Gaming, Achievements, Real World and Virtual March 20, 2010

So I went to dinner last night with a few educators I admire and the talk turned to Twitter and blogging and gaming and how people learn and why people play games.  I got all these resources in mind to send them, and then decided I might as well blog about them, too, since they might be useful to more people. This seemed a lot easier to write in a way that made sense while I was dreaming about it last night.

Let’s start with what’s often shared in the news: Video-game Ownership May Impair Kids’ Academic Achievement. This news article sums up a study on short term effects of game system ownership. The study is published in the Psychological Science Journal and only members can read it. So I’m not able to see how long “short term” is. Basically the blurb says they discovered the shocking news that if you give someone a gaming system, that person is going to play games on it, thereby spending less time doing other things they would have done without the new gaming system. They probably would have found similar results had they given these boys really interesting books to read, a new interesting museum to go to, or anything at all new that they were interested in. Think of anything new worth a couple hundred dollars that has entered your life. After you got it, did you spend more time with it for awhile than you did other things, perhaps causing some negative effects with the other things? Did the ‘new’ wear off after a bit so that it settled into a normal routine and you then focused on what you should have been doing again? Basically, without having read the actual study, it sounds to me like these kids and their video game systems were set up to fail.

I’m not saying there aren’t potential problems with time management where games are concerned. Almost Normal is an awesome web comic that explores time management issues with gaming. I’ve picked out a few of the strips below. Read what she writes about each strip, and read the comments from her readers to really understand where they all come from. The artist is a real gamer with real life goals that she is accomplishing.

• August 21, 2009: This strip introduces the characters pretty well.
• November 6, 2009: This illustrates the frustration and doubt everyone experiences about being able to accomplish their dreams or change the world. Gamers get that doubt, too. This is especially relevant to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers. One of her points, and I think it’s the only one I disagree with, is that gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world, not the real world.
• November 13, 2009: You can see here that all of her characters need stuff. This is one of the ways the game keeps players playing. David Wong compares video game design to Skinner box design to explain this.
• February 19, 2010: This one is for all the Farmville gamers you know, and it illustrates how many different responsibilities pull at our time, both in real life and virtual.

Reactions to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers:

I agree with and learned so much from all but one sentence Jane McGonigal shares–the once where she says gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world. I think she needs to meet some of the gamers that I know. These are people who believe they can change the world, and they do change the real world. I play with successful business owners, kids who start charity events to raise money for children’s hospitals, published and self-supporting artists and musicians, parents raising responsible and well-behaved kids, and lots of people who have day jobs to pay the bills and very fulfilling, creative hobbies in addition to playing games.

So why do we game? David Wong’s Skinner box analogy explains how the game meets a need for feedback, for our efforts to be rewarded. Jane McGonigal explains that we play to escape reality. These are definitely reasons why I play. It’s why I read. It’s why I do art projects. It’s why I go for a drive, go hiking, go biking, and dream of going on vacations. Working with reality can get frustrating. You work really hard to meet a goal and you can’t tell if you are making progress or going backwards, and the finish line can be years away. Around any corner, you can meet people who say you can’t succeed. Since I’ve started playing World of Warcraft (WoW), I find that at those times, I play. It’s a great break. I get rewarded. I can tell I’m making progress. I can team up with people to accomplish things none of us could do alone. After awhile, I re-energize and am ready to take on my real life goals again.

David Wong describes the light shooting from your body when you accomplish goals in game. This is my toon achieving the most difficult thing I’ve done in game so far:

This took a few months to accomplish and I am still really proud of it. Real life rewards very few people this way. In real life, I earn something to list on my resume or a good story to tell.

An author and game designer, Sirlin, shares a video of Jesse Schell’s 2010 DICE lecture describing an amazing world in which marketing takes over and rewards everyone for every little thing they do in real life. The video is at the top of the page and Sirlin’s analysis follows. He closes with, “Jesse Schell’s future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?” So it seems that Jane McGonigal hopes for a world where we create games where people learn to live responsible lives by virtually exploring the consequences of doing otherwise. Jesse Schell thinks advertisers will control our reward systems and we will learn to live lives that buy the products they want to sell. Hopefully it will be a combination of the two, and we will also learn to be critical and question these reward systems.

These award-winning serious games include examples of what McGonigal wants to see in the future as well as many educational games. Each banner launches a video about the game.

