Partner institution: Interactive Communications & Simulations at the University of Michigan
The challenge
In 2001, when I was a Ph.D. student in the University of Michigan School of Education, Michael Fahy, an anthropologist working in the Center for Middle East and North African Studies, approached me and my colleagues, looking for a way to engage K-12 students with educational resources that the Center had collected.
He had been imagining a “digital library,” following the popular trend in academia in the early 2000s, but we convinced him that what K-12 students and teachers needed most was not just static knowledge, but opportunities for perspective-taking and dialog. The result was Place Out Of Time. Using a custom-built website, students from a dozen or so different schools around the world could take on characters from a wide range of places, times, and cultures, and talk to each other about current-day and historical issues.
At the core, what was needed was a discussion system, but with some particular conditions:
- For assessment and in order to support individual students better, mentors and teachers need to be able to see everything a student character has posted, in one place without searching through the site. Teachers need to be able to efficiently monitor the activity of their own students, and delete inappropriate postings when necessary.
- Participants need to be able to find new activity, especially new responses to their own postings and messages.
- Project leaders need to be able to assign characters and give teachers a set of logins and passwords to give to their students. The system cannot depend on students having their own email addresses, and in fact we do not want to collect personal identifying information from students. The system also needs to accommodate students who are playing characters in pairs, and therefore sharing a login.
The process
A mentored, 8-week program
The Place Out Of Time program was modeled on other programs run by Interactive Communications & Simulations, most notably a simulation of the Arab Israeli Conflict that had been going on in various forms since 1975. Place Out Of Time would be an 8-week social simulation, involving 10-15 middle and high school classrooms from across the US and beyond, overseen by a university instructor and a team of university-student “mentors” taking a seminar for credit.
A banquet at the Alhambra
At first, the idea was simple. Characters would have a virtual “banquet,” along the lines of the old television show Meeting of Minds. When we tried this with students, however, the discussion started out well enough, but quickly lost steam. Characters were too polite to each other — we needed a way to create some tension to spur discussion.
A trial
We decided to add a courtroom trial scenario to the simulation, creating The Court of All Time, and inventing cases, based on real-world events, that the players could discuss. But how would the case be decided? If the case would be decided by a majority vote, once people’s positions became clear, there would be little incentive for those in the majority to seriously engage with those in the minority. On the other hand, if we selected a jury or panel of judges, what incentive would they have to listen to others not on the panel?
Votes of Confidence
We ultimately decided to try an elaborate system where a panel of justices would rule on the case, much like the US Supreme Court, but to make the justices accountable to the whole group, before ruling they needed to receive a minimum number of “Votes of Confidence” from other characters. As characters participated in forum discussions and messaged each other, they accumulated Votes of Confidence, which they could then give to justices as they saw fit. This introduced a political aspect to the simulation, as justices now needed to “lobby” other characters to receive their votes.
An Evolving Program
As time went on, we gathered feedback from teachers, students, and mentors, and made changes to the program and website accordingly. Polls gave characters a way to quickly weigh in on a question. We tried having courtroom “exhibits” and invented transcripts of witness testimony. Before the pandemic, in-person events brought participants together for a day in character (and in costume), providing added drama. Eventually, teachers and students told us that they wanted to discuss more issues and come to resolutions more quickly, and the program has involved to have multiple, shorter scenarios, decided by polls rather than by a panel of justices.
The solution … and the future
The current Place Out Of Time program meets the needs of its audience well, but that audience is limited by the time commitment necessary to do the whole 8-week simulation. A new version, called Take Another Perspective (TAP) is under development. TAP will allow teachers to set up and run simulations in as little as one class period, without the overhead of a university mentor team.
