I'm not going to talk about all of these, but if you ask the question, what is that ideal state? What are we trying to produce in a learner, at some exhibit, or doing some project in a class, or doing homework, all of the contexts we should ask there. What are we trying to achieve both as an outcome at the end of the process but also during the process, when the student is engaged in something. So these are words you'll hear, and it's a messy collection of words, I'm not going to lie. People think about immersion, sense of presence, absorption in an activity, narrative transportation is often used for people studying literature and reading. So, flow is a very famous one, incorporation is a relatively new when they combine aspects of several of them. The one that probably gets the most traction also is the most confusing, unfortunately is the word engagement. So I will talk about that primarily and for this I will say probably the most commonly referred to paper on the topic, by Fredericks in 2004. And so let me just briefly break down the idea of engagement a little bit, according to Fredericks at all, and then that might help us as we think about some of the technologies I want to share with you. So engagement, it's been argued but, it's pretty useful to think of it as having three kinds of engagements. The three possible ways, sometimes both are active, maybe all three even, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive. And so the first one I'll break down even further, and I do want to mention that engagement research really started with researchers looking at students attrition in schools. So we wanted to know are students engaged in school, why or why not, what does it mean to be engaged in school. But now the concept is much more broad than that, but the roots of this formulation come from that body of research is thinking about attrition and preventing kids from dropping out of school. And so some of the behavioral ones reflect that, so conduct for example is how good a kid is in school, effort relates to, and this is the one that connects at most with what we think about in museums and homework and things like that, the context I tend to work in. Effort, and that is are they actually choosing to do things that gets into motivation. And involvement is again, one of the school related things, how involved are they in different aspects of school. Emotional engagement, let me backup a little bit. Emotional involves is pretty simple, do they care? This is, it connects very closely to motivation and the overlap with existing constructs in psychology is a very common topic of discussion in the literature. I won't pretend that I could make sense of it here very briefly like this but I will tell you that the emotional aspect of engagement is what's created when you go to the movies and see a very good movie. It's one of the things when we go to a sad movie, we might cry or get choked up. While that might not be a positive emotion, it is part of engagement and in the end, we're happy that it happened. It's crying at a wedding, [LAUGH] emotional investment is a very important idea and an indicator of engagement overall. The last one is what Fredericks called cognitive engagement. And this is the one that most psychologist, at least historically it's kind of changing now as emotional psychology grows rapidly. But cognitive engagement refer to this agreement to go in and try to solve problems and try to invest time in understanding and thinking and reflecting. So that gets to the self-regulation, gets to the second part, is these are the self-regulated skills. When kids start to monitor their own understanding, when they're confused and they know it and they take steps to resolve or reconcile their confusion, these are very good indicators of cognitive engagement. So I wanted to break that down, and before I step back to this model of engagement, and this is a very process oriented model. This is what happens when you sit down with technology, how do you determine the level of engagement with the technology. So in this case, I'm citing a paper from O'Brien in 2008, and this figure comes from that paper, and as you look at it from left to right, you can sort of think about it in the context of the museum setting I just showed you. So you have this point of engagement or trigger and then you hop into the experience, and you can see there's ups and downs in this experience. There are different things that can happen. This is where we understand that the negative emotions can play a very important part in the overall experience of being engaged. It doesn't have to all be happy, it doesn't all have to be sad, some of it can be neutral, but the point is is that it's very much like any life experience. But while you are still involved in that task and doing something actively, engagement is sustained. And so this involves all sorts of different things, preexisting interest for example, general motivation or self efficacy for the domain, goals that you have, attention, awareness, control. So, if we think about interaction with technology, we want to roll in all these ideas and think about what we can do now as orchestrators of experiences to maintain successful engagement over time. And so there's the citation to O'Brien. Okay, so I will add, this is primarily from the human computer interaction community. So the studies this was based on were interaction with software, so web browsers, some video games, some educational software, they tried to generalize across the board. That's excellent work often cited just like Fredericks. Okay, so let's get back to our friend and think about that outer circle now. So there are many ways to influence a learning experience. So I am no way claiming these are comprehensive. But these are for that I find particularly relevant from a technology point of view. And so I'll give you the four and then we'll talk through them, one by one. So of course interactivity, that's an obvious one. We want to use technology to bring that learner in and be active. Narrative, this