Yesterday we held our first MiLK Professional Development Workshop. During the short workshop the teachers played a MiLK event to become familiar with the format of MiLK events before they built MiLK events of their own.

The feedback we received from the teachers throughout the workshop was positive. They enjoyed the hands-on nature of the workshop and imagined many in which they could apply MiLK in their schools.

The workshop ran smoothly with no technical hitches and we received useful feedback from the teachers regarding possible interface and administration improvements.

A big THANK YOU to all of those who attended. We hope to hear from you again soon.

MiLK has been used to deliver course curriculum for Master of Fine Arts, Design and Technology students from Parsons, The New School for Design. The collaboration studio course, ‘PLAYLab’ was delivered by leading game design experts Katie Salen and Melanie Crean.

The course was delivered through exploration of three related domains: Game Design, Psychogeography, and Microfictions. The students were asked to develop new gaming concepts for MiLK for play by both students and teachers, propose and develop supplementary platforms or content, and prototype, playtest, and document their research findings.

The students also explored the adaptation of MiLK for 6th grade curriculum standards as a way to define the use of mobile gaming within formal learning environments. To do so the students worked with 6th grade students from the Ross Global Academy. Firstly the university students created MiLK games to be played by the primary school students. The university students collected footage and photos and used the playtest to revise their games. This was then followed up with a workshop where the university and primary school students collaborated to co-design games around the words alliance, trust, diplomacy and collaboration.

This course is an exemplar of how MiLK can support cross-discipline, cross-institutional and cross-generational learning. We look forward to hearing more from Katie Salen and her students about their experiences with MiLK.

Last week, Deb, Sherwin and Colleen headed off to Aspley State High School to introduce 10 teachers to the new interfaces of MiLK version 0.5. The teachers familiarised themselves with the new processes of administering a MiLK class. They created mock events to which they assigned mock builders and also mock class discussions.

We also introduced MiLK to a class of 23 year 8 students. The teacher of the class Katrina Beakley is setting her students the task of building school orientation events that will be played by the new year 8’s coming to the school next year.

The students were very excited about building their profiles, adding images, links and a short description about themselves. Colleen introduced MiLK with a demo game from the Adelaide Botanic Gardens workshop and walked the students through the steps of building events. The students encountered difficulties with saving images from the web to upload to their profile pages, with many sites including Google Images being barred. In a smart move to get over these issues, Katrina set profile building as homework so that students could upload images from their home computers.

The students will begin building their games this week and we look forward to seeing the results!

Last week Deb, Sherwin and Colleen collaborated with Paul Doherty a project officer from Learning Technologies and Steve Meredith an education officer from the Adelaide Botanic Gardens to conduct a MiLK workshop with students from three Adelaide Schools.

The aim of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens participant workshop was to apply MiLK in an institutional context outside the classroom and to test the new version, MiLK 0.5. The results of this trial is vital to our research into new possible tools and literacies that link schools to other dynamic learning spaces and ultimately to the everyday lives of the students.

The workshop ran from 9am to 3pm on Tuesday, November 27 and consisted of three main activities. In groups of three, the students played an event created by the MiLK team before creating events of their own. The groups then played each other’s events.

The day was a complete success with students playing an event, making events of their own, playing each other’s events and most importantly having fun whilst learning. A huge Thank You to Paul, Steve and the participating students and teachers! We look forward to seeing what you may do with MiLK in the future.

On November 1st Deb, Sherwin and Colleen of the MiLK team conducted a teacher training workshop at Aspley State High School. The teachers were given a brief introduction to the MiLK interfaces before they formed groups and headed outside to plan a quick event path. They then used the MiLK system to create, publish and test their event paths. The ten teachers who attended the workshop were from varied disciplines ranging from Drama and Visual Arts through to Physics and English.

All of the teachers expressed interest in using MiLK in their classes and one teacher even wanted to begin activities the following week. We look forward to assisting the Aspley teachers in introducing MiLK into their professional practice and are ager to learn from each of their varied scenarios of use.

Following her use of MiLK, Janelle Williams has been awarded an ICT Pedagogical License. The license acknowledges teachers who effectively integrate ICT into teaching and learning. It is an initiative of the Queensland Government’s Smart Classrooms strategy and is a key component of the Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework. The development framework aims to give incentives for teachers to improve their use of ICT and provides a guide for planning enhanced student and professional learning with ICT. Janelle’s use of MiLK was a large component of her application to be awarded the license. When reflecting on her experience with MiLK, she said “the relationships I strengthened with my students are perhaps the thing that I found the most powerful about the project”.

It is a real treat to know that MiLK is helping teachers build expertise and develop closer relationships with their students.

From the MiLK team, Congratulations Janelle!!

Currently researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play are piloting MILK in New York and Chicago. For this pilot we have adapted the system to work with WEB ENABLED mobile phones as this is more conducive to the current conditions/capabilities/attitudes in US schools (please note that the UK and Australian schools will be sticking to SMS for now with occasional pilot studies using web enabled mobiles.)

We are know sharing our MiLK system with researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play in New York. Currently Katie Salen and her team are working with students in New York and Chicago to experiment with ways of using MiLK to cooperatively compose mobile game events for a variety of learning contexts.

