Dangerously Irrelevant

CASTLE adds 3 new blog partners!

As part of our never-ending quest to tap into the potential of social media to enhance the practice of school administrators (and the university programs that prepare them), I am pleased to announce that CASTLE has added three new blogs to its portfolio. Two of the three blogs have been in existence for a long while; the third is a new blog by a faculty colleague.

Are we trying to become the Weblogs, Inc. or Gawker Media (or Education Week) of the edublogosphere? No, not exactly. But we ARE trying to assemble a portfolio of blogs that meet the various technology and/or leadership needs of practicing school leaders.

Our blogs

Here are the blogs that we’ve initiated to date (and their topical focus):

1. Dangerously Irrelevant (technology, leadership, and school reform)
2. LeaderTalk (school leadership; group blog)
3. Edjurist (school law; group blog)
4. 1to1 Schools (1:1 laptop programs; group blog)

To this mix, we’ve now added the following (which fill in a few significant topical areas in which we were lacking)…

5. Virtual High School Meanderings (online schooling)

Dr. Michael Barbour, an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University, has been blogging about online schooling for years. As you’ll see if you read it for a while, if it has to do with online schooling, you’ll likely find it at Michael’s blog. Michael posts A LOT; the comprehensiveness of information he provides is astounding. Michael also maintains a virtual schooling wiki or you can follow him on Twitter. Michael’s blog soon will be renamed Virtual School Meanderings to reflect the growth of online schooling in earlier grades. 

Here are some representative posts to get you started:

• Idaho needs our attention
• Documenting Clovis - End of semester edition
• The impact of opencourseware on paid enrollment in distance learning courses
• Virtual schooling in the news
• Virtual schooling presentations at SITE

6. Educational Games Research (educational gaming)

John Rice is an educator, author, and speaker, as well as a doctoral student at the University of North Texas, who has been blogging about educational gaming since February 2007. I am a learner in the area of educational gaming so I always gain a lot from John’s posts. John does a nice job of looking at K-12 and higher education and also includes a post now and then on corporate simulations, serious gaming, and the like.

Here are some representative posts to get you started:

• Learning STEMs from McLarin’s Adventures in Oklahoma
• Animating the news: How videogame technologies can alter our perceptions of real live events
• How to design an educational video game: Three important considerations
• Study: Reaction times lowered via video games
• Toy spy robots: A practical way to teach programming

7. School Finance 101 (school finance / policy)

I have known Dr. Bruce Baker, school finance professor extraordinaire, for many years. Bruce is a fantastic scholar. His interests extend far beyond school finance to include a variety of policy and leadership issues. Those of us in educational leadership academic circles know that Bruce is not afraid to take on the establishment and confront uncomfortable political and educational truths. I was delighted to see that Bruce started blogging more extensively last fall and was even more pleased when he agreed to join us. Bruce writes about deep, significant school funding and/or policy issues, but does so in a way that’s accessible to those of us who aren’t experts in this area. You also can find Bruce on Twitter.

Here are some representative posts to get you started:

• Racial achievement gaps and within-district funding inequity
• Why do states with the “best” data systems have the worst schools?
• Pondering the usefulness of value-added assessment of teachers
• NCTQ teacher quality ratings: Where’s the “quality?”
• New Jersey teacher salaries: Spiraling out of control?

I encourage you to subscribe to all three of these blogs for a while. There is some really important information and thinking coming out of all three of these channels. I can guarantee that you’ll learn a lot and gain some valuable resources for your own work.

Next steps

What lies ahead for the CASTLE blogs? Well, we will be shifting a couple of our existing blogs over to WordPress, so you’ll see some visual changes and added functionality in the next few months. We’re going to add some new authors to our group blogs, particularly LeaderTalk and 1to1 Schools. And we’re in conversations with our sponsor, the University Council for Educational Administration, about initiating a blog that deals with school leadership for social justice. If you’ve got some other suggestions for us, or know of a blog that might be a good addition to our portfolio, let me know!

Happy reading!

Do most educational games suck?

Since my preview of Conspiracy Code: U.S. History at NECC, I’ve been thinking again about educational games…

Here are a bunch of screen shots of different online games for learning. I found them by typing into Google variations of learning games, educational games, learning games high school, educational games middle school, and so on. Most of these appear to be aimed at kids of middle or high school age.

FunBrain Math Baseball

PBS Kids You’re in Charge

Quiz Hub U.S. History Timeline Quiz

Math Playground Math TV

UPDATE: The creator of this would like me to note that Math TV is a 'learning activity' rather than an educational 'game.' See the comments below for more on this.

eSchoolOnline eMath Pretest

Asian Countries – Level Seven

Hotmath Number Cop

Teach-nology Diner Dash

CoolMath Pool Geometry 2

Eat or Be Eaten

Just from a graphics standpoint, I have to wonder how interesting these games are to preteens and teens when the games below are more along the lines of what they see at home.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Madden NFL ‘09

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

Super Mario Galaxy

Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships

BioShock

Plants vs. Zombies

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

So I’ve got some questions…

1. Does the quality of the graphics matter when it comes to educational games? Or is the quality of the learning experience enough?
2. Speaking of the learning experience, just how bad are most of these so-called ‘educational games?’ I wasn’t too impressed with the games shown above. In terms of gaming complexity, many of them are using pretty simplistic techniques to try and reach what I’m guessing are fairly-savvy students. Also, many of them seemed to be games from many years ago that still are being pitched to educators and adolescents. I found two of the learning games as links from a high school web site (Asian Countries – Level Seven and Eat or Be Eaten), which made me feel really sad for the students who were in that school.
3. Maybe it’s completely unfair to compare online learning games with commercial games that are downloadable or on CD-ROM/DVD. So what is out there that’s comparable in the commercial downloadable/DVD educational games sector? Anything good? Vendors, if you think you’ve got educational games that are worth looking at, feel free to comment!

Your thoughts?

NECC - My adventures with Horse & Hound magazine: Florida Virtual School, Achieve3000

A few days before NECC I was invited by a publicist to interview Julie Young, the Executive Director of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), and also speak with the folks from Achieve3000. I accepted because I’ve always wanted the chance to talk with Julie. I had no idea in advance that I would end up having a Notting Hill Horse & Hound magazine-type experience (and, yes, I was Hugh Grant).

Florida Virtual School

I knock on a door and am quickly ushered into a hotel suite. I meet and shake hands with Ben Noel, CEO of 360Ed, as he walks out the door. Then I am offered a beverage, plunked onto a couch, handed a packet of publicity materials, and given 30 minutes to talk with Julie and Andy Ross, VP of Global Services for FLVS. The topic: FLVS’ new online video game / American History course, Conspiracy Code. I’m a little bit disoriented but gamely dive in…

Conspiracy Code runs on a custom gaming engine designed specifically for FLVS by 360Ed. It cost $1.5 million to develop; costs were shared equally by FLVS and 360Ed and spread over three years ($250K per partner per year). Two hundred FLVS students are in the game now. Several other districts are piloting it. Conspiracy Code is designed to be an integrated, full-year course / gaming experience. Students take about 90 to 100 hours to complete the game. They dip in and out of the gaming engine throughout the year, assembling clues and completing missions. The game includes 51 assessments (both oral and written), 270 mini-games, numerous interrogations, 30 ‘agent eliminations,’ and 371 clues. Teachers monitor student progress; each of the 10 missions takes 2 to 3 weeks. Most students spend about an hour a day working for the class, some of which is in the game environment. Historical facts are interwoven throughout the gaming experience and student-teacher discussion. Sometimes the game requires students to do outside research to complete assignments and proceed forward.

