So the final idea that I decided to start implementing is a mobile social business simulator, which I decided to call Biz Smart. Biz Smart will be a multiplayer game, players from all over the world will be able to create virtual businesses that they will have to manage over time until they go bankrupt, just like in a Tamagotchi you would look after a virtual pet over a period of time until it dies.

Based on a social learning theory, I thought that it will be great for the players to be able to communicate with each other and create business deals with each other’s virtual companies. To make it even more realistic I want to pull exchange rates and calculate real-life distances between the companies to work out the postage costs for their products.

The aim of the game will be to get to the top of the learder board with the best business rating score (just like in IBM’s innov8 game) I also want to add a challenge mode to the game to make the player concentrate on a particular element of business management that he is not so good at. This is where the adaptive teaching machine model comes in. The system will work out what the student’s main weakness is at that point of time based on his performance so far and will generate a specific challenge. Here is how it will work:

I now have a month before the deadline to plan out this application and build it. Its not a lot of time considering such applications usually take a team to build and they never do it in a month. (I read this somewhere while researching designing learning applications!)

Here are some of the currently existing business simulation games:

Trading Around the World

For 11-14 year olds (5-8 graders, US) studying Social Studies and Economics in school.
Students become international traders from one of six continents: Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North America or South America. They negotiate prices with buyers and sellers from the other continents. Sometimes they are thwarted from trading by barriers, and they come to understand how the IMF, by fostering free trade, enhances the flow of goods and services worldwide.

BT Better Business Games

Better Business Choices:
This game gives you the opportunity to build your business from scratch. Will you make the right decisions about market conditions and select the right products, suppliers, energy and other vital ingredients to make sure your business survives in the long term?
This game is a single player game that has an option of 3 world scenarios.

Better Business Dilemmas:
You are about to experience what it can be like to manage social and environmental issues in a business – are you up to the challenge? As the new Chief Executive Officer (i.e. the boss) of your company you will be asked to make some decisions. You will have to make the best choices you can as you guide your company through the next twelve months.

NZIM Business Challenge

The NZIM Business Challenge is a business simulation where teams or individuals from around New Zealand compete against each other in the running of a fictitious company. The business decisions made each period are entered into the simulation website, where the computer simulation analyses the effects on the competing companies.

IBM Innov8 v2.0

Innov8 is a state of the art 3D business simulator for Business Process Management (BPM), a ‘serious game’,
which takes participants through the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, optimization, and innovation of a fictional company’s business processes.

INN0V8 teaches the fundamentals of Business Process Management (BPM) by allowing you to virtually
participate in a BPM project derived from IBM’s real world experiences.  The game is intended to provide users with an understanding of the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, and optimization of a company business processes.

All these games are good for what they are inteded to do but they are all computer based. In developing countries access to a personal computer is limited, however, almost everyone has a mobile phone. This is why I would like to use these projects and create a similar application but for a mobile phone. I want to use social learning theory and adaptive teaching machine model as the basis for my application integrated with the idea of a business simulator.

After a lot of reseach and thinking I had a list of elements that my project should/will consist of:

• Social learning, multi-user
• Adapting teaching, caters for each student individually
• Mobile application
• Helps to bridge the digital divide
• Educate people with low technical knowledge
• Bring developing countries capital
• Simple so it works on low end handsets
• Innovative, has never been done before

I’ve analysed this list and came up with an idea of a social multiplayer business simulator game. But this would not just be a learning fun game but more of a ’serious game’, aimed at over 18s, who want to learn how to run a business. I believe this can help some people overcome the fear of starting their own businesses and others can use their virtual business for parctice before the real thing, because simulation is a system that reacts in way similar to the real world, and thus teaches us about that world in the process. Subsequently, such application can increase the number of businesses in developing countries and improve their foreign trade, which can bring a lot of capital and help bridge the digital divide.

A game that I am thinking of creating would not be like a tycoon game, which are usually made mainly for entertainment but you still learn business elements from them. My game would be a serious game for people who are serious about learning business management.

“Serious games are designed with the intention of improving some specific aspect of learning, and players come to serious games with that expectation. Serious games are used in emergency services training, in military training, in corporate education, in health care, and in many other sectors of society. They can also be found at every level of education, at all kinds of schools and universities around the world. Game genre, complexity, and platforms are as varied as those found in casual games. Play, an important contributor to human development, maturation, and learning, is a mandatory ingredient of serious games.” (Derryberry A. 2007 in Serious games:online games for learning: http://www.adobe.com/resources/elearning/pdfs/serious_games_wp.pdf)

Research on adaptive teaching machine theory has also led me to the social learning theory, which focuses on the learning that occurs within a social context. It considers that people learn from one another, including such concepts as observational learning, imitation, and modeling. This theory was originated by Albert Bandura.

