In One Place

I have been poking around Marc Prensky’s Social Impact Games website, browing through the games. Many are just descriptions of games that are in development or that have been developed but are not free or web-based. For instance, in his book Prensky talks about The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a game used to teach engineers how to use a new 3D CAD program.
But there are several that are available to try out:

MassBalance: This is a simulation that asks the user to balance the Massachusetts state budget. The game warns you when your budget cuts are dangerous, and you can also raise taxes. Pretty realistic and shows the complicated nature of balancing budgets. (Listed under Public Policy Games)

Kinetic City: This series of games was created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based on a National Science Foundation grant. It is an interesting mix of online and offline activities.

Brain Connection: Billed as brain teasers, these online activities help with phonemic awareness and other early literacy skills including sound discrimination.

Team Up: From Girls Inc, a game that emphasizes team building. Each girl has her own strengths and they have to work together to move to new levels.

Girls seem to be a big concern of game designers. Here’s one that’s still under development:

Rapunsel: A constructionist site that hopes to encourage girls to become computer programmers. Rapunsel stands for Real Time Applied Programming for Underrepresented Students’ Early Literacy. So, here’s a game with social concern as a basis for its creation.

Judi commented on my post about Social Impact Games that one of the reasons Logo may not have taken off the way its developers would like is that “there were no ?¢‚Ǩ?ìrules?¢‚Ǩ? in the ways that learners usually thought of them.” In Turkle’s book, Second Self, she describes a girl who created her own rule about Logo: her turtle could only go in 30 degree angles. She created intricate drawings but they were much more difficult to do than if she had abandoned the rule. Interesting that we tend to think of children as not liking rules but here was a child who sensed the need for a rule. Turkle suggests that for Deborah, the sense of power that usually accompanied children as they worked with the program was threatening instead. For her, the rule made the game more challenging and also made her different than the other students. So, how would she have reacted if the rule had been imposed from outside, as part of the game itself?

I finished Second Self this morning. Here’s my initial thought: my mantra when working with teachers has become that the computer is “just” a tool for learning. According to Turkle, it is much more than that: it’s a tool that supports your identity and indeed changes it. And since she was writing more than two decades ago, how has that increased? About ten-fold, I would guess.

Am I different because of my relationship with my computer? It has brought out a more technical side of me although I am definitely a “soft” programmer. Mostly, my computer is an extension of me. I understand the feeling that several of her informants described of not really typing, as though ideas are moving from the brain to the computer.

Right now, I have a brand new Mac ProBook sitting on the desk next to me. It wouldn’t be too hard to switch over to it especially since so much of my life isn’t just digital but also online, available no matter computer is in my hands. But I’ve had this laptop for two years now and it is definitely geared to my learning and working style. I go very few places without it, and I store text, photos, movies, and music on it. It’s where I go to interact with people. It’s where I go to relax. It’s going to take time to set up the new computer so it can work the way I do and in the middle of a semester, that’s not going to happen. Do I think of my computer as a person? Not really, but it’s definitely a partner.

Thanks, Judi, for the link! This is the perfect site for someone like me who is interested in ways to incorporate gaming into learning. I have Marc Prensky’s book Game-Based Digital Learning on my shelf so it has just moved up in the priority list.

I poked around a few games and will blog about them later, but for now am most happy with the Game Design Advisor, a set of tools for game designers to follow. While the site still needs work (the theory section is just a skeleton), the rubric for types of learning and possible game styles is a helpful starting point along with the distinction between game design and learning design:

“Game design involves keeping players engaged and having fun over an extended time span. Learning (or instructional) design involves creating strategies to ensure certain things get learned. The art — not trivial — is to blend the two without ‘sucking the fun out.'”