• Conspiracy Code Product Overview
• Conspiracy Code Press Release
• FLVS Consipiracy Code web site
• FLVS Presskit
• Education Next article about FLVS

The first evaluation report on the Conspiracy Code is due in a couple of weeks but anecdotal evidence looks extremely promising. The students who seem to like the game the most are the ones who ‘hate history.’ The game requires students to write, create data maps, make timelines, ask questions, make associations, solve problems, etc. Students must apply their knowledge and facts in a number of different ways to be successful. Some ‘barriers’ were put in place to ensure that students didn’t play more than work (e.g., students can’t move forward until they work on their data map, write in their journal, get feedback from their teacher, etc.).

 

The first two teachers were ‘gaming people.’ It still took them 2 to 3 months to get comfortable with teaching this way. All FLVS teachers receive extensive professional development before they’re allowed to teach. The first few teachers will train those that follow. There is a ‘Teaching Online 101’ course plus a separate gaming module for Conspiracy Code.

 

Now that the gaming engine has been built, FLVS will use it for other games/courses; I also suggested that FLVS release it to students to design their own games. The next Conspiracy Code game will target reading and comes out in August. All in all, it appears to be a solid attempt at integrating gaming into the education experience. It will be interesting to see the evaluation results when they come out. FLVS is a data-driven organization and is committed to reworking the game/course as need be to ensure students are both engaged AND learning whatever facts they need for success in the standardized-testing era.

Achieve3000

Throughout our conversation, people are coming in and out of a door to another room in the suite (reporters? other bloggers?). When my 30 minutes with Julie and Andy are up, I’m swooped into that room, replaced by someone else who gets my spot on the FLVS couch. I’m handed another publicity packet, do the quick meet-and-greet, and away we go…

Achieve3000 is a ‘differentiated instruction solution.’ In essence, students are given an article to read on the computer that’s aligned with their reading level. The company recommends a minimum of 1 or 2 articles a week but there are articles available every day if desired. Great care has been taken to avoid stigmatization of low-level readers. For example, even though the article text and corresponding assignments are geared to students’ individual reading level, the overall layout of the article, font size, graphics, etc. all are extremely similar to what other higher-level readers in the class are experiencing. There is little to no difference in reading experience; it’s actually fairly difficult to tell at a glance at what level another student is working. The student reading at first-grade level also is reading the same content as her peer at the ninth-grade level. This allows low-level readers to still contribute to class discussions. All of this is in contrast to schools’ typical practice of having separate books or textbooks – often on separate topics – or pullout programs for struggling readers.

Results so far seem to be impressive. Expected student growth in a year is 46 lexile points. Students who read one article a week average 102 lexile point gains; students who read two articles per week average 124. The program accommodates Spanish-speaking students (and, soon, those that speak Haitian Creole). The New York City and Miami-Dade school districts (as well as the State of Hawaii) are using Achieve3000. Average gains in one year for ESL/ELL students are 166 lexile points (compared to 27 points expected). Good results also are being seen with students with special needs (see, e.g., the Arrowhead (WI) Schools).

Achieve3000 is working with the Associated Press and now has an archive of over 16,000 nonfiction articles. Next steps for the company are to 1) create a number of specific science units, and 2) identify and/or write articles that target specific career clusters and can be aligned with the WorkKeys job skill assessment program.

Final impressions

My time is up. I’m whisked out of the back room toward the hotel suite door. Julie and Andy are talking with someone new on the couch and I’m soon in the hallway, left at last to collect my thoughts. As I walk toward the elevator to return to my own hotel room, I’m left with one thought: Man, was that strange. Quite informative, but strange nonetheless. Who knows what else goes on in the back hallways, hotel suites, and meeting rooms of NECC?!

Disclosure: I received no incentives from either organization (other than a thumb drive from FLVS that contained the above Conspiracy Code materials) and was not pressured to cover them in any particular way. In short, I believe I was treated much like any media representative, despite being ‘just a blogger.’

2009 Game Education Summit begins today!

The 2009 Game Education Summit begins today in Pittsburgh. If you’re not attending, the keynote presentations will be streamed live and also will be available afterward. The summit looks awesome; it’s “the only conference where the video game industry and academics from around the world can come together to have meaningful conversations about the future of game development.”

Wish I could be there! Maybe someone’s liveblogging or there’s a Twitter hashtag for the event?

Help wanted - Using online games in K-12 classrooms

Each month, Cable in the Classroom Magazine has a page called InterActive that asks educators to answer a question related to the issue’s theme. The magazine usually prints at least five answers from readers.

The magazine editors have requested my help finding contributors for the February question:

How have you used an online game to enhance your students’ classroom experience?

If you’re a K-12 teacher to whom this question applies, please send your thoughts to Ellen Ullman. If you know a teacher who’s done this, please pass this post along. Thanks!

Not so irrelevant 012

Three great questions

I especially like the last of these three questions from Rodney Trice. We should be asking teachers and principals that question more often (and just that directly).

• How do you intend to bring the global community into your classroom?
• How will you prepare students for a future that is relatively unknown?
• How you will eliminate the racial predictability of achievement outcomes in your classroom?

This just in: Teenagers play video games!

All kidding aside, the latest report from the amazing Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that kids - even girls! – are up to their eyeballs in video games.

We’ll stick to the tried and (not) true

Nope, sorry. iPods are not allowed. Back to the old way. Too bad it doesn’t work as well. Gotta do it anyway. Oh, and I love how the music players are categorically, by definition, a ‘distraction’ (if not in actuality). Who needs reality when we have these little educational policy fantasy worlds that we can create for ourselves?

Throw da bums out!

After attempts to bring in turnaround experts didn’t work, the state of Maryland is increasingly leaning toward completely restructuring schools that are academically unsuccessful. State schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick says:

We are very comfortable being more aggressive about this. We have seen much better results [when the staff is replaced].

Blog like a farmer

I ran across an old post by Mike Sansone, one of my Iowa blogging buddies. I really like his metaphor that blogging should be like farming.

Scorecards

I bet parents and community members would really like to see scorecards like this one (maybe with different data) for their local schools. I know some schools and districts already do this. Hopefully they use line graphs rather than tables of numbers. Could you tell the essential story of a school district with 10 key, well-done graphs? I bet you could!

No writing in journalism class?

Check out this excellent article about the NYU journalism student who got in trouble for blogging about her class. [hat tip to Tim Stahmer]

I got no money, honey

Did you catch Edutopia’s advice on how to innovate without extra money or support?

