philosophi.ca : The Sculpture Garden Of Historical Computer Game Characters

When is a project not scholarship?

This story is based on a real instructional project I led in 2008 and is an example of a digital project that would not be pedagogical scholarship. The idea of this story is to illustrate digital work that should not be submitted for evaluation for the purposes of tenure and promotion and to explain why it is not pedagogical scholarship.

The Project

In 2007 I was asked to teach a course on Digital Games. At the same time I had been talking with the Library and in particular with a newly hired Immersive Learning librarian. The Library had rented an island in Second Life and was looking for learning projects that would exploit it. It occurred to me as I planned the Digital Games class that there was an opportunity for an interesting assignment where students could be asked to create a statue of a historically important computer game character and add to it an essay on that character's importance written in the first person. As the Digital Games class was a larger "theory" class without tutorials and without marking support I could, through this project, introduce a very modest hands-on project with some relationship to actual game design that could be managed. Further it would be a way to experiment with Second Life for learning with the Library. My objectives (as I remember them now) were:

To develop a hands-on assignment that gave students some experience with character modeling while at the same time encouraging them to learn about the history of computer games. I wanted an assignment that was doable and markable given the size of the class and the variety of skills.
To explore the use of Second Life in learning in a fashion that was manageable given the resources available and appropriate to the course.
To help the Library populate their then empty island with learning content.

Gaming Sculpture Garden

The project took the following form:

I first formed the students into pair teams.
The teams were asked to write a short essay, preferably in the first person (as in "Hi, my name is Ms. Pac-Man") and submit it for a preliminary mark. This allowed me to get a sense of the variety of characters students were working on.
A level 4 student who was doing his thesis project on Second Life and the Library island designed and delivered a tutorial to the students on how to model in SL. The challenge he was dealing with in his thesis project was how SL could be used for learning, so this afforded him a real subproject using SL for student expression. He also created a "sculpture garden" space where the student statues of characters could go (among other spaces he created on the island).
The Library had paid for the island and in turn authorized all the students to be able to author in garden.
The students created their character statues in the garden and attached their edited essays to the statues so other players could go up and learn about the character.
I marked the final assignment of character model and essay.
Working with the Library we had an "opening" of the garden complete with virtual (and real) ribbon cutting.

The Garden can be found at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Steel%20City/160/239/39/?title=Gaming%20Sculpture%20Garden

Why is it not scholarship?

The project was, from my perspective, a success. The project was manageable, the students worked hard on their essays and models knowing that they would be public and I found the final results a pleasure to assess. A few students with experience with Maya didn't like the primitive modeling tools of SL, but they still participated in the spirit of the project. Many of the teams experimented with the animation tools and they all got a feel for SL beyond the tours typical of such courses. The Library got a real learning project on their island without much work and the 4th year student got useful experience with a learning project. Why then do I use this project as an illustration of what is not the scholarship of pedagogy?

My reason is that there was no assessment of the project itself. Scholarship is reflective and asks about how and whether pedagogical objectives were met and this project was not designed to reflect on its success beyond the casual anecdotal evidence any instructor gathers listening to students. For digital instructional work to be scholarship there needs to be a deliberate evaluation component built into the project where you formally ask if the project met its objectives. It is about honestly wanting to know whether the project really made a difference so that you can then share evidence of that knowing with the larger community. I, frankly, was just trying to teach the class and do something interesting for all of us involved that was manageable. This is the difference between what we all do, which is to try things in our teaching, and the scholarship of pedagogy which can be presented as research. Simply doing something with technology in a class shouldn't count any longer as research.

What a scholarship of pedagogy project would look like

What would it take to make this a scholarly project? What are the signs of a project conceived as research? Here are some of the things I could have done to turn this into a research project:

Formally describe the pedagogical objectives before running the learning project so that an evaluation can ask whether these objectives were met. Frankly, I was just trying to put together something that would work in the class. My objectives above are rationalizations after the fact.
Engage with experts in pedagogical evaluation to design assessment probes to see if the project met the objectives. It is one thing for me to feel satisfied that the project went well, but that is just the impression of one witness. Had I wanted this to be a research project I should have worked with our teaching and learning folk to design some assessments that would actually probe what worked and didn't.
Create a context where the students and other stakeholders could assess the project without interference from me. If you really want to know if something worked then as an instructor you need to back off and provide students (and other stakeholders) a chance to assess the project safely without fear of repercussions. This is where having a neutral party like the teaching and learning unit run an assessment can help. They can run focus groups or surveys and report back to you while guaranteeing confidentiality.
Review the literature on learning and immersive worlds like Second Life so my experiment is informed by the research of others.
Present the findings, even preliminary ones to the interested community. In the case of a first iteration of the project I would probably start by presenting locally (and the opening doesn't count as we had treats and a ribbon). Then, of course, one can report back to conferences and eventually publish the results.
Iterate the project and compare it to other ways of trying to teach to the same objectives while running other forms of assessment. There is always the danger that the novelty of the first run of a project is confused with pedagogical effectiveness.

In defense of not doing research

To be honest we need to keep open a space in academic careers for not doing research. If we were to design all our teaching to generate research effects it would distort the spontaneity of teaching. I would go further and say that as academics we are not, despite how we actually get assessed on the ground, only researchers - we need to hold on to the opportunities to just try to teach - directly engaging a class of students as best we can without any research calculations for the love of it.

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