People learn through observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors. “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (Bandura). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences.

A lot of today’s technology relies on user’s social behavior, the Internet has connected people around the world through blogs and social networks. Social theory seems like a perfect learning model to apply to my mobile learning application.

I had a meeting with Gianni last mounth and showed him my latest idea. He said that I should do some more research on the Conversation Theory and try and figure out how I can tie it in within a mobile learning application effectively.

I did some research on this theory and came across a very interesting article by Usman Haque (2007) called The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask. (View PDF) This paper looks at Pask’s theories and projects. A particular project that got my attention was the Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor (SAKI), designed by
Pask and Robin McKinnon-Wood in 1956, which was essentially a system for teaching people how to increase speed and accuracy in typing alphabetic and numeric symbols using a 12-key keyboard.

Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor

SAKI is based on a concept of an adaptive teaching machine, mimics the possible relationship between a human teacher and student. A teacher is able to respond directly to a student’s apparent needs by focusing at times on particular aspects of the material to be studied if weaknesses are measured in these areas. This is achieved in Pask’s constructed system via the dynamic modulation of three variables.The machine responds not just to the student’s actual input, but also changes the way it responds on the basis
of past interactions. The student responds to the machine just as the machine is responding to the student, and the nature of their goals at any point in time is dependent on the particular history of response the other has provided.

Believed to be an instrumentation panel from the Eucrates project (1955), Gordon Pask developed the system with Robin McKinnon-Wood and CEG Bailey to simulate the relationship between teacher and student. His use of variables for concepts like ‘awareness’, ‘obstinacy’ and ‘oblivescence’ are core to the system.

Here are some other references that I came across on Pask’s theories:

Nakauchi Y., Naphattalung P., Takahashi T., Matsubara T. and Kashiwagi E. (2003) Proposal and Evaluation of Natural Language Human-Robot Interface System based on Conversation Theory [online] Available: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26isnumber%3D27829%26arnumber%3D1241625&authDecision=-203

Feinberg W. and Odeshoo J. (2000) EDUCATIONAL THEORY IN THE FIFTIES: THE BEGINNING OF A CONVERSATION [online] Available: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/Educational-Theory/2%20Feinberg-Odeshoo.pdf

Fernandez Maria (2008) Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath [online] Available: http://aminima.net/wp/?p=858&language=en

Sharples Mike (2002) Disruptive Devices: Mobile Technology for Conversational Learning [online] Available: http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/sharplem/Papers/ijceell.pdf

Sharples Mike (2005) Learning As Conversation: Transforming Education in the Mobile Age [online] Available: http://www.fil.hu/mobil/2005/Sharples_final.pdf

De Rosnay M. and Hughes C. (2006) Conversation and theory of mind: Do children talk their way to socio-cognitive understanding? [online] Available: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17603398

Scott Bernard (2001) Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory: A Domain Independent Constructivist Model of Human Knowing. [online] Available: http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/pub/fos/pdf/scott.pdf

My dissertation title ended up to be: “Can mobile learning bridge the digital divide in education?”

Since the development of electronic technology and the innovation of the Internet, information has become readily accessible around the globe, triggering an innovative approach in today’s education; electronic learning in schools, otherwise known as e-learning. However, due to the considerable expense of computers and Internet services, a digital divide emerged between the countries that could and could not afford them. The gap in computer literacy between these countries is still substantial and the governments all over the world are constantly trying to find ways to reduce it.

There are many different technologies related to e-learning that have been successful in education practices in developed countries – from the original Internet based in-class applications to the latest mobile learning (m-learning) systems outside of the classroom. M-learning is a new concept in the industry, emerging in recent years with the development of handheld devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPods and smartphones. Now, people all over the world, including developing countries, own one or more of these devices. As Sachs (2008) suggests, over 3.3 billion people are subscribed, an estimate of one per every two people on the planet. Perhaps one reason for such growth is that mobile devices now have many technologies embedded within them, which allows vast flexibility and access to any information independent of time and location.

The falling costs of handheld devices have led people to believe this may aid to bridge the digital divide in education. Yet even with such flexibility and diverse technology like location-based media and communication services, these devices may not be powerful enough to bring computer literacy up to the required standard. The objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the potential success of mobile learning methodologies in this electronic age of education and measure its effects on learners and educators in various cultures and societies. Worldwide statistics, theories and projects will be evaluated and compared throughout this study, in order to discover whether m-learning can bridge the digital divide in
education.

Many hours of research and writting have finally ended as the dissertation is all finished and handed in! Here is the link to a PDF.