Spend hours on content you can find with Google in 3 seconds!

One of my favorite things about Wes Fryer is his ability to highlight the ridiculous. I also enjoy his irreverance (“Behold! I hold aloft the holy words!”), particularly when I have the same experience at my kids’ school.

Speaking of Google…

Finally, I’m digging Google Chrome. it’s now my default browser and I’m using Firefox less and less (and I love Firefox). Chrome is much faster. I also like that each tab is a separate process; I have yet to have a browser hang…

Recommended reading - Educational gaming

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on educational gaming. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.

[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]

Video games and learning: Individualization, simulation, and complexity

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

In my post for LeaderTalk this month, I’m going to quickly address three ideas related to video games, schools, and learning and offer a short wrap-up at the end…

1. Individualization of learning

The artificial intelligence engines that drive most video games are able to customize the learning experience for each individual player. In other words, the game you play is different than the game I play because we have different skills and knowledge and because we make different choices during the game. The gaming engine adjusts to our differences, providing each of us with a learning experience that is both unique and optimally challenging for us as individuals. That’s a pretty powerful argument for considering the use of video games in education. As I said in a post long ago:

Video games are structured so that learners constantly operate at the outer edge of their competence. Participants are continually challenged but the challenges are not so difficult that learners believe they are undoable. [Dr. James] Gee refers to this as the regime of competence principle. Lev Vygotsky, a famous developmental psychologist, called this concept the zone of proximal development - the area in which students are ready to grow. Video games are similar to teachers in that they take the role of what Vygotsky called the 'more knowledgeable other,' the entity that helps students bridge the gap between their current ability and new capabilities. In education, we often call this scaffolding - the idea that learners can progress to new skill levels with structured, individualized, just-in-time assistance. Video games are very adept at scaffolding participants' learning. One of the reasons that video games are so compelling / engaging / 'addictive' is that participants are continually faced with new challenges that are neither too easy nor too difficult. This motivates them to move forward because the next step is always in sight and is perceived as being achievable.

We can foresee a day in the hopefully-not-too-distant future when all students have laptops and teachers, rather than seeing video games as competitors for their students’ attention, will instead have a wide variety of powerful educational video games available to them. Teachers then will be able to work individually with one group of students while other student groups move forward with the help of meaningful, substantive (not simplistic drill-and-kill) gaming software. Voila! The age-old dilemma of effective classroom differentiation just got a huge boost of assistance!

2. Simulation of authentic experience

The sight and sound capabilities of today’s video games are increasingly realistic. Video game designers are getting better and better at reproducing reality through the use of sounds, images, and videos. Corporations, governments, and the military all are using video gaming engines to produce simulations for employee training. As I said in another post from my gaming series a while back:

As the educational and/or ‘serious’ games movement grows, we will begin to see complex, realistic, accurate simulations of ancient civilizations (e.g., Colonial Williamsburg, the Maya, Great Zimbabwe), historical events (e.g., the Pelopponesian War, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Long March), scientific and mathematical processes (e.g., space exploration, Archimedean physics, Euclidean geometry), and the like. I am looking forward to this day. Right now even the most popular education-oriented games (e.g., Reader Rabbit, JumpStart, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) have been notably simplistic compared to commercial virtual worlds such as Second Life, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. I believe that education-oriented simulations will be much better at stimulating deeper, richer learning than the textbooks, videos, and learning games of today. It’s hard to argue that making authentic decisions in the role of a pharaoh or a slave or a farmer, while immersed in the realistic sights, sounds, and activities of ancient Egypt, wouldn’t be a better, more meaningful, and more permanent learning experience than merely reading a few textbook pages, seeing a few pictures, answering some “drill-and-kill” multiple choice questions on the computer, or watching a short video on the subject.

Reframing video gaming technologies as productive simulations rather than time-wasting games will go a long way toward fostering acceptance among educators. Simulations have a long history of use in K-12 classrooms. What today’s gaming technologies allow us to do is to create simulations that enable learners to do the actual work - and make the actual decisions – of whatever profession or society we wish (past, present, or future). This, of course, makes them incredibly authentic learning experiences and is why their use is skyrocketing in the professional world.

3. Intellectual complexity

Many advocates of video games in education focus on the fact that children find them engaging. They’re fun and they take advantage of powerful learning principles as described above. But one aspect that often gets neglected, I believe, is the fact that most good video games are pretty complex. As The New Yorker noted in its review of Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good For You:

Most of the people who denounce video games … haven’t actually played them - at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III” - that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities - is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes - like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess - which most of us grew up with. They don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification - sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”

At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coordinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking - simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

If you talk to gamers, they will tell you that one of the key attractions of their video games is the complexity of their activities. Dr. Henry Jenkins at MIT has said that:

The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a video game is that it's too easy.

Wrap-up

When our students, nearly all of whom have grown up immersed in video game experiences, complain about school not being interesting or engaging, they’re not just looking to be entertained (as many teachers claim). They’re looking for learning experiences like they have at home that are individualized, authentic, and intellectually complex. Figuring out how to make that happen in our K-12 classrooms is the challenge for us as leaders as we consider what forms 21st-century learning environments need to take.

Productive and powerful

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’m in the midst of reading Clark Aldrich’s Simulations and the Future of Learning. As Aldrich walks me through the process of developing a leadership simulation, he has a number of interesting things to say about video game and simulation design. Thanks to Aldrich’s clear and engaging prose, I’m finding myself unexpectedly captivated by the nitty-gritty of the workflow of simulation production.

So far the statement that has resonated with me the most, however, pertains as much to education as it does to the gaming industry. Aldrich said:

The goal of learning in any organization (business, educational, governmental) should be to make its members more productive (p. 3).

I’ll agree with that. And I probably would add to the end of that statement “… and more powerful.” I think that additional phrase takes the edge off what might be construed as a focus solely on preparation for work and expands it to include personal empowerment.

Productive and powerful. Isn’t that what we want for the children in our schools? Isn’t that we want for the educators with whom we work? Productive and powerful. I like it.

We have 50 million public school students in the United States. Are the thousands of worksheets that they will complete in their lifetime making them more productive? Are their countless hours of individual seat work going to lead to greater personal empowerment? Are they getting opportunities to be both productive and powerful on a regular basis?

What about our subpopulations? Are socioeconomically-disadvantaged students often getting the chance to be powerful? Do our students with disabilities or our students whose primary language is not English have multiple, ongoing opportunities to feel like they are productive, contributing members of our communities?

What about our 3 million public school teachers? Are the tens of millions of hours that they spend in staff development and training each year actually making them more productive? Do you think the bulk of them feel empowered by their ‘learning opportunities?’

Do we regularly ask ourselves these kinds of questions in our school organizations? As educators, should we?

I have some hard thinking to do about my own graduate classes and degree programs here at Iowa State…

Compare and contrast - Video games as educational tools

Dr. Jim Gee notes:

If learning always operates well within the learner's resources, then all that happens is that the learner's behaviors get more and more routinized, as the learner continues to experience success by doing the same things. This is good ... for learning and practicing fluent and masterful performance ... but is not good for developing newer and higher skills. However, if learning operates outside one's resources, the learner is simply frustrated and gives up.