Keith Devlin wants to build a virtual game on the scale of WoW that helps people learn to think mathematically. He thinks that commercial game developers will not be motivated to spend the necessary money to build an educational game. I’m not so sure that’s true. If it’s a good game, what geeky gamer doesn’t want to be in a world of math? I would play. In fact, I’m very tempted to buy an early reading program, ItzaBitza, because it’s just a really great game. Click the “Try ItzaBitza” button for a 15 minute free trial and you’ll see what I mean. I hope I can spend my gaming dollars to learn things like higher math, physics, and programming someday soon.

Edits: I updated this on Monday, March 22nd to add some formatting and adjust some words to make it a little more readable and to try to say what I mean more clearly. I’ll continue editing this in the future. I’m still analyzing all of these related sources and figuring out the points I want to make about them. Thank you for reading trudging through it in its current state.

NCCE 2010: Reflections on What I Attended, Part I of ? March 18, 2010

On March 4 and 5, 2010, I attended the Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) conference in Seattle.

Here are all the sessions I attended, my thoughts, and all the related resources I can find.

Dennis Small, CBAs for Washington’s EdTech Standards

I was interested in attending this because it was on assessment of standards. Standards tend to get a bad rap, and so does assessment, especially when it’s of standards. My analytical and organized instructional design soul cries out at these attacks. How can anyone say having standards is bad? How can anyone say assessing whether standards have been met is bad? You can say the standards are poorly written, poorly implement, poorly designed. You can say the assessment is poorly designed and unimaginative. But just because these things are so often done badly does not mean they, themselves, are bad. Standards are how you know what the goal is. Assessment is how you know you got there. Simple. Essential.

Anyway, I’ll tuck aside my little soapbox and write about the session.

Dennis Small is the Director of Educational Technology at OSPI (Washington State’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction). Tara Richerson actually did most of the presentation. First they discussed timelines and deadlines for when assessment of the standards would need to be developed. All of that sort of information is better accessed from OSPI than from my blog so I won’t go into it here.

I learned that 13 states assess educational technology literacy. Some assess it online, and only four assess it by embedding in content tests. Those four are the only ones that have it right, I think. Technology is nothing without content. No one uses technology that’s worth having standards written about it and assessing a person’s skills at using it just for the sake of using the technology. They use it to learn and to create. The best assessment is an authentic one, so embedding technology assessment into content assessments gives a chance of it being authentic.

The attendees were shown a tech standard and then given time to discuss how they would assess it. I chatted with a technology integrator who shared that his school’s problem was not how to assess technology, but rather that they were still discussing whether they should use it. My previous post has my impassioned response to that nonsense.

After the discussion, teachers shared some formative assessment techniques:

• When one student has a tech question, instead of answering, the teacher asks another student to answer.
• In a web design class, students blog their daily progress in a web design class.

Tara shared a quote that I love: “Give me enough evidence to convict you of learning.” I believe she cited a source, but I’m not finding it in a Google search.

I took a couple more notes via Twitter:

• Does there need to be an audience of the information that you organize–how do students prove they can organize ideas?
• How do we make the evaluation consistent from teacher to teacher and content to content. Evaluate “creative.”

One person’s definition of “organization” and “creativity” can be vastly different from another’s. The point of an assessment, though, is that any work will receive that same evaluation regardless of who is examining the evidence. The challenge is to design an assessment that effectively asks the learner to organized and creative, and that gives the viewer enough evidence to convict them of that. I find that exciting.

Keynote

The keynote was the same one I attended at FETC–a talk about the state of our environment from Philippe Cousteau. He’s awesome, amazing, and engaging, but is in no way what I expect for a keynote at an educational technology conference. I understand the economic reasons for the choice, but please, put someone up there to inspire teachers to integrate technology. His message is vitally important, but there are a lot of vitally important messages, and the one most relevant to an educational technology conference is the one on effective technology integration. /rant

Jennifer Gingerich, Digital Kits for Differentiation and Learning

Jennifer Gingerich is a technology coach for an Oregon school district. She shared a story about her transition from physical, topic-specific learning kits to digital ones. She used to collect materials on different topics that kids could handle and pass around in order to become familiar with the topics. When digital resources became available, she had a revelation that her kits could be digital and this is how she came to embrace technology (at least that’s how I remember it now, two weeks later). She shared that she wanted to help other teachers embrace this and had a tough time until she finally gave in and just gave them one to use. Then the teachers saw how great it was and asked how to make their own.

