So as you might have picked up by now, I’m part of the faculty at Old Dominion University. Imagine my surprise to discover that Matt Jabaily, Education Reference Librarian, is running a multiplayer Minecraft server that acts as an introduction to the new library extension! If you aren’t familiar with Minecraft, it is an indie game runaway hit in which players can manipulate everything about their environment, one block at a time, with a sort of zombie survival aesthetic; you must carefully explore your environment and build a shelter to survive the zombie wave that comes out at night. Here’s a description of the library’s version:
Monsters have attacked the Learning Commons, and only you can save it! Destroy the invading mobs and light up the library to keep more from spawning. As you do, you’ll learn more about the resources and services available at the Learning Commons, finding weapons, armor, and rewards as you explore. Play alone or with friends live on the server (IP: 96.8.117.2:25607) or request the single player download to modify and play the game according to your desire (email mjabaily@odu.edu).
Each area of this new part of our library is represented in Minecraft for students to explore and learn – plus zombies! The zombie extension is a special Halloween-inspired version that will be retired on November 18, at which point the server will revert to an ordinary library again. So your time is short to try it out!
Can you figure out which one is real!?!
I don’t think defeating zombies is necessarily related to any vital library skills, but perhaps it will motivate students to try investigate aspects of the library they otherwise would not have. The requirement to own Minecraft (which is not university-provided – although it should be!) is certainly a barrier to student adoption.
So will this be more effective at getting students to learn about new library resources than anything else? Who knows? At the very least, it sure is a fun way to try.
One of my graduate students, Katelyn Cavanaugh, has decided to embark to the brave new world of science funding called crowdsourcing for her I/O Psychology Master’s thesis. Here are the two facts that led us to this point:
- Science funding is very hard to come by, as most of it comes from federal grants. As a graduate student, you generally don’t qualify for many federal grants. As a result, many graduate students either a) ask less interesting research questions than they really want to ask because they don’t have enough money to ask them or b) pay for their projects out of pocket. And asking someone making less than $12,000 per year to supply nearly 10% of her yearly salary to advance the cause of science is not terribly fair.
- The Internet enables new forms of funding that previously did not exist. Thanks to services like RocketHub, anyone in need of funds can simply ask for them! Generous patrons surfing the Internet can browse through folks that need money to do good works, and choose whom to fund. Have an amazing art project that will require purchasing rare plants only found on one slope on one mountain in the Alps? Crowdsource it, and perhaps a curious art lover will provide you the cash you need to make it a reality.
So, as you might guess, cash-poor scientists have begun to use crowdsourcing to fund their research. The effort is called SciFund, and it may be the future of science funding. This year, researchers are seeking funding for 49 projects, one of which is Katelyn’s Master’s thesis. I’ll let her explain her project in her own words from her windowless-4-person-shared-office/closet provided generously by ODU (YouTube video below):
Less than a day old, and already 4 funders – please join them! Any donation is valuable; every dollar gets her more participants for her study. You can make your own donation to her research before December 15 by visiting http://rockethub.com/projects/3800-learner-control-in-online-training-programs
When students feel that their performance on learning assessments is out of their control, they create excuses before the assessment has even taken place. These excuses are often not based in reality; instead, the students are trying to protect their self-esteem – if they ultimately fail, they have already created an excuse as to why it happened, and if they succeed, they have done so in the face of adversity. Either way, the student’s self-concept is protected. This practice is called self-handicapping.
In a fascinating article in the American Psychological Society’s Observer, Valkyrie and Tobin1 discuss the research on self-handicapping, rather amusingly titled, “Teacher, I May Not Do Well on the Test Next Week Because I May Have to Babysit My Sister.” They discuss the myriad excuses students use a priori to excuse themselves from the responsibility of a difficult test looming before them.
This isn’t necessarily done to annoy instructors, although it often feels like it to the instructor. Instead, students are trying to protect themselves. Knowing that the test is difficult, they shift the blame from themselves to external factors. It’s not that I didn’t study enough, or that I didn’t know what coming – instead, the world is conspiring against me so that I have no choice but to fail.
Of course, in reality, these excuses are nonsense. Needing to babysit next week certainly does not prevent you from studying now. But they are convincing to students making the argument, perhaps with a similar mechanism to self-fulfilling prophecy.
The authors suggest several techniques that teachers might use to minimize the effect of self-handicapping:
- Teach students about self-handicapping so that they are strengthened against it.
- Create an environment that discourages self-handicapping by:
- Being supportive of students.
- Explaining why staying on task is important, and how course objectives relate to staying on task.
- Emphasize equity and fairness, that the power to succeed is shared by the teacher and student.
- Don’t use motivational structures that pit students against each other (i.e. don’t use competition to motivate)
- Teach learning strategies to students.
- Consider why students are motivated to perform (or not) in your classes and work toward those motivations.
These are generally good recommendations, although I’m not sure about #3. Certainly outright competition for grades is not a great idea, but revealing grade ranges so that students have some sense of how well they are doing relative to others can be useful. This de-legitimizes claims like, “This class is too hard, everyone is failing!” and can be a useful tool to give students a better sense of perspective.
- Valkyrie, K., & Tobin, C. (2011). ‘Teacher, I may not do well on the test next week because I may have to babysit my sister.’ Observer, 24 (8) [↩]