Good video games ... build in many opportunities for learners to operate at the outer edge of their regime of competence, thereby causing them to rethink their routinized mastery and move, within the game and themselves, to a new level. Indeed, for many learners it is these times ... when learning is most exciting and rewarding. Sadly in school, many so-called advantaged learners rarely get to operate at the edge of their regime of competence as they coast along in a curriculum that makes few real demands on them. At the same time, less advantaged learners are repeatedly asked to operate outside their regime of competence.

[Video games] build into their designs and encourage good principles of learning … that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. [pp. 70, 205]

In contrast, here are current teachers’ beliefs (click on graph for full report):

Interview: Mike Vitelli, The Gaming Krib

As promised, here is my interview of Mike Vitelli, CEO of The Gaming Krib:

• Conversation 29: Interview with Mike Vitelli

Happy listening!

Violent video games as exemplary teachers of aggression

Iowa State University researcher Dr. Doug Gentile studied 2,500 children and adolescents and found that violent video games do indeed foster hostile actions and aggressive behaviors. Here's the money quote:

We know a lot about how to be an effective teacher, and we know a lot about how to use technology to teach. Video games use many of these techniques and are highly effective teachers. So we shouldn't be surprised that violent video games can teach aggression.

Get the full story at the ISU News Service.

Game mods for the elementary crowd

Many gaming-savvy teenagers and adults create modifications, or mods, of the video games that they play. By doing this, they transcend from mere players into virtual world creators. Conceptualizing, designing, building, testing, revising - these are all complex cognitive skills that go far beyond the relatively simplistic skills required by many educational software programs.

So I was delighted to see my 2nd-grade son and 4th-grade daughter breathlessly rush up to me today to show me the levels that they created for their newest Nintendo DS game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis. At ages 7 and 9, they're already engaging in complex world creation on their little Nintendo just like they can with SimCity, The Sims, Zoo Tycoon, and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Best of all, they are finding that creating new worlds may be more fun than just playing the game.

Elementary kids as world builders. Very cool...

[image credit: http://tinyurl.com/282woz]

Virtual worlds for tweens

Will Richardson's post covered the article in the New York Times about the growing popularity of virtual worlds for tweens (and younger). Think Club Penguin, Webkinz, etc. Will's post included the 'money quote' from the article but omitted the 'money graph.' Here it is...

[click on picture for larger version]

Book review - Everything bad is good for you

I just finished reading Everything Bad Is Good For You. The author, Steven Johnson, makes a quite-convincing case that today's popular culture and media (video games, television, Internet, movies), rather than being 'cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual riches of yesterday,' are much more cognitively complex than what we had available to us just a decade or two ago. If you haven't yet read this book, I highly recommend it. Kottke.org has a short blurb on the book along with a number of excellent links to other resources and commentary.

One of my favorite parts of the book is at the beginning. First Johnson quotes Marshall McLuhan:

The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Johnson then hypothesizes what critics might have said if video games preceded books rather than the other way around:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the long-standing tradition of game playing - which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements - books are simply a barren string of words on the page.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion - you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.

As Johnson notes, these new forms of communication, participation, and learning have worth. They're not the vast intellectual wastelands that cultural critics often claim them to be. Reading still has a great deal of value, as Johnson clearly states in other parts of his book, but so do these other forms of media. We might sometimes wish that the subject matter or content matter of these media forms were different - for example, I personally wish that some video games weren't so violent and gory - but the bottom line is that the intellectual complexity of popular media is much greater than before. We would be better served to tap into the affordances of these new media forms rather than criticizing them simply because they're new and different.

I give this one 4 higlighters.

Learning Spanish virtually

Yesterday I uploaded our third CASTLE Conversations podcast. I interviewed Julie Sykes, a doctoral student here at the University of Minnesota, about her Spanish Pragmatics Project, which is using virtual world software (like Second Life) to help postsecondary Spanish students learn how to communicate effectively with native Spanish speakers. Screenshots are included with the podcast.

The intent of CASTLE Conversations is to interview folks that have expertise and are doing interesting things but may not have much national visibility. Keep giving us feedback and let us know what you think. As always, we're interested in your nominations for interviewees. If you know someone interesting that you think we should interview, get in touch!

Happy listening!

Yesterday I uploaded our third CASTLE Conversations podcast. I interviewed Julie Sykes, a doctoral student here at the University of Minnesota, about her Spanish Pragmatics Project, which is using virtual world software (like Second Life) to help postsecondary Spanish students learn how to communicate effectively with native Spanish speakers. Screenshots are included with the podcast.

The intent of CASTLE Conversations is to interview folks that have expertise and are doing interesting things but may not have much national visibility. Keep giving us feedback and let us know what you think. As always, we're interested in your nominations for interviewees. If you know someone interesting that you think we should interview, get in touch!

Happy listening!

100% proficiency on old skills?

Here's something if you have a 60- to 90-minute block of time with educators...

100% Proficiency on Old Skills? A Candid Conversation About the Demands of NCLB and Preparing Students for the New Economy

• Step 1 - download the handout (jot a few notes)
• Step 2 - watch Did You Know? (6:05) (become a little overwhelmed)
• Step 3 - see the slides and listen to the podcast (34:20) (challenge the status quo)
• Step 4 - watch The Human Network (1:32) (remain hopeful)
• Step 5 - start discussing
• Step 6 - hand out either the short version or the long version as a take-away
• Step 7 - share widely!

P.S. This presentation is better than the one I did last week.

More on Prensky

Listen to this post!

Dear Kelly, as usual, your recent post is deeply thoughtful. So is your comment to my previous post. That said, I don't feel like you've quite captured why people are supporting Prensky on this topic of engaging students. For example, in your post you cite this quote from Chris Lehmann:

I used to say to my English classes, 'Hey, on a warm spring day, I’d rather be outside playing Ultimate frisbee than teaching English, but we all have to be here, so let’s find a way to make it meaningful.' The flaw in Prensky’s article is that there is a difference between recreation and work.

No one's arguing against English. What we're discussing is the importance of meaningfulness and how you get there. It's awfully difficult to teach in a non-engaging way but still impart meaning. Why? Because you can't get anyone's attention. Folks can rail about the injustice of that all they want, but it's reality.

As I noted in my post, and as any gamer can tell you, good video games are hard work. They also happen to be fun and engaging at the same time. It doesn't have to be either one or the other. As Jim Collins would say, visionary organizations "do not oppress themselves with ... the 'Tyranny of the OR'" but rather recognize that we can have both at the same time. What Prensky and others are advocating is that we understand that students have the opportunity at home through video games and other technological experiences to do work that is both hard AND engaging. Then they head to school where too often the work is just hard (or perceived as irrelevant) but NOT engaging. But we expect students to do the work anyway, and then we get frustrated because they push back or tune out.

