any number of YouTube videos. Need help visualizing the Golden Ratio? Look it up on Pinterest. Interested in finding out what Leonardo da Vinci’s top 10 inventions were? Check out the Stuff of Genius blog.

It’s important to remember that institutions of higher education are not simply “How-To” resources, and applying measures of quality for online courses is an essential way of achieving the outcomes that we educators desire as well as the outcomes that learners deserve. In my blog entry “The Quality of Learning,” (https://hapaziz.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/the-quality-of-learning/) I take the Online Learning Consortium’s Five Pillars of Quality Online Education and modify them slightly into these four categories:

• Framework – Here we consider the quality of technology infrastructure and support across an institution. How well equipped, for example, is the academic technology group in order to provide exemplary levels of service to the various end users?
• Content – The quality of course design process has a direct impact on the actual materials and media that both educators and learners will interact with during the duration of a particular course. You might think of the difference between a well-curated academic journal and a tabloid pseudo-news publication.
• Experience – When we think of the quality of faculty and student end-user experience, we need to consider both the end-to-end experience as a service as well as a product. What will students say after they have taken the course? The answer often comes back to how they felt about what they experienced throughout.
• Design – Program design quality includes components of the three other quality measures, but it is also an overarching theme that spans an entire program of study rather than individual courses. This means that individual course quality measures “interact” in the learner’s mind–so a single poor experience might negatively impact the whole program experience.

On top of these vertical pillars I superimpose four horizontally-spanning themes that are common across all measures of quality:

• Ethics involves topics from intellectual property policies and considerations to online harassment and bullying.
• Resources addresses the way in which institutions provision their online operations, hopefully positioning themselves for success.
• Constituents is all about audience: who is participating, and what is important to them.
• Measurement is the ever-present need to understand how well we are executing to our goals at every level of the institution from leadership to department to individual instructor.

The resulting composite model looks like this:

Once we’ve established a way of ensuring (and measuring) quality, we can take a look at some of the characteristics of online learning that add value to the learner such as accessibility, the ability to present content that aligns with particular learning styles, and the capacity to provide a multisensory learning experience for improved engagement. In fact, since online learning is a specific flavor of technology-mediated learning, the advantages that technology brings in general to learning are often specifically addressed by online learning and the expansions educators have made to the modality.

In another one of my blog entries, “The Seduction of the Senses,” (https://hapaziz.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/the-seduction-of-the-senses/) I discuss how “traditional” education has been limited by the technology of the alphabet. That is, we have developed a system of learning that first requires mastery of coding and decoding of symbols that represent the real world. While this model has brought education “to the masses,” it has forced us to adjust the way we learn into an artificial process. Online education (along with its variations of blended learning and supplementation of face-to-face learning) offers a pathway for people to learn as we were originally built to learn: through the simultaneous application of all our senses. We’re not all the way there yet, but despite the professional skepticism, the immature state of data-sharing standards, and the uneven application of tools across the K-20 education landscape, online learning brings us a step closer to an ideal state.

The Non-Linearity of Learning

by Hap Aziz

This morning, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote address at the 2016 ATMAE Annual Conference in Orlando. (ATMAE is the Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering). My address was titled, “Virtual Engagement: How Gamification Can Improve the Distance Learning Experience.” I admit the title was a bit of a stretch, as I was truly interested in discussing how gamification can improve learner engagement, no matter the modality of the course or program. And to be clear, “gamification” to me means a set of techniques, some technology dependent, that may appear to have very little do to with actual game playing, on the surface.

One of the points I made is that gamification allows for flexibility in the way content is presented to learners for their consideration. That is, games allow players to move forward via multiple pathways, and this is good for a number of reasons, one being that if a player gets stuck in one part of the game, things don’t have to come to a grinding halt. The player can simply move to a different area, and in the interim, a eureka moment may come that allows the player to come back and solve the previously unsolved part. Formal learning experiences tend to be more linear, however, which is one of the great elements of frustration for students. When they get stuck, there is no place else to go in the course. Until they get outside help, they are often left with no choice but to do something else entirely, while they curse the offending course material for being too obscure or complex or both.

I was pleasantly surprised to find corroboration of this gamification technique in an unrelated article that I happened to find while reading Inside Hire Ed online just a few hours after my keynote. The article by Matt Reed is titled, “Going ‘Full Florida‘,” and it is about Florida’s experiment to drop the requirement for remedial classes coming into college. Reed describes how this (i.e., going “Full Florida”) could actually be a good thing:

Having spent nearly a decade as a chief academic officer at two different community colleges, I’m increasingly sympathetic to going Full Florida. There’s something fundamentally broken about developmental education as it’s currently done, and placement has a lot to do with it. Forcing students who have had bad experiences in a given subject to start by re-taking material they’ve had before, on their own dime, with no credit towards graduation, is a motivation-killer. And it’s based on a theory of knowledge that I don’t think holds water.

