QuestionLab on the DML

Just a quick post to let you know that several hundred great new ideas on how we might reimagine learning have just been submitted to the Digital Media and Learning competition. This week only, you can contribute to the conversation by adding your own comments. Be sure to check out QuestionLab, which is a proposal outlining how we can leverage Grockit’s platform for live collaboration to create a new game that actively engages learners in asking questions and sharing their work with the world, in concert with our friends at Connexions.

I’d love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment about QuestionLab on the DML site!

Update: The public viewing/commenting period is now closed. For the curious:

QuestionLab: Using inquiry to power a community of peer learning online

QuestionLab encourages inquiry and collaboration through social online games. By expanding on Grockit’s live web-based collaborative learning platform, QuestionLab complements the existing focus on students answering challenging questions with a new activity engaging small groups of students in asking/authoring their own questions, assessing peer responses, and sharing their work via automatic publication to the Connexions OER Content Commons.

While Grockit games are primarily built on instructor-written multiple-choice questions, QuestionLab supports student-written open-ended questions. Using a real-time collaborative editing environment, small groups write STEM-oriented questions of interest to them. Students are encouraged to draw on Open Educational Resources in composing these questions, and QuestionLab affords doing so directly from Connexions, a “Content Commons” of free and open-licensed educational materials. By attaching descriptive tags and estimating question difficulty, students shape which of their peers are later presented with that question.

Complementing this new collaborative inquiry activity is an expanded form of Grockit’s existing problem-solving game, in which students work alone, with peers, or with a teacher to research and answer questions. Students specify their topics of interest and a Grockit game is prepared based on those criteria. After seeing a question and submitting an answer, the group reviews and assesses past responses and can award points and achievement badges to past respondents and/or the question authors. All student work produced within QuestionLab will carry a Creative Commons license and we automatically be externally published to Connexions.

QuestionLab leverages several strengths of Grockit’s platform: its social and game dynamics that motivate engagement, its growing global network of peer study groups, and its popularity both in and out of school. By fueling these games with the products of student inquiry, peer-assessment, and open educational resources, QuestionLab creates a culture of participatory learning among a community of peers.