Daniel Molnar, The Data Janitor about talks/tv music articles translations

Connectivism in Practice – Edutainment that Works!

Excerpt of presentation delivered at Onlinde Educa Berlin 2005

“Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.” (George Siemens: Connectivism - A Learning Theory for the Digital Age)

“Edutainment (also educational entertainment or entertainment-education) is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse. Edutainment typically seeks to instruct or socialize its audience by embedding lessons in some familiar form of entertainment: television programs, computer and video games, films, music, websites, multimedia software, et al.” (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Case A

Professor X Quest

The competition was launched in October 2004 UPC by UPC Magyarország Kft., in cooperation with Oktopusz Foundation and Coedu EducatioNet Ltd.

Teams of students between the ages of 14-19 registered on the website of the quest, became secret agents and faced the challenge to save the lives of Hungarian scientists. The spy teams had to download one movie every week from the official website of the competition with limited information scraps about their actual target person. In every mission they had to find out who that person could be and create the profile of this scientist. This way they could save one Hungarian scientist every week from being kidnapped by the evil Professor X who tried to use them to conquer the world. 1400 students form 438 different settlements of the country applied for the competition. On the last day of the quest a group of ex-spies launched an unofficial site for Professor X quest to keep the community together.

Planned learning objectives for the students: During the 6 weeks of the quest the participants had the opportunity to:

What we’ve learned?

Case B

Luis de Filmez MovImagiNation Contest

The competition was launched in April 2005 by UPC Magyarorszag Kft. In cooperation with Oktopusz Foundation and Coedu EducatioNet Ltd.

Students between the ages of 14-19 registered online on the website of the contest, and so they had 3 days to send their film ideas in 160 characters via SMS. After this, the next task of the teams was to explain their film idea and to create the synopsis of it. In order to help complete the contest the organizers made available an electronic learning material for the participants in that they could find examples and illustrations about what and how they are expected to present in their work in each round. Teams did not accomplish this round were not disqualified from the competition the only ‘punishment’ they get is 0 point for not completing the second round. In the third round teams had to record a scene from the television and re-dub it with the dialog that suits their own storyline. In addition they had to fill in the film structure table and choose a “dream team” of director, cameraman, actor and actress to their films, and create their profiles Twiki and publish them on the internet. In the last mission teams had to create a trailer for their imagined movie. They had 2 weeks to create the 2-3 minutes long clips. The 10 best teams were invited to present their movie plan in front of a professional jury. They had only 15 minutes to convince the jury that they had the most creative plan and “sell” their idea to them.

Planned learning objectives for the students: During the 3 months of work students had the opportunity to:

Case C

Professor X 2050 Quest

We try to provide visual storytelling tools while keeping the original scientific mystery format. Each week we present a mystery in the form of an animation with a soundtrack and we’ll ask for the solution in the same format. Therefore we’ve developed Release, a Flash-based animation generator that lets the user edit the storyboard of an animation with predefined sets and character animations. The characters will talk in textbubbles and you’ll be able to construct your own radio drama for the episode.