is the idea that story matters. Story is one of the oldest forms of communication, passing down lessons learned, telling stories of troubled situations and people, so narrative is something that has been profoundly important in recent years with educational technology. The third one is novelty, and the fourth one is ease of use. And so all of these things I found to be incredibly important as we integrate technology into learning. So let me start with the kind of the easier ones. So the first one is novelty. And what do I mean by that? Well let's think about a museum. And we've got just hordes of children coming in. And many of these kids are at home and doing things like this. You may recognize this, you may not. I happen to be a video game player, this is Black Ops 3. One of the most popular Call of Duty games in their long run of successes. But when we think about kids and adults playing games like this at home, that is their frame of reference for when they go somewhere, when they go to school, when they go to a museum. And so, thinking about what happens at home, what happens with their friends, should influence the experiences we provide them. Humans are drawn to novelty, we're drawn to new things that create some kind of spark in us, and so that said, we can also build on this. So if there is say, an interface that requires a controller, we might want to take some of that experience from their own life and use it. But we do want to think of how to give them new things and different things. So novelty is a critical one to think about. The next one is ease of use, and I'll just be very brief here. One thing to think about when you introduce technology into a museum experience is that it suddenly becomes a little more complicated to use it. And so I'll tell that with the twins, we found that there were two modes to use the twins. One is to have a staff member ask you a question of the characters, because it was full free speech. The other was later we had at a microphone where music could go up, press the button, ask the question and it would do the speech recognition on them. What we found was it was incredibly difficult to communicate how to use that microphone. People would push it down once and speak. What they need to do is hold it down when they spoke and let up. But people don't read signs, they get excited and just start pressing buttons, that's what you do at museums a lot of times. So we really struggled to get that right. And as speech recognition moves on, we notice now the solution seems to be leave it on all the time. Google and Apple have gone these directions, and if we were to rebuild this exhibit now, that's probably what we'd do, and try to intelligently pull out questions that we could answer, just like humans do. What you're looking at now is a exhibit, this is the daughter of a colleague here at U of I, using a Transformer's exhibit at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. One of the most exciting, it is the largest children’s museum on Earth and they made this exhibit very easy to use. They had these barriers showing you where to walk, you walked and there was a point where you would stand very still, it would lock on to you and then you could move your arms and see, the connect camera there is just like a video game detecting those movements and reflecting them on the character in the screen. They made it incredibly easy to use in a situation that could go the opposite way. You could get 20 kids running up to the exhibit and nothing working right. So, this is an example of making things easy to use, quick to use. There's a phrase in museum literature called immediate aprhendability or immediate comprehensibility. So, you want people to really get it right when they walk out. Okay, so let's talk about now interactivity. So if we think of an exhibit with minimal technology, we might look at the turn table exhibit at the Exploratorium. It's a really fun thing to do. The metal ring you see there is spinning and people get to experiment with different objects. Spheres, you see them using discs there. There's other objects they can put on there. It's essentially a big record player spinning around and they can roll a ball across the table and see how its trajectory changed. And so it's an exciting exhibit with minimal technology behind it. Contrast that with work of a friend of mine at the University of Wisconsin, Matthew Burland, who has built a highly interactive exhibit, with tangible blocks, with RFID tags that sit on a touch table, that simulates a lot of phenomenon. And so I won't even go into the details, but I will tell you it's called Aztuk. And kids learn basic programming and circuit design, and they're also trying to capture electronic fish to experience a little bit of what a scientist might do in the field, trying to collect specimens and classify them. So Aztuk is an exciting exhibit based on collaboration research. So these kids have to work together and pay attention to each other and talk, and at the same times there's sound effects, really good graphics. So this is a really good example of bringing in technology but really remembering that you've got these human learners here that you really want them to perform certain tasks and talk in certain ways that you know will promote the learning you seek. The next one I'll show you is even more on the technology side. So it gets risky here when you start pouring in the technology to make it work right. But in this case, this is a beautiful exhibit in the New York Hall of Science. And so what this is is a full wrap around screen with I don't even know how many connect cameras and projectors, but kids get to experience a variety of biomes. And as they walk around, they see creature interacting with the environment and kids get to introduce rain or grow a tree or chop down trees. And on the floor they can redirect water, and move, decide which biomes are going to get more water and which ones aren't. So there's a desert, there's forest, there's farmland, and a variety of different things
