Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Two questions about documenting student learning in and around MC.

Two questions about documenting student learning in and around MC. 1) Is it possible (perhaps with a mod) to save all the text generated in game over, say, a week's time? 2) Does Discord ofter the ability to record talk between gamers?

On the other hand, the talk alone would be useless without being able to simultaneously view what the players were seeing and doing while talking.

I'm pretty sure the tech must be out there to allow this, but I don't know anything about it.

23 comments:

  1. Windows 10 has an in-built tool that allows us to record pc gameplay, including audio from Skype/discord.

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  2. While searching for examples I came across this cute video where players who are also fans of Doctor Who created their own Minecraft based episodes :) . I'm a fan of Doctor Who so I had to look. youtube.com - Doctor who minecraft adventures episode 1

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  3. Maha Abdelmoneim It records video and audio.

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  4. Can't wait for Mattie to meet Jacob, and Emanual on our server. For Mattie (9 years old) and Emanual (8), English is their second language. For Jacob (10), English is his mother tongue. Having three kids from three different countries to join us on the server sounds exciting! =) And if we can record their interaction on Discord, we would have data to start with and prove how language learning takes place via in-world interaction with players. Last night after Mattie parted his teammates on minecraft for dinner, he said "We had a blast." I was surprised because this is not something Taiwanese kids would learn from the textbook. I see much potential for kids to learn language through interacting with online players. I just need to collect data to prove it. Being able to record them converse and having Don's expertise in conversational analysis would help us provide some evidence. =)

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  5. Ideally, you're going to need to videotape the interaction. Audio alone won't cut it except in situations where audio was the only thing available to the participants, for example, in a telephone call. In terms of game play it gets complicated very quickly. The "in-game" video and audio that Maha mention are certainly important. You might even want to set up a camcorder to record Mattie while he is playing.

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  6. I can definitely work on setting that up. Mattie loves to be on camera. =)

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  7. Jane Chien Emanuel was born in Brazil from Brazilian parents, however he ended up speaking English as his first language. He struggles with Portuguese though. He spoke only English until 6. Last year though, he started speaking in Portuguese. It would really be great for Emanuel to have this chance to connect with other kids in English as he feels really lonely here without anyone to communicate. He plays with kids in school but they often tease him because of his Portuguese.

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  8. Record anything and everything you can (think like an ethnographer). You can always decide not to use something but if you don't record something you later decide you need, you're stuck. It's hard to say anything else without looking at a bit of sample data. I work exclusively with video data of face-to-face interaction (among novice L2 users).

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  9. Jane, that looks pretty good. If you could have IN ADDITION to actually screen recording that would get all the text that would be great. Also if you can you might want to put the camera on a tripod. In CA we talk about "unpacking" the interaction and there's certainly a LOT to unpack here!

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  10. The videos are longer but I only managed to upload one within one minute otherwise the file would be too large. This was their first time playing together and it was about 4 months after attending 4th grade in Orlando. When I first had teacher parent conference in November, his homeroom teacher and language arts teacher both told me that Mattie was silent most of the time and did not speak English. He was only using gestures and "cheh-guh, cheh-guh" in Chinese, which means "this, this" in English to communicate with them. (Funny that both teachers are speaking perfect Chinese "Cheh-guh" after hearing it so much from Mattie.) The way he tried to express was so entertaining that he often made the whole class laugh. His teachers wanted me to encourage him to speak in English and suggested that I should talk to him in English at home. One day at lunch, his classmates were playing "Kiss, Kill, Marry" and he said that his stomach was full of words and because he wanted to participate, all of what he wants to say just burst out from his stomach, and he says "Washington, Obama, Trump!" He could not stop talking ever since. Now he's getting lots of negatives on classdojo for talking out of turn....(sigh).

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  11. It would make for interesting as well as challenging research since not only are these two playing the game (inworld together) but also interacting with each other in person . I noticed a couple of times that Mattie took his eyes off his screen to check what the other kid was doing.

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  12. Jane, my children went through similar experiences (each in his or her own way), first when we moved to Mexico and they attended a Spanish-language elementary school, then again a couple of years later when we moved to Japan and they enrolled in Japanese public schools. It wasn't always easy for them but I think they appreciate the value of it now.

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  13. BTW, when we were living in Mexico I asked my son one day if he was learning a lot of Spanish. He answered "no, but I'm learning a lot of English." What this meant was that in school they had English lessons so that was obviously learning. The Spanish he was learning didn't seem like learning to him.

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  14. And when we lived in Oman, the kids would come home using all sorts of words and phrases that we didn't understand. It was a very international community on campus. They would just say it's something my Filipino or Sudanese friend says.

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  15. And one final humorous story on child language learning. We were at home (in Oman) when my 3 year old daughter, Alia, came into the room saying "Baby f**k, baby f**k" . We were a little concerned to say the least. Turned out she had been watching Arabic Sesame Street ("Iftah ya Simsim") on TV and there was a baby seal. Seal in Arabic is "fuq" which is where the Spanish word "foca" comes from.

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  16. oh my....that is sooooo funny!!!! LOL hahaha can't stop laughing!!!!!

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  17. Don Carroll lol some words in one language may sound really awkward in another. I sometimes have to act as if I'm not aware of anything funny, especially when I'm working with pronunciation.

    BTW, I lived in Oman too. I was there for around 4 years in the early 90s. It's my favorite place.

    For anyone wondering "iftah ya simsim" means Open Sesame btw :) . It goes well with stories as most Arabs know the Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.

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  18. We lived in Oman (while I taught at SQU) from 1988 to 1994 (when we moved to Mexico). We loved it there, but there were practical factors impelling us to move on (and leave the Middle East). It seems that everyone who lived in Oman (at least at that time) loved it. I might be heartsick to see it now that it's gotten all hyper-developed, for example with a superhighway going down to Tiwi. resorts all over, and bumper-to-bumper traffic from Seeb to Muscat.

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  19. BTW, Maha, I just watched two Arabic language films. The first was Wadjda which is absolutely outstanding! EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH IT. The other was Theeb which a friend described as a "Bedouin Western." A sort of Good, Bad, and the Ugly in Wadi Rum. Both were excellent, but Wadjda was more impactful.

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  20. I know just enough Arabic to feel like I should be understanding...but don't. ; )

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This is about the best I've been able to do so far.

This is about the best I've been able to do so far. I can't get comments to upload consistently to blogger. It might be a bandwidth ...