“The Institute will work in partnership with you to develop a set of demonstrations for the platform, exploring the kinds of experiences that it can support, particularly from a game design perspective.
We will also assist in the development of identifying and designing a set of processes/resources to support the use of MiLK by teachers and students, and will look into the development of supplemental technologies that might extend the MiLK experience.
… we’d really like to think about how to integrate MiLK at an infrastructural level in the new school we are designing, and this initial phase of research will help us better understand how to do that.”

Katie Salen Executive Director, Gamelab Institute of Play (nonprofit organization.)
19 W. 24th Street, 12th floor, New York, NY 10011

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Recently Janelle Williams’ year 10 Multi-media students from Trinity Bay State High played MiLK events designed by their fellow classmates. The students had lots of fun playing each other’s events and learnt much about how to improve their own event design through playing with a critical eye. On several occasions the students came across confusing or unanswerable questions and had to fall back on the hints to progress in the game. With their experience in designing their own events, the students were able to recognise that the frustration they experienced on such occasions was due to faults in the event design. As a result they were quick to reflect on their own event design and identify similar faults in their events. So, in addition to learning new facts about their school and viewing their school through new narrative lenses, playing each other’s events was an activity in learning good event design. To assist in this critical reflection, Janelle being the amazing teacher she is, asked her students to rate the event they played according to 5 principles of successful game design:

Player Empathy
Player Feedback
Writing
Storytelling
Immersion

Janelle also documented the event by uploading photos of the day to BubbleShare a photo sharing website. Once again showing how MiLK has increased her confidence in introducing other web-based facilities into her teaching. Congrats Janelle!

Janelle Williams has been a passionate fan and ever so active user of MiLK, however we must admit we have been avid fans of how she has been engaging her students with MiLK and drumming up plenty of interest within her teaching community. She is a lead teacher role Green and Hannon note must be undertaken in order for the education system to evolve to provide the skill set needed of the future workforce. “Leaders need to think innovatively about the resources already within their school and how to mobilise them all to make maximum impact, from reinvigorating ICT lessons, to embedding technologies across the curriculum. This is about focusing on small levers with the potential to create big change”.

Janelle Williams from Trinity Bay State High School has been inspired to create a Wiki website to accompany her students’ learning with MiLK. A Wiki is a website that supports collaborative authoring by allowing visitors to view, add, and remove content.

Janelle has asked her year 10 Multimedia students to use the Wiki for a number of tasks related to their use of MiLK. Firstly she has asked her students to use the Wiki to reflect on how their group is working together. This requires her students to critically reflect on their actions when working in a group, allowing them to identify and develop the skills needed for successful group collaboration and co-operation.

Janelle has also asked her students to contribute to the Wiki with a post listing the Digital Social Networks (DSNs) they are members of and identifying what type of networks they are; ‘The Gatherers’, ‘The Toolmakers’ or ‘The Entertainers’. Through asking her students to critically reflect on their participation in DSNs, Janelle is developing their critical thinking around social networks. This aids skills and knowledge transferral from formal learning to the informal learning that students engage in when using DSNs and vice versa. It encourages students to utilise the skills they have developed when using DSNs in their formal education. Also, by allowing her students to use a DSN as part of their formal education, Janelle is integrating her students’ experiences of MiLK and the Wiki with their existing social activities. The language adopted by students when contributing to the Wiki is evidence the Janelle has tapped into her students’ existing discourse for participation in DSNs. This casual language accentuated by short hand phrases is evident in the following quote form a student post on the Wiki:

“Hey r we supposed 2 talk about our group and its cooperation lol oh yeah well our group is really… well we get side tracked often but yeah ‘good’ ideas rarely cross our groups mind lol our group need alot more motivating! lol come pump up yeah we need ideas! hehe its realy hard to work in a group with people that u rarely talk to…so yeah ok i gtg”

Significantly, Janelle has also asked her students post responses to the question: Why are we using MiLK? Through posing this question, Janelle is asking her students to acknowledge what they are learning by using MiLK and why this learning may be important. She is engaging her students in their own learning processes and as a result making their learning more personally meaningful and motivating. One student in particular has been intrigued by this question and has actually responded with two fabulous and insightful posts:

Post 1:
“Hm. Well, firstly so that the ‘older’ community can enjoy technology as much as the ‘younger’ community. Therefore, they can have as much fun as we have using the new technology.

And Secondly, for us teenagers to be able to use the technology we have today without being critised by older people either to put it away because it’s not important or because it’s anti-social of whatever. We enjoy these things so we should be allowed to have them. ”

Post 2:
“To the answer to the third question I will ask another question. How is this NOT educational It’s completely educational. I mean, alright. You use mobile phones, but we can learn a whole lot from them. For example; it involves electricity, radio waves, electronics. Also, when we are playing the game we are doing teamwork, human interaction and we are using logical thinking as we are answering questions and answers. It’s also being physical as you run around the area trying to look for clues and answers. And just because it’s fun doesn’t mean that it’s not educational. Fun activities can be educational. What’s wrong with that? For the people who think that, take this for an example. If a person thinks maths is fun then does that mean that maths is not educational??? Should they stop doing maths??? Answer that. ”