I don't think anyone is arguing against struggle. I don't think anyone is arguing that some stuff is 'difficult and mundane.' I don't think anyone is telling kids that life is like a video game or is 'confusing fun with life skills' or thinks that we should 'just let kids play until they're 21 and then see what happens.' What we are noting (as do you) is that there are ways of teaching that make the difficult and mundane more interesting, more engaging, and more relevant. There are ways of teaching that go beyond simply blaming kids for their inattention and put more of the ownership for student learning on us. This is a very similar theme to what we're seeing in the data-driven decision-making arena: schools that take greater ownership of and responsibility for their students' learning end up with better student learning outcomes than those that simply say, "Well, we taught it. Now it's up to the kids." The bottom line is, if the kid isn't learning, your instruction isn't successful. If you have to be more engaging to make it happen, so be it. That's part of teachers' jobs: to be interesting and engaging enough to capture and keep kids' attention on the learning task and to be able to explain the relevance and meaning of the task sufficiently to motivate kids to work.

People work hard when they find meaning in the task. This is true in school. This is true in life. Yes, there's some mundanity in life, but I think it's tough to argue that mundanity is a desirable aspect of schooling, one we should be arguing to retain. If the task to be done today is mundane but will pay off for kids later, it's our responsibility as educators to explain that to kids in such a way that they buy into it. Just telling them it will be good for them later, and then getting frustrated because we don't get buy-in, doesn't cut it. Again, that's our fault, not theirs.

You note in your comment that the lecture and note method is out of style in most classrooms. I wonder if most people would agree with you. I know from the hundreds of schools that I've personally visited that worksheets are by no means out of style. I know that teaching the same thing to all kids, regardless of whether some kids are ready for it or whether some kids already know it, is still predominant. I see a lot of teachers that are seemingly trying hard to engage kids but still haven't found the magic formula. When this happens, it seems that we have two choices: keep trying to figure out the answer or blame the kids. And while many teachers keep plugging and keep looking for new solutions (including those that involve technology and/or gaming), many begin to blame the kids. It's these latter educators that I think all of these Prensky advocates are arguing about. I love this recent Seth Godin post: "We've 'tried everything,' by which we mean we've tried a few things that everyone else has done as long as they didn't involve doing anything differently from what we normally do." For many educators, he hits it right on the head.

All of this has always been true. What is different now (and why Prensky’s article is so salient) is that until recently kids didn't have anything to compare teachers' instruction against except other teachers. Now they have these high-powered learning environments called video games that are purposefully designed to keep kids' brains in their own individualized zones of proximal development. The subject matter may be questionable, but the intentional cognitive engagement that is occurring is not. Personally, I'm not certain that most teachers can ever compete against that. But we have to try if we're going to stay relevant to students. We can't expect them to pay attention to us just because we want them to. Discarding rigor or difficulty is not the answer. Finding the right balance of engaging activities (or technologies) to ensure student attention is the answer. Again, to come back to Seth Godin's quote in my previous post, it's not the kids' fault that we don't have their attention. It's ours. How do we know when we're successful? Not when we say we are but when the kids' actions show we are.

I've read your post and your comment each half a dozen times now. I don't know if we're that far apart but I wanted to at least note where I think we may differ. Maybe you've been blessed with a good teaching staff. Maybe you see less of this because you're a great administrator. From your blog writing, I'm guessing that this is true. But there still are a lot of teachers who blame students for their lack of engagement and their lack of learning. They may not be the majority, but there are enough of them to be concerning (to me at least). I can't quite tell if you're okay with that or not (for example, you note that at age 14 it's awfully hard to get kids to respond to anything). I'm willing to say that it's our fault, not that of the students, and that we have multiple examples (including Chris Lehmann's own school) where middle and high schools have found ways to keep adolescents meaningfully engaged with course content. And, yes, in some of those schools they're recognizing that technology is not a prerequisite but can be a powerful helper.

You asked what in my own life I've found useful from my schooling experience. I was fortunate to have enough good teachers in my life (both K-12 and higher ed) to

1. instill in me a love of learning and a loathing of seemingly-meaningless work;
2. motivate me to become an educator myself and serve others;
3. challenge me in engaging ways to become a better thinker and writer;
4. show me that school should be about more than just "babysitting;" and
   
5. help me see that good teaching is not about the teacher but about the learner.

Here's what I'm struggling to see: Why are folks arguing so hard for boredom? Why are folks arguing so hard for mundanity and slogging through? Why can't we escape 'the Tyranny of the OR?' In my own life I've found that the more my work is also recreational, the more I like it. It's not that I'm engaged in recreation instead of work. It's that my work becomes more recreation-like (i.e., fun, engaging, interesting). If people work at it, align things right, and maybe get a little lucky, the difference between recreation and work can be awfully slim and life can be rewarding and energizing. There's tremendous power in being in a job that seems like play because you like it so much!

Thanks for your thoughtful extension of the conversation. I am highly enjoying your blog and appreciate your willingness to think both deeply and publicly about leadership issues. We need more principal bloggers like you. I don't know if any of us are adding anything new to the discussion, but I'm guessing that those of us who are having the conversation are probably learning at least a little bit.

My take on Prensky

Listen to this post!

There are some great conversations going on right now about Marc Prensky's article, Engage Me or Enrage Me. One is at Dennis Fermoyle's blog; the other is at Chris Lehmann's blog. I love these types of conversations because they force us to examine what we really believe about motivation, learning, and good instruction.

I just started reading Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson. One of the first points the author makes is that most good video games are HARD. They're frustrating. They cause players to think and stew about them even when they're not playing the game. It's not that the gaming activity is easy. On the contrary, like a good hobby, it's that the activity is challenging AND considered worth the work by the player.

We shouldn't be making our schools fun at the expense of solid intellectual engagement. But making students' classroom time more fun (or engaging, or whatever you want to call it) will help them learn more. Teachers who say it's not their job to keep their kids' attention during class time should, in my opinion, immediately be placed into a remediation program to improve their instruction. It's not the kids' fault if their teachers are boring or haven't put together lessons that interest students (e.g., I just did a study of some high schools in which 68% of over 1,000 students said 'Most of our work is busy work'). Or, as Seth Godin puts it...

Too often we educators (both K-12 and higher ed) say that 'We've put together a good lesson, now it's the students' responsibility to meet us halfway.' But Godin's quote puts that belief to the test because it doesn't hold up very well in the real world. In our own lives we don't waste our valuable and limited attention span on stuff that doesn't interest or engage us. To say that kids should because it's in their best interests is disingenuous and morally dishonest. We have to make the case. Otherwise we deserve the consequences. Alfie Kohn has a wonderful quote in The Schools Our Children Deserve: "Might we have spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was exactly as pointless as we suspected at the time? (p. 1)" [For those of you who might bring up the fact that work isn't always interesting but we have to slog through anyway, I'll point out that 1) no one made you work in that job and/or for that employer, 2) job mobility is way up (people are trading autonomy for job security), and 3) we make students go to school through mandatory attendance laws - they have no choice but to be there.]

Right now I think students go home and are immersed in learning environments (i.e., video games) where the end product is considered to be worth the hard work. Then they go to school and too often don't feel that way about what they do in their school environment, either because of lack of engagement or lack of perceived relevance. That is the challenge, and that is how I read Prensky.

