Forum Teaching with LAMS - experiences: Role play sequences - technology adoption

By: James Dalziel

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Learning Design and LAMS can be particularly appropriate for role play scenarios. I've just posted three new role play sequences to the Public repository - they are:

LAMS Adoption Role Play
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq%5fid=376430

Template - Technology Adoption Role Play
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/dl?seq_id=376434

Interactive Whiteboard Adoption Role Play
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq%5fid=376440

This posting is to reflect on the process of creating these, and to encourage discussion with others who are interested in this field.

The first sequence - LAMS Adoption Role Play, is a version of a task I first ran in a Masters unit on Learning Design technology that I teach at Macquarie University (EPG937). I used this sequence to illustrate how role plays can be used in LAMS/Learning Design, as well as to encourage my students to consider different perspectives on the adoption of a new technology like LAMS within a typical secondary school. I think the sequence went quite well - although getting the timing right was challenging - and the students seemed to enjoy it.

The structure of all three sequences uses a simplified variant of the Versailles example from the original IMS Learning Design documentation (see http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/ldv1p0/imsld_bestv1p0.html#1503778 for details). In part 1 (pre role play), it breaks students into different groups and gets them to discuss their assigned role within their group. In part 2 (role play proper), all groups comes together and play out their roles in a whole of class discussion. In part 3 (post role play), students reflect on the role play experience.

The first sequence is ready to run immediately if you'd like to conduct a role play about LAMS adoption. However, I wanted to create a more generic version of this structure that could be adapted to other topics, so I created the second sequence, which is a Template version of the first sequence. In it, I remove all the references to LAMS so as to make the role play potentially applicable to many other kinds of technology adoptions. To help with understanding of the original and the template, there is a Template Advice document that shows the text of the two versions side by side - see http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/files/TemplateAdvice_TechnologyAdoptionRolePlay.doc?file%5frev%5fid=376436

To illustrate the use of the template, I then created the third sequence based on adoption of interactive whiteboards (instead of LAMS). I did this by editing the relevant text of the Template version to apply it to interactive whiteboards.

Here are some reflections on the whole process:

(a) Creating the alternate version (interactive whiteboard) was easy and quick - it only took me about 10 minutes.

(b) Creating the Template took quite alot of work - I had to do lots of careful wording to try to make it as re-usable as possible, and not require lots of editing.

(c) Editing the original LAMS adoption sequence to be ready to post here took quite alot of work - I found various typos and bits of unclear text when I went back to it; and also had to edit out bits of text that related to the specific course I was running at the time.

One more issue struck me - there are many levels at which you can create a re-usable template, and it is hard to know where to start/stop. For example, the context I chose for this role play was a secondary school with four roles, but I could easily have made this more generic in both location and roles - but on the downside, this would have given the sequence less focus on a specific style of role play. Different authors will approach this in many different ways - and I think we still have much to learn about what is most useful.

Finally, the sequences are based on LAMS V1, which meant I couldn't limit access to certain activities to certain groups - I could only give a list of activities and ask people to go to the appropriate task. Later I'll explore how the new features in V2 could help facilitate this more directly.

Posted by James Dalziel