Some tips she shared were to create a folder structure in which no two folders have the same name. For example, at the top level, there would be folders for “Ocean” and “Oregon Trail”. Inside those, there would be folders for pictures, but they would not be called “Pictures”. They should be called “Ocean Pictures” and “Oregon Trail Pictures”. Having worked in a one-to-one computing situation before, this made total sense to me. When you’re trying to explain to 25 or 30 people to go to a particular folder, and you’re trying to walk around to make sure no one is lost, it’s so much easier if the window’s title bar has the full name of the folder. In Windows there are options to turn on the full path, but you’re not always in control of that setting, so it’s better to name the folders something that will quickly tell you that Lucy can’t find the picture of the flower because she’s in “Fish Pictures” instead of “Flower Pictures”.

She was an engaging and informative presenter, but I could not stay for the whole thing as there were many more presentations I wanted to see. Her website includes many more resources on this and other topics.

Randy Orwin, ePortfolios Using Open Source Software Called Mahara

At the district I used to work for, I got to participate in many conversations about the practicality and challenges of implementing ePortfolios. At first blush, they probably seem like a no-brainer to implement, but given a little time to think about legal and technical issues, they’re really quite complicated and easy to do very very wrong.

Mahara sounded pretty cool. Jason Neiffer liveblogged the session.

My Twitter notes:

• The portfolio is exportable and then viewable as a web page. The portfolio can travel with kids who leave the district.
• Also usable as a digital dropbox.
• Students can create views of their art that displays the sizes etc that they want.
• A teacher could assign making a view of their work for a specific purpose. The work exists once and can be used in many views.
• The student has complete control of what is published and who can see it.
• I recommend looking at Mahara of you are considering digital portfolios and want to allow your students a sense of ownership.

I’m not sure that I have much more than that to share. In summary, I was impressed and would really like to see this in the wild someday.

Okay, that’s all I can write tonight! And I decided that if that’s all I can write in one sitting, it’s probably more than you want to read in one sitting! So I’ll post more as I have time to write it. And oh, is there more!

NCCE2010. The World Has Changed. Know it. Accept it. Embrace it. March 7, 2010

I had the great pleasure of attending NCCE last week in Seattle. I got a lot out of attending and found it inspiring. It’s also a little overwhelming. There are so many resources available now. My field of instructional technology is overwhelming enough. I feel a bit of a responsibility to be familiar with everything out there related to my field. Honestly, there is too much being created and becoming obsolete all the time for any one person to know all that is out there. I’ve known this for awhile, and I try to compensate by following technology news sources and educators so I can be on top of the field as much as possible, and so I know where to go to find out more whenever I need to.

My field’s pretty easy, though, compared to that of anyone in content. The days when the teacher was the gateway to knowledge are so long gone. Know it, accept it, and embrace it, teachers. Your students can hear straight from an astronomer about a discovery of a new star. They can read an original historical document. They can have a conversation with the president of another country. They can ask a professional mathematician about the practical applications of last night’s homework assignment. And they can do this without you ever knowing. You can’t stop it. It’s already happened. It’s happening now.

I was in a presentation where we were shown Wolfram Alpha doing math. If someone wants you to find x^2 sin(x) (whatever that is), type it into Wolfram Alpha and get all the data you could ever want and more. Every homework assignment I was ever given in math class can be done by simply typing it into Wolfram Alpha. Hmmm.

Know it. Accept it. Embrace it.

How cool! Math teachers, tell me you didn’t become a math teacher just to show kids how to follow the steps to answer a math problem the same way everybody else in the world was taught to solve it. What inspired you to become a math teacher? Now that Wolfram Alpha can do the basic stuff, can you do even more? If your students can find the answers there, can you teach them why the answers are worth finding?

Another presentation focused more on literature and history. There was a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I don’t think I had ever heard about it before, but I learned it was pretty significant in women’s lib and labor laws. The presenter showed us so many resources available on this. If kids know how to search, they can find images, videos about it, interviews, building plans, and so much more. That’s just one little fragment of a content area. There is no way a teacher could be familiar with all of the resources available on that one event, much less the rest of topics in the curriculum, much less everything else that is relevant to the curriculum that didn’t fit into the plan for the year.

Not only was it the last presentation of the conference, but the sea of information that was available was so vast, I could see teachers thinking, “How can I possibly know all of this?” Does it help to think, “I can’t.” There is more information available in every subject area now, and more becoming available all the time, that no one can have a complete list. It’s impossible. Your students are going to find sources you have never seen before. Know that. Accept that. Embrace it. If your kids aren’t inspired to find things you have never seen before, are you teaching it well enough?