I also found the three general rules for creating good games to be interesting, particularly as we think about how we can provide “authentic” learning experiences for our students in the often very inauthentic world of the classroom. According to the games site, there are three basic principles of game design: good games involve rules, goals that players care about, and a good struggle to reach the goals. What if we substitute “games” for learning: good learning should have some kinds of parameters, but it should also be something students care about and provide them a challenge. Finishing a worksheet doesn’t seem to be a “good struggle.”

Since the fundamental goal of my class for pre-service teachers is to help them actually integrate technology in their classrooms, that will be the challenge, the thing they do in the end. Throughout the game, they will learn about different types of technologies and then, in the end, use them to create a learning experience for their students.

Petraglia, J. Reality by design: The rhetoric and technology of authenticity in education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

This book has been on my shelf for some time. I don’t think I was ready for it, but it seems to be a natural next text for exploring the ideas I’ve been tinkering with such as constructionism and constructivism. I’ve only made it through the introduction, and I’m still trying to grasp his argument. Here are the threads I’m following:

Educators talk about “student centered” and “authentic” learning without really being clear on what they mean. Petraglia uses the example of a colleague who shows the egg carton contraption that his students to designed to fight aliens. While certainly a student-centered project, Petraglia wonders about the fact that “no one in the room seemed to notice or care about the vagueness and contradictions in the discourse on authenticity and reality” (p. 2). For Petraglia, getting at the meaning of authentic learning is essential to an understanding of contemporary education. I’m not sure I have a good definition and I reference authentic learning every time I show people the enGauge Range of Use model. One of its axes deals with the authenticity of learning and it goes from artificial to real-world context. No one has ever asked me what that means; we seem to have a general idea.

Educational technology and constructivism come together in support of authenticity. Certainly, notions of contextual learning pre-date computers, but there seems to be a natural linking of technology and authenticity, according to Petraglia. He also goes on to suggest that authenticity is “the most interesting of the possible arguements for investment in educational technology both for its imperviousness to empirical investigation and for its rhetorical force” (p. 6). If we use authenticity inaccurately, we run the risk of focusing on the technological tools rather than the power of those tools. Petraglia believes, however, that educational technologists have made “compelling arguments” for technology contextualizing learning.

Finally, he makes the case that if implemented correctly, constructivism “deprives us of the foundations on which Western education rests” (p. 7). But, we’ve chosen to ignore its antifoundationalism and thus have “domesticated” it. Here, Petraglia reminds me of Cuban and his argument that the power of technology is often similarly domesticated. He also gives a pretty wide definition of constructivism, calling it a metatheory that is “an ecumenical and eclectic approach to learning” in which people from Montessori to Dewey to Geertz would feel comfortable. He suggests that it at its base, constructivism “alludes to learners’ active roles in learning and the diversity of path to knowledge” (p. 9). Under this definition, most educators are constructivist.

And…I’m tucking this away for my 604 final paper: “The essentially epistemological dilemma constructivism poses remains before us, for as Berlin and Inkster (1980) note, it is impossible for educators to have a theory of learning without a theory of knowledge” (p. 7).

I feel like I was all over the place this week in terms of learning. I’ll try to do some summarizing and synthesizing before I fill out the weekly check in:

Judi commented on my post Just Stop It:

“So ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù isn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t that part of constructionist learning, also? Think about what you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re doing in this 3-week unit. You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re constructing knowledge, for sure ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù but just PART of your learning is ?¢‚Ǩ?ìconstructionist,?¢‚Ǩ? per se. And, if you were focusing on a different topic ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù say, writing def poetry ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù the process would probably be more constructionist than what you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re doing during this three-week unit. But constructionism (at least the way that Papert, Harel, and Resnick have demonstrated it) can be overdone, IMHO, and different learners probably respond very differently to it.”

