Shifting Commitments

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General Steps:

I am mid-way through a Masters of Educational Technology (MET) at the University of British Columbia. While studying situated learning and distributed cognition, I learned about an educational mobile learning technology developed by David Gagnon at the University of Wisconsin called Augmented Reality Interactive Storytelling, or ARIS, and recognized the opportunity that this gaming app could provide to create the learning experience I had envisaged at the school. Dilemma 1944 is situated documentary hosted on ARIS that I developed for my Social Studies 11 classes, and as a part of a more extensive online lesson called Shifting Commitments: Safety, Security and Sacrifice in a Changing World, which I created for a recent UBC MET class.

A situated documentary is a place-based approach to learning where students use mobile technologies to experience real life events in the locations where they actually occurred. In the game, students travel back to Kitsilano High School in Vancouver during the Second World War, where they become a graduating student, struggling to decide whether or not to join the Canadian Forces fighting in Europe and Asia. The game presents students with various primary source artifacts, including archival photographs, film footage, letters, newspaper articles and original Canadian Army Newsreels. These items are triggered through Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Quick Response (QR) codes on their mobile devices. The ARIS App also enables students to have fictitious conversations with past Kitsilano Students, interact with a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) map and watch present day interviews of survivors who went to the school.

My classes piloted Dilemma 1944 and completed the personal letter or diary entry activity. They evaluated each other’s decisions for contextual accuracy, evidence-based assumptions and implications reflected in their reasoning. On the online lesson, this is accomplished through forum discussions. In my Social Studies 11 classes, this was done as a small group activity.

Dilemma 1944 had a great impact on my students. It was a welcome change to get out of the classroom and use the school landscape in a learning context. Students reflected after the activity that it was powerful and slightly unnerving to be occupying familiar spaces in real time, with their phones acting as portals to the past, creating a disjunctive shared space. The emotional pivot point was when they found the photos of personalities in the narrative and realized that they were real people, and that they were about to discover what happened to them. This is when students were confronted with the realization that these grads from the 1940’s were their same age, with similar school experiences, and that the dilemma of enlistment was very real for them.

Part I:

Activity 1: Dilemma 1944/Discussion:

• Do all citizens share a common responsibility for national security?
• What commitments should Canadians make to ensure collective safety?
• Are the sacrifices by Canadian Forces in the past relevant in today’s changing world?

Some people believe that the nature of safety, security and sacrifice are dependent on the context of place and time. Others see it them as matters of principle. Take the survey below to determine your stand on these issues. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6JTK2C9

Activity 2: Critical Response: Read and respond to the letters or diary entries of your classmates from the perspective of a person living during the Second World War (do not use current examples). Maintain respectful dialogue as you exchange points of view with each other Take a critical position by challenging, evaluating and seeking clarification from others whose positions differ from your own.

Activity 3: Reflection: Consider your experience of playing Dilemma 1944, the content presented in the game, and the interactions you have had with your classmates in discussions 1 and 2. Respond to the following questions and comment on those of your classmates in Discussion 3:

• To what extend has identifying the real people characterized in the story and determining the consequences of their decisions influenced your position on enlistment?

• What new or different considerations have affected your rationale or helped you to understand those of others?

Activity 4: Addressing an Ill-Defined Question: In teams of 3-5, address the problem posed by the question below by designing and creating a web-based project: "What level of commitment should Canadians be prepared to make for national security and personal safety in our rapidly changing world?"  

Activity 5: Think back on your responses to the survey at the beginning of this lesson and discuss the extent to which your beliefs and perspective has changes on national security, collective safety and personal sacrifice. Elaborate on all the factors that you have considered and identify any points where you felt particularly conflicted. Include some thoughts on the degree to which the process has influenced your awareness, knowledge or understanding of the issues and concepts presented. What have you observed about your own learning after completing the activities and discussions in this lesson?

Evaluation: 
  Assessment for learning occurs is done with the opening survey. Assessment as learning takes place in the posted discussions and reflections of activities 1-3 and the final private self-reflection following activity 4. Assessment of learning is done by the teacher as well as students individually and on a team basis based on the following rubric, which also is posted on the lesson website: http://ccbrumwell.wix.com/dilemma1944

Selected Resources:

Dilemma 1944 Overview Video

Shifting Commitments: Safety, Security and Sacrifice in a Changing World