Side note: Chris used the word gumption in his blog post. The third definition for gumption at Dictionary.com is 'common sense.' Using that definition, I'd argue that students that are tuning out of irrelevant or uninteresting lessons are showing a lot of gumption. Unless the teacher or school organization had successfully made the case for why it was worth my time to slog through anyway, I know that's what I'd do and I strongly suspect that most others would too.

Chicago digital youth afterschool program

Gerry Beimler, who is Manager of Leadership Development Programs for the Chicago Public Schools Office of eLearning and one of our School Technology Leadership graduate certificate students, forwarded me this story about the digital afterschool program at North Kenwood / Oakland Charter School in Chicago. Grants from the MacArthur Foundation are facilitating incredible digital experiences for the students in this program, most of whom come from socioeconomically-disadvantaged familes.

The program operates on the assumption that digital technology can be used as a constructive force and, possibly, a necessary force to equip children with the technological literacy skills they will need to be competent in this age of iPods, cell phones, e-mail, computers and countless other gadgets. The program uses cutting-edge educational strategies to introduce middle school students to the creative uses of digital technology. It has existed for only one year, but students in the program are already creating robots, programming video games, transmitting podcasts, recording original rap music and producing digital documentaries.

Read the article - there's some very cool stuff happening in this program. Now all we have to do is replicate what's happening in this building after school into the regular school day and across multiple schools and districts. Gerry, thanks for sharing this inspiring tale from Chicago.

Gaming, cognition, and education - Wrap-up

Yesterday I concluded my series of posts related to gaming, cognition, and education. The purpose of the series was to illustrate some of the powerful learning principles that are present in video games, particularly role-playing games where a participant takes on the role of a character interacting with her environment and/or others. The learning principles that I discussed help explain why a kid who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games.

The series only highlighted 18 of the 36 learning principles described in Dr. Jim Gee’s book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. I selected principles from the book that I thought were particularly powerful aspects of electronic learning environments. These principles are present in K-12 classrooms to varied extent, depending on the school and/or teacher. However, it is important to note that these principles, even when present, typically occur in K-12 classrooms only some of the time while for video games they are the bedrock foundation of the learning platform and are present nearly all of the time.

I think that video games, or virtual simulations, or whatever we want to call them, will be a key component of classrooms of the future. The learning principles and potential will be too powerful to ignore for much longer, particularly as we move closer to every student having some kind of computing device with him or her 24 hours a day. Also, educators are starting to recognize that the ability of computers to facilitate students’ self-paced learning can free up teachers to spend more time with students who need extra help or who are ready to move ahead. One of the biggest challenges for K-12 teachers is differentiating instruction for a classroom of students with greatly-varying ability levels. Computers running educationally-valuable electronic learning environments can help immensely with this issue and can be powerful tools for savvy educators.

As the educational and/or ‘serious’ games movement grows, we will begin to see complex, realistic, accurate simulations of ancient civilizations (e.g., Colonial Williamsburg, the Maya, Great Zimbabwe), historical events (e.g., the Pelopponesian War, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Long March), scientific and mathematical processes (e.g., space exploration, Archimedean physics, Euclidean geometry), and the like. I am looking forward to this day. Right now even the most popular education-oriented games (e.g., Reader Rabbit, JumpStart, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) have been notably simplistic compared to commercial virtual worlds such as Second Life, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. I believe that education-oriented simulations will be much better at stimulating deeper, richer learning than the textbooks, videos, and learning games of today. It’s hard to argue that making authentic decisions in the role of a pharaoh or a slave or a farmer, while immersed in the realistic sights, sounds, and activities of ancient Egypt, wouldn’t be a better, more meaningful, and more permanent learning experience than merely reading a few textbook pages, seeing a few pictures, answering some “drill-and-kill” multiple choice questions on the computer, or watching a short video on the subject.

To facilitate easy dissemination to teachers and administrators (hint, hint!), this 8–page PDF document contains the text and hyperlinks from the week-long series:

• Gaming, Cognition, and Education.pdf

If you’d like to share the series with educators but would rather send them a URL, send them to this post. Here are links to all six posts:

• Day 1 - active learning, risk-taking, engaging
• Day 2 - amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice
• Day 3 - ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing
• Day 4 - multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning
• Day 5 - subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information
• Day 6 - discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer

If you liked this series, please share freely and encourage others to do the same. In addition to the document and links above, here is another tool to help educators think about the cognitive and educational aspects of video games (any feedback you have on this would be welcome). Note that the spreadsheet can be initially completed by individuals or in small groups but must be done on a computer with Microsoft Excel.

• Gaming, Cognition, and Education Spreadsheet.xls

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 6

Today is the last day of my week-long series related to gaming, cognition, and education. Remember that I am approaching this issue with the following question in mind: Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games? If you're new to this series, check out the previous posts:

• Day 1 - active learning, risk-taking, engaging
• Day 2 - amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice
• Day 3 - ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing
• Day 4 - multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning
• Day 5 - subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information

My guide for this series is Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Today’s topics are discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer.

16. Gamers are discovery learners

Virtually every role-playing game requires participants to actively investigate the learning environment. As noted previously, this active learning aspect replicates real-life learning contexts and deepens overall knowledge and proficiency. Unlike many K-12 classrooms, video games rarely tell learners anything overtly. If games do, it’s usually planful and related to something small. All of the big discoveries - the conceptual breakthroughs - are left for the learner to discover in a structured, scaffolded way. Educators have long recognized the value of guided, inquiry-based learning methods, particularly for problem-solving, even if they have rarely implemented such methods on a large scale.

17. Gamers have many opportunities for learning transfer

One of the key outcomes that educators try to achieve with students is the transfer of learning from one context to another. In rapidly-changing societies such as ours, the ability to transfer and/or adapt existing knowledge and skills to new situations is an essential requirement for life success. Video games give participants many opportunities to practice already-acquired skills and to transfer their learning to new and different challenges. To succeed in video games, learners must not only exhibit near transfer (i.e., replication of prior learning to new, fairly similar, situations) but also far transfer (i.e., adaptation and modification of prior learning to substantively different contexts).

18. Gamers are producers and insiders, not just consumers

Like other modern technology tools (e.g., digital cameras and camcorders, podcasts, blogs, wikis), many video games allow learners to be producers of original content, not just consumers of pre-packaged material. Some of the most popular role-playing games (e.g., Second Life, EverQuest) have very sophisticated economies built upon user-created content. These video games have tools that allow for rich, individualized customization of the learning environment by participants. This stands in sharp contrast to the “one size fits all” instructional model that we see in many schools and classrooms, where teachers and textbooks are the insiders and “the learners are outsiders who must take what they are given as mere consumers” (Gee, 2003, p. 194). Control of the learning path, and perhaps the learning environment itself, can be powerfully motivating and engaging for learners.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to facilitate discovery learning? to facilitate learning transfer, both near and far? to allow students to be producers and insiders, not just consumers?