She is absolutely right. I am constructing knowledge even though only part of my learning is purely
“constructionist.” And we’ve already determined that constructionism is different than constructivism. And I know from reading E.D. Hirsch, that there is controversy about what exactly constructivism is. (Actually, Hirsch would like the students of the teacher in Texas because he argues that students are always constructing knowledge for themselves even during direct instruction like a lecture. But the important part of your story for me is that the students were in a position to request how they wanted to learn. That doesn’t happen too often in public education.) But I think what draws me to constructionism is that too often making things is relegated to non-core classes or final projects. It’s the learners who like to make things that often don’t get a chance in school. In general, this brings me to a personal frustration with the “isms.” They can all be, to use Judi’s word, “overdone.” Reflective teachers will have a panoply of strategies and methods of organization. Rather than having any particular “ism” control what we do in our classrooms, we need to find ways to work across them.

Judi commented on my post That Tingly Feeling:

“For students aspiring to be teachers, why couldn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t there be a MOO-like experience in which they (virtually) construct learning experiences online that allow them to experiment with ideas for technology integration ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù perhaps from both the teachers and the (K-12) students?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ points of view?”

Bingo…I’m not sure how to do it but now that the elementary ed tech course I teach is two credits, I want to do some serious rethinking. Can I set up a game like the one Judi shared in class? Or figure our the MOO (or find one that will let us add on)? Even though I’ve made some changes to the course since I first started teaching it, I still feel like it’s a very teacher-centered course so I’m not doing anything to really model the way technology can empower the students.

Sitting at the Service Desk in Swem with a lull in the action so decided to do some googling/searching for information related to gender theory. Our next paper in 604 has to apply a theory to a problem. I decided my problem is gender and technology. How do we get/keep girls more interested in technology as a subject and career?

I googled “gender theory” and happened upon Things Change, the media theory site. There was a link on the front page to the Lego Theorists. Of course, considering my current interest in all things Papert, I had to click! There were several pictures of Lego creations including the ArtLab Research Centre, where they explained some of their work:

“ArtLab (see www.artlab.org.uk) explores new ways of researching social experience, by asking participants to make creative artefacts. The set LEGO 5420 includes participants exploring self-expression through video, photography, drawing, and collage.”

There it is…constructionism. The focus on creating and making as a way of developing individual and social identity.

“Instructionism vs. constructionism looks like a split about strategies for education: two ways of thinking about the transmission of knowledge. But behind this there is a split that goes beyond the acquisition of knowledge to touch on the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing. There is a huge difference in status between these two splits. The first is, in itself, a technical matter that belongs in an educational school course on “methods.” The second is what ought properly to be called “epistemological.” It is close to fundamental issues that philosophers think of as their own. It raises issues that are relevant to the nature of science and to the deepest debates in psychology. It is tangled with central issues of radical thinking in feminism, in Africanism, and in other areas where people fight for the right not only to think what they please, but to think it in their own ways.” Seymour Papert

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating constructionism. Ablex Publishing Company. Retrieved March 20, 2006, from http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html.

For 604, I have to write an educator’s autobiography and describe my ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology. Papert’s distinction between instruction (teaching) and construction (learning) make sense to me. Why can’t we teach math the way we teach soap sculpture? Or at least value soap sculpture as much as math? And the current emphasis on Marzano’s work in instructional strategies just furthers the emphasis on instruction. The author of Flow suggests that constructing things is one way to achieve flow, a state of happiness. How often do students get close to achieveing flow? Does it happen more often in math class or soap sculpture class? I can still remember the abstract painting I made in high school and what a relief art class was–even though I’m no artist–because the teacher gave me a few leads and let me paint. My other classes were structured and teacher-directed. I did fine in them but was often bored because I lacked any real challenge.

I loved doing projects. Again, those are what I remember about school: the advertising skit for Excalibur wine, the scale model of the train in The Great Train Robbery, and my high school science project on types of cleaners. I could pour my heart and soul into them and create something that was meaningful to me. I still like making things. I’m hooked on Sudoku right now so I’m going to try to make my own.