It assumes that students can only learn material in one order. It assumes that material progresses linearly, and that students have to go step-by-step to make progress.

I’m just not sure that’s true.

Take languages. It’s possible to teach a language in a linear way, but that’s not how people best learn them. They learn languages by being thrown in the deep end and flailing around a while. Anyone who raised children can tell you that their learning is much more idiosyncratic than linear. Yes, that can lead to gaps, but gaps can be filled.  And the fastest way to shut down a kid’s interest is to reduce it to workbooks.

Notice that Reed writes: “It assumes that students can only learn material in one order. It assumes that material progresses linearly, and that students have to go step-by-step to make progress. I’m just not sure that’s true.” In other words, Reed has observed that people tend to learn better if their learning experience is modeled after the way they play. I certainly agree with this, and I’m gratified to see the idea articulated outside of the direct context of game playing.

Students do not learn material in one order, and, indeed, in many cases they cannot learn material in one order because obstacles can become insurmountable when there are no other paths forward. This is a design problem, not a learner problem, and it doesn’t matter if the audience is in need of remediation or perfectly suited for advanced study. The good news is that this is a design problem that is continually being solved in the gaming world. The bad news, though, is that many educators have not yet determined that the gaming world knows more than a thing or two about how people learn.

 

Revolutionary Learning 2016 in NYC

by Hap Aziz

The Revolutionary Learning 2016 conference (#RevLearning) is taking place right now at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The following is from the website (http://revolutionarylearning.org):

Revolutionary Learning 2016 will feature hands-on workshops, educational keynotes, a Local Game Jam, a Revolutionary Game Arcade, and ample networking activities designed to connect attendees with professionals who will inspire. Colleagues and thought leaders from the cutting edge of learning will be in attendance – it’s the one place to truly learn from each other.

I won’t go into too much detail here as you can read more on the website, but the conference does address a variety of issues regarding the use of games and gaming techniques as a way to enhance engagement in learning. I’ll be doing a presentation, in fact, on engagement and the use of Interactive Fiction in the classroom to better connect with learners (http://www.revolutionarylearning.org/program/). Part of my presentation is about a classroom activity to have 8th grade students build an IF artifact using Inklewriter (http://inklestudios.com/inklewriter) as part of a history assignment. I prepared a Beginner’s Guide to Inklewriter for the students, and if you’re interested, you can download it here: BeginnersInklewriter. And if I’m motivated, I will post the presentation here. But I’d need to add notes to the picture slides first!

 

Second Chance for Second Life?

by Hap Aziz

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education website, Jeffrey R. Young has an article titled, “Remember Second Life? Its Fans Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom.” I do remember Second Life, and I actually used in some college courses I taught about eight or nine years ago. It was primarily a tool where I could gather with students for additional lecture time outside of the classroom, and often it was a combination of socializing and course content Q&A. Fortunately, my students were comfortable with technology (the course was on the subject of digital design), otherwise I would not have been able to provide the technical support to get the students signed up, logged in, and comfortable in the environment. The technology is smoother now, but I wouldn’t recommend it for students not confident in their online computing skills.

The history of Second Life is interesting in that it began as a possible game world framework, but the development environment was so robust, SL morphed into an open-ended virtual space that really had no particular purpose. This was both its advantage and its curse, as enthusiastic users that saw potential in the technology worked at finding a purpose for the platform. Many higher education institutions acquired space in SL, and educators used it for lectures, office hours with remote students, and a variety of other activities somehow connected with learning. And while the individual users may have designed unique personal avatars, the education spaces, for the most part, were representation of real campus locations (or at least could have been real). There are a number of reasons SL was unable to sustain itself at its heyday level of engagement, and Young explores them in his article in connection with the latest tech wave of Virtual Reality innovation. Second Life, in fact, is looking to ride the new VR wave with its Project Sansar (indeed, if you go to the SL site, you’ll see that you can explore SL with the Oculus Rift, which is a step in that direction).

Will the addition of 3D VR breathe new life into Second Life? As a technology, there is no question that VR has great novelty out of the gate. But I still believe that without some sort of meta-narrative point to drive engagement, SL could go through another bubble-burst cycle. By “meta-narrative,” I mean that Second Life itself needs to have a point, rather than offer itself up as an environment where users can do anything they want. Why enter a virtually real world to “just hang out and look around” when we can much more easily accomplish that in the really real world?