Gaming and education resource 6

• Education Arcade

On Monday, I will wrap this all up and present a tool that can be used to help teachers and administrators discuss (and maybe reframe) their beliefs about gaming.

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 5

Today is Day 5 of my week-long series related to gaming, cognition, and education. Remember that I am approaching this issue with the following question in mind: Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games? If you're new to this series, check out the previous posts:

• Day 1 - active learning, risk-taking, engaging
• Day 2 - amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice
• Day 3 - ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing
• Day 4 - multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning

My guide for this series is Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Today’s topics are subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, and just-in-time information.

13. Video games can create subsets of a domain

One of the most powerful features of video games is their ability to simulate worlds: past, present, or future; real or fictional. The multimodal capabilities of video games allow participants to be immersed in rich, deep learning contexts. For example, instead of reading about the Civil War, learners can take the role of soldier, general, medic, battlefield photographer, news correspondent, and the like. At the same time, however, dropping a new learner into a complex world can be disorienting and discouraging. Video games can create a simplified subset of the real domain, a starting place where participants can safely become oriented to the new world before being exposed to the entire learning environment. The value of this cannot be understated. Imagine if you were an English-speaking American who was about to be dropped into the middle of South Korea. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a chance for some safe and structured, but authentic, practice first? Gee (2003) sums this up nicely:

Learning is not started in a separate place (e.g., a classroom or textbook) outside the domain in which the learning is going to operate. At the same time, the learner is not thrown into the “real” thing - the full game - and left to swim or drown. (p. 122)

14. Video games effectively facilitate “bottom up” learning of basic skills

In early stages of video games, learners are exposed to critical fundamental skills that allow them to gradually engage in more complex actions. As Gee (2003) notes,

early situations and problems [are designed] in a quite sophisticated way to lead to fruitful learning. When later the player is confronted by harder situations and problems, he or she has just the right basis on which to make fruitful guesses about what to do. (p. 135)

These basic skills are learned in a “bottom up” fashion - by playing the game, not through decontextualized exercises. Indeed, the structured learning environments of video games typically are designed so effectively that

by the time new players are aware of what are basic skills . . . the basic elements that are used repeatedly and combined and often concentrated in the earlier episodes . . . they have already mastered them. (Gee, 2003, p. 136)

15. Video games facilitate “just in time” learning

The artificial intelligences that reside in video games can be structured to respond in different ways to participant activity. Computer-mediated learning environments thus can be designed to provide information “just in time” or on demand. There is a great deal power associated with just-in-time learning or resource acquisition. For example, in manufacturing and industry, the concept of just-in-time manufacturing allows companies to reduce inventory and cut costs, making them more efficient and effective. Similarly, just-in-time learning environments allow participants to acquire skills or knowledge when they need them and not before. This facilitates greater concentration in earlier stages on things that are important (rather than extraneous or unneeded); allows for greater individualization and customization; makes learning more fluid; and leads to more active, engaged, motivated learners.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to create safe but authentic subsets of real learning domains? to help students invisibly learn important skills from the “bottom up?” to allow students to gain information only when they need it (i.e., when it can best be understood and put into practice)?

Gaming and education resource 5

• Social Impact Games

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the series:

• Saturday: discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer
• Monday: wrap-up

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 4

Today is Day 4 of my week-long series related to gaming, cognition, and education. Remember that I am approaching this issue with the following question in mind: Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games? If you're new to this series, check out the previous posts:

• Day 1 - active learning, risk-taking, engaging
• Day 2 - amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice
• Day 3 - ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing

My guide for this series is Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Today’s topics are multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, and multimodal learning.

10. Video games allow learners to follow their own paths

There is more than one path to success in most role-playing video games. The path that some players follow, or the choices that they make, can be different than the paths and choices of others and yet still lead to the next level. Those paths may take longer, or some choices may be better, but eventually each player gets to the next stage. By playing and replaying levels repeatedly in ways that are not boring, players can revise and refine their paths to success. Video games allow for individualized learning toward common outcomes.

11. Gamers make meaning within embodied experiences

Because video games have the capacity to create complex, experiential simulations, participants’ learning is situated within learning environments that are fairly authentic, at least within the paradigm of the game framework. In other words, learning is not decontextualized, like a multiple choice item or writing prompt might be, but instead is rooted within the ongoing development of the skills, knowledge, and behaviors necessary to be successful in the game environment. For example, instead of reading about a blacksmith or watching a video about a blacksmith, gamers learn by actually being blacksmiths. Participants’ understanding is thus deeper because it is embodied within simulated (and often very real) experiences.

12. Learning in video games is multimodal

Most educators know about the theories of multiple intelligences and learning styles. The basic idea is that students learn differently and have different strengths. Teachers thus should try to facilitate multiple paths to learning and attempt to create different ways for students to show their mastery of content material. Most video games seamlessly integrate three of our five senses: sight, sound, and touch. If we ever figure out a way to implement Smell-o-vision or Odorama with our computers (click here to learn more about digital scent technology!), participants also may experience different smells while gaming. Because they can simultaneously utilize images, text, sound, interactions, abstract design, and so on (Gee, 2003, p. 210), video games are better able to simulate real-life experiences than can printed text, audio, or video. This makes learning more authentic, more engaging, and more compelling.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to allow students to travel their individualized and unique learning paths? to create embodied, authentic learning experiences that are not decontextualized or overgeneralized? to facilitate multimodal learning as the dominant pedagogical model?

Gaming and education resource 4

• Serious Games Initiative

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the series:

• Friday: subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information
• Saturday: discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer
• Monday: wrap-up

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 3

Today is Day 3 of my week-long series related to gaming, cognition, and education. Remember that I am approaching this issue with the following question in mind: Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games? If you're new to this series, check out the previous posts:

• Day 1 - active learning, risk-taking, engaging
• Day 2 - amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice

My guide for this series is Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Today’s topics are ongoing learning, regime of competence, and probing.

7. Video game participants are constantly learning, unlearning, and relearning

In most video games, particularly role-playing games, participants must continually unpack prior learning and undo previously-routinized behaviors in order to learn new skills that allow them to progress and be successful. In other words, participants cannot function on 'autopilot' for long before the video game requires them to do something different to reach a new and higher level. As Gee notes

Several educators have argued that this cycle of automatization of skills through practice, rethinking this automatization when faced with new conditions in order to learn new skills and transform old ones, and then perfecting these new skills through further practice that once again leads to automatization is the very foundation of intelligent practice in the world. . . . A cycle of automatization, adaptation, new learning, and new automatization is a sine qua non of learning for those who want to survive as active thinkers and actors in a fast changing world. (pp. 69-70)

8. Video games continually and appropriately challenge learners

Video games are structured so that learners constantly operate at the outer edge of their competence. Participants are continually challenged but the challenges are not so difficult that learners believe they are undoable. Gee refers to this as the regime of competence principle. Lev Vygotsky, a famous developmental psychologist, called this concept the zone of proximal development - the area in which students are ready to grow. Video games are similar to teachers in that they take the role of what Vygotsky called the 'more knowledgeable other,' the entity that helps students bridge the gap between their current ability and new capabilities. In education, we often call this scaffolding - the idea that learners can progress to new skill levels with structured, individualized, just-in-time assistance. Video games are very adept at scaffolding participants' learning. One of the reasons that video games are so compelling / engaging / 'addictive' is that participants are continually faced with new challenges that are neither too easy nor too difficult. This motivates them to move forward because the next step is always in sight and is perceived as being achievable.