So, this gets at my epistemology, I think: how do we know? When we can do something with our knowledge, when it can be connected to our experiences and frames of reference, when we can make things (ideas, poems, artifacts) with the information and when through that making, we continue to learn about the subject. How often in school is the project that last thing we do: we demonstrate what we know. Why can’t the project be the way we learn? Instead of memorizing all that stuff about the Civil War and then promptly forgetting it, I can work on my model of the battle of the ironclads and use that to ask questions about the Civil War.

Kafai, Y.B. & Resnick, M., eds. (1995). Constructionism in practice: Designing, Learning and Thinking in a digital world, Retrieved March 20, 2006, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kafai/faculty/Book_CIP_Intro.html.

Do you know that tingly feeling? The one you get when seemingly disparate pieces of learning come together? I just had it…I’m reading the introduction to a book of essays on constructionsim. One essay in particular caught my attention:

“In the final chapter of the section, “They Have Their Own Thoughts,” Paula Hooper describes her research at an African-centered community school. The school, Paige Academy, aims to create a community and culture rooted in African-American ways of knowing, values, and interactions. Hooper presents a “learning story” of an 8-year-old girl working on a Logo project. The story examines how children, in the process of making new computational artifacts, can take control of their own learning, developing and extending their own ideas. It also highlights the need for school environments to support and legitimize children’s own personal ways of thinking and mental and physical constructs.”

For another class, I’m reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His major tenet is that to be happy we must be able to control our consciousness and I would argue that being able to control your own learning is part of that. He tells stories of people in prison camps who managed to maintain their sanity precisely because they could develop and extend their own ideas. That was all they had to work with. I think constructionism is at the heart of Flow, which Csikszentmihalyi defines as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” (p. 4).

Flow comes when we are constructing things. Csikszentmihalyi recommends, for instance, that while doing crossword puzzles is good, constructing them ourselves is even better. And in one of the essays in the book on constructionism, “Learning Design by Making Games,” Yasmin Kafai describes what happens when students make their own games rather than playing those created by others. They develop content knowledge but also process skills.

And there’s that tingly feeling again because I’ve been spending time thinking about gaming and reading Steven Johnson and Clark Aldridge on gaming and gamers. The circle of learning…and the big question: what about games and education? And…how can I incorporate some game-based learning in 304 next semester?

Fritts, J., Thurber, B., & Bryce-Fritts, M. (2001). Living in virtual Rome: Adventure@Cybercamp. 17th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning.

This project focuses on life in Ancient Rome. Students adopt characters and interact with their environment, while helping to create that environment. Just powerful.

Here’s the paragraph that attempts to get at the technology:

“Living in Rome: Adventure@Cybercamp is the first of a projected series of interactive, web-based books and virtual spaces that contain, support and illustrate activities that have been used by master teachers over the years to help students experience history in a more hands-on way. It has been written with an interactive multi-user virtual space so that students can experience and participate in ancient Roman life in real time.”

I find a couple things interesting about this description:

1. The project is a series of interactive “books and virtual space.” Something about the use of the word “book” struck me as odd. Even though I know there are lots of different kinds of media that are considered books from paper to audio to electronic, I still think of books as the things on my shelf. And even the audio and electronic versions mimic that form even if they aren’t corporeal. I suppose these are more like the “choose your adventure” book where you even get to choose which character you’re going to follow. That blurs over into drama, too, like those plays where the audience actually comes up on the stage. So, book seems limiting but I think it helps people understand who might not get “virtual space.”

2. Experiencing history in a hands-on way: it’s just a great idea. And it is becoming both a real and a virtual experience with more and more groups doing reenactments of historical events. I haven’t installed Age of Empires yet but am interested in seeing how the gamers do it. I’ve heard differing opinions of how much history you learn. In this MUSH/MUV environment, you create and experience in that time period, allowing a “truer” understanding of history, hopefully by reducing the glare caused by the march of time. And as we learn to interact with history, we learn to interact with our own time more effectively.