This is a big, stressful change. I hope you’ve made it already. If you haven’t, accept that you can’t stop it. There’s no going back. Even if all the access is shut down in a school, kids can get to all of this outside of school. The time when the school was the gateway to information is gone. Long gone. And that’s really pretty awesome. Help your kids find all of this, analyze it and evaluate it, and then teach them the inspiring things you never had time to teach before.

Splitting my Twitter account March 6, 2010

I’ve split my twitter account into three categories:

@cathig: This is the account I will follow people with, I think. This might change. I’m not quite sure how that will work. But basically, this is the consolidated ‘me’.

@cathig_edu: This will be the account from which I will post education and technology tweets.

@cathig_sci: This will be where I tweet about social gaming, comics, and other geeky things.

Why? Well, I attended NCCE this week in person. A week ago or so, someone I follow attended another conference and tweeted info as it went along, so I was kind of able to be there. I really appreciated it. I thought I would do the same thing for my followers from NCCE. The problem is that perhaps half of my followers are from my gaming side and don’t give a crap about what I think is important about educational philosophy and that sort of technology.

I resisted dividing my stream for personal identity reasons and for technical complexity. My personal reasons were just that this is me. I’m interested in all of this stuff, so here it all is. I didn’t like the idea of dividing ‘me’ into multiple boxes for people. But with a day or so of reflection and analysis, I came to the following conclusions:

• I already compartmentalize ‘me’. There are personal things I do not tweet or blog, and there are public things that I do tweet or blog.
• I already do not tweet a lot of things I would want to share with my gaming and comics followers because I do not want to annoy my education followers. My gaming and comics side is more personal and my education side, while still my personal passion, is more what I want to share as a professional.
• Most everybody is really complex, and very rarely is one person interested in everything another person is interested in. Most people are not like me. While I am really interested in hearing what a person has to say about almost anything they are passionate about, most people’s eyes glaze over when others geek out about things they aren’t interested in. For me, my eyes will glaze over when anyone starts talking about celebrities’ personal lives or reality TV. I’m just not interested. So if someone who posted mostly about education were giving a blow-by-blow tweet stream about whatever popular show, I’d be annoyed at the clutter in my stream.

So I came to an understanding on the personal side. It’s okay for people who choose to follow me not to want to follow all of me. Got it. Now for the technical problem. The folks at Twitter do not make it easy to have separate streams for people to follow. This problem spans most social networking sites, including Facebook. I’ve rarely touched Facebook in the past year because of this. News I want to share with my family is different from what I want to share with my friends and different from what I want to share with coworkers and different from what I want to share with whomever might want to hire me in the future (my current job ends every six months, so I have to expect that I will work somewhere else one day unless my employer can figure out how to make a commitment to people who want careers there). I understand and appreciate the integrity aspect–they want to be able to say that everyone with an account is a genuine, real person, not just a bunch of fake accounts created merely to deceive or entertain. We do need to be able to trust that we are interacting with real, honest people, not characters. But there has to be some way to easily have this integrity and allow people to share different information with different groups. I don’t need to know that my coworker hates gay people. While I am lividly opposed to that opinion, that should not be a factor in my workplace. I should not know who my boss is voting for. My boss should not know who I am voting for. I should be able to share that with my friends and not be automatically sharing it with coworkers.  It’s simple and true, right?

Anyway, they don’t make it easy to have separate accounts yet, even though it’s absolutely necessary. Twitter wants a separate email account for every Twitter identity. With the recent rash of hacked email accounts, I groaned at the idea of setting up fake ones that are linked to my very honest and real Twitter identities. Happily, I found the article, One Email for Multiple Twitter Accounts! So now I don’t have to worry about people hacking email accounts I never use.

The next problem is figuring out how to post from each account. I’m going to try out Twitterrific on my phone. It’s supposed to be able to handle that pretty well, and it’s free. The computer side does not seem to have a great solution. It irks me that I’ve wasted three hours setting this up today. I hope it ends up being worth it!

Update: Twitterific did not have the features I needed on my iPhone. I tried a few others and even bought one, and none met my needs, until I found TweetDeck–free! Woot! I’m trying to follow just one stream as @cathig, and reply and retweet to specific followers as @cathig_sci or @cathig_edu. I hope this will end up working for my followers. While I would prefer a solution that didn’t require any action on my followers’ parts, I think people are just going to have to unfollow and follow the ‘me’ with the stream tailored to their reason for following.