9. Video games foster active, reflective investigation

Gee points out that most good video games require learners to

• probe the virtual world by exploring, looking around, moving items, clicking on something, etc.;
• form a hypothesis about what something in the game might mean based on reflection while probing and afterward;
• reprobe the world with that hypothesis in mind to see what effect occurs; and
• treat this effect as feedback from the world and accept or rethink the original hypothesis. (p. 90)

These four stages reflect how expert scientists approach their tasks and embody the process by which children and adults learn when they're not in school. In other words, this probe-hypothesis-reprobe-rethink process is "central to how humans learn things" (p. 91). This model of learning is underutilized in schools, however, as curricula and other pressures often result in a focus on memorization of facts rather than on teaching students how to discover, decode, and test patterns of thinking and meaning. The latter, of course, is an essential skill for individuals living in an everchanging global society.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to allow students to continually learn, unlearn, and relearn at higher levels? to have students work at their own pace and  individualized levels of challenge? to foster active, reflective investigation?

Gaming and education resource 3

• The Innovate special issue on gaming in education

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the series:

• Thursday: multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning
• Friday: subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information
• Saturday: discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer
• Monday: wrap-up

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 2

Today I continue my week-long series related to gaming, cognition, and education. If you recall from yesterday, I am approaching this issue with the following question in mind: Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games?

My guide for this series is Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In addition to discussing some key concepts from Gee’s book, each day I also will highlight a gaming-related resource for K-12 educators. Next Monday I will wrap up the series and provide a tool that can be used to help teachers and administrators discuss (and maybe reframe) their beliefs about gaming.

Today’s topics are amplification of input, rewards, and practice. I’d love some comments on the Questions of the Day, either for today or yesterday.

4. Video games give a lot of output for just a little input

One of the key characteristics of video games is that they operate according to what Gee calls the amplification of input principle. In a video game, you can push a few buttons here and there, or type a few words with your keyboard, and an entire immersive environment springs forth to engage you. Gee notes that this principle is present in other domains as well. For example, think of the output that you get (e.g., you can drive halfway across the country) by simply moving your foot up and down on the gas pedal of your car. Amplification of input is a powerfully motivating feature of video games because learners can put in just a little and still get a lot back out. This encourages them to put in a little more to see what else they might get.

5. In video games, learners get rewards from the very beginning

Another significant feature of video games is that participants get rewards from the very beginning. These rewards, both intrinsic and extrinsic, send messages of success to learners and encourage them to continue to play to gain additional rewards. Extrinsic rewards might include new character lives, greater wealth, more points or coins, etc. Examples of intrinsic rewards include satisfaction with character progress or growth, expanded interconnection with other characters, greater understanding and knowledge, and so on. Importantly, these rewards are individually customized to each learner as he or she progresses further through the gaming environment.

6. Gamers get lots of non-boring practice

As Gee notes, people “need to practice what they are learning a good deal before they master it” (p. 68). Moreover, if they don’t continue to practice, they lose much of their previously-acquired skill and knowledge (e.g., how much do you remember about sine, cosine, and tangent?). Because they provide opportunities, for active, interactive learning, video games do an excellent job of allowing learners to practice skills and mentally ingrain existing knowledge in ways that are engaging, not boring. One of the keys to this is the fact that video games embed learning within meaningful contexts rather than being decontextualized like “drill and kill” worksheets or homework problem sets. Video games also facilitate learners’ acquisition of self-selected goals rather than goals that are externally imposed by others.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to give students a lot of output for just a little input? to provide, from the very beginning, both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for learning? to allow students opportunities for non-boring practice within meaningful contexts and on self-selected learning goals?

Gaming and education resource 2

• Prensky, M. (2006). Don’t bother me Mom – I’m learning! St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. See also Prensky’s companion web site: www.gamesparentsteachers.com.

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the series:

• Wednesday: ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing
• Thursday: multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning
• Friday: subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information
• Saturday: discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer
• Monday: wrap-up

Gaming, cognition, and education - Part 1

Educators and parents are quick to disparage video games - they’re a ‘waste of time,’ they’re ‘too violent,’ or they lead to repetitive stress injuries (nintendinitis). And yet, even non-gamers like myself can recognize that there’s something going on when a kid who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games.

Today I kick off a week-long series of posts that discuss gaming, cognition, and education. Although my comments this week primarily will focus on children and adolescents, my discussion also should be relevant to college students and other adult learners. This series of posts is based on the superb book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by Dr. Jim Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to discussing some key concepts from Gee’s book, each day I will highlight a gaming-related resource for K-12 educators. Next Monday I will wrap up the series and provide a tool that can be used to help teachers and administrators discuss (and maybe reframe) their beliefs about gaming.

So… without further ado, here are some learning principles that are present in most video games, particularly role-playing games where a participant takes on the role of a character interacting with his environment and/or others.

1. Video games are set up to encourage active, not passive, learning

All video games require participants to be actively involved in their own learning. Gamers, particularly those in role-playing games, rarely sit passively and receive information. Instead they must actively explore, hypothesize, experiment, reflect upon, critique, move about, interact, etc. As children navigate complex gaming spaces, they learn to think of these gaming environments as spaces that both manipulate them and can be manipulated by them. This is very much like real life (or ‘meatspace,’ as some virtual denizens call it!).

2. In video games, ‘learners can take risks where real-world consequences are lowered’ (Gee, p. 207)

Video games provide places where participants can safely take risks. When a gamer fails, at worst she ‘loses a life’ or has to start over, often not at the beginning but in a slightly reduced state that allows her to retain nearly all of the skills, knowledge, power, capabilities, progress, etc. that she has gained thus far. This gaming principle entices children to try, even if they (rightly) believe that they will fail at first.

3. Gaming environments are compelling to participants

The proof that gaming environments are compelling to those playing them lies in the fact that gamers are willing to play a game repeatedly and often. Gamers put in a lot of effort as they try different ways of doing things, try to get further than they did before, explore new variations in areas where they already have been successful, etc. Gamers are mentally engaged - often quite deeply - with the learning environment as they try, fail, try again, fail again, try yet again, fail yet again, and so on.

Questions of the day

• How do the concepts discussed above map on to K-12 education?
• Are our K-12 classrooms set up . . . to encourage active rather than passive learning? to be places where students can safely take risks? to be mentally-engaging and -compelling learning environments where students will try repeatedly despite possible and/or actual failure?

Gaming and education resource 1

• Gee, J. P. (2004). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the series:

• Tuesday: amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice
• Wednesday: ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing
• Thursday: multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning
• Friday: subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, just-in-time information
• Saturday: discovery learning, learning transfer, learner as producer
• Monday: wrap-up