The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference is pleased to announce that David Gibson will be one of our featured keynotes in Second Life. Only he can best describe the significance of his work in this guest blog:
Design Implications of Game-Based Analyses
Games and simulations provide educational researchers with big data. Compared to the past when two or three measures were all the evidence available for a pre-post evaluation, researchers now might have from hundreds to thousands of records from a single individual performance in what some call a virtual performance assessment space (e.g. 3D worlds, game-situated experiences, simulators). This situation creates a need for new analysis and interpretation methods and a new frame of mind for designing digital learning experiences with the potential to assess what someone knows and can do.
Data mining, machine learning and symbolic regression techniques are some of the new tools for analyzing and making sense from the time-based records and for relating those to both automated and human scoring artifacts. Researchers are beginning to understand how semantic layers can be pre-constructed from atomistic layers of mouse clicks, movements, and resources utilized, and how the new methods help provide insights into the patterns in the data. The bigger and more complex flows of data also therefore raise new psychometric challenges due to the dynamic processes that the data can now reveal, the layered resolution levels spanning from seconds to hours of performance, and the complex patterning of actions with objects in these virtual performance assessment spaces.
Learning analytics analyses that take stock of these issues will help uncover and articulate the relationship of time-event appraisals, visualization structures and resource utilization constraints on the psychometrics of virtual performance assessments. My talk at the VWBPE will introduce and briefly discuss some of these key issues I’ve encountered while conducting recent game-based analyses.
Date: Saturday April 12th, 2014
Time: 7:00am PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
Featured Keynote
Design Implications of Game-Based Analyses
The rise of digital game and simulation-based learning applications has led to new approaches in educational measurement that take account of patterns in time, high resolution paths of action, and clusters of virtual performance artifacts. The new approaches, which depart from traditional statistical analyses, include data mining, machine learning, and symbolic regression. This talk will briefly describe the context, methods and broad findings from two game-based analyses and describes key explanatory constructs use to make claims about the users, as well as the implications for design of digital game-based learning and assessment applications in virtual worlds.
Biography
Dr. David Gibson, Associate Professor of Teaching and Learning and Director of Learning Engagement at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, works as a team thought leader, educational researcher, learning scientist, professor and innovator. With funding from National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, MacArthur Foundation, EDUCAUSE, and others, Gibson’s research focuses on complex systems analysis, design and improvement of cyberlearning applications, games and simulations in education, and the use of technology to personalize learning via cognitive modeling, design and implementation. He is the creator of simSchool, a classroom flight simulator for preparing educators, and eFolio an online performance-based assessment system.