Educational Technology and Life

FINAL POST: Educational Technology and Life has Moved

2006-02-11T01:01:00.000-08:00

Well, my new Wordpress based version of Educational Technology and Life is ready. As with any move, there are plenty of details I want to work on, and I'm sure I'll be unpacking for a while, but the big stuff is done.

I imported all 273 posts on the Blogger version of this blog, the last 30 posts at the original MSN Spaces version of this blog, a handful of posts from my other blogs, and this was the real triumph - 588 categorized posts from my FURL account! I owe Dave Brussin more than a few beers for his generous and heroic efforts converting FURL XML into proper RSS (with accommodations for Wordpress) so it could be imported. If Dave is willing to be so generous, I'd love to be able to write up what he did and post it, because you can indeed import FURL into Wordpress. :)

Wordpress tells me there are currently 906 posts and 120 comments, contained within 21 categories. (The number of comments seems really low, but only the blogger posts came in with comments... and one of the main reasons I moved was so visitors could now comment on my referrals, which they could not do at FURL.)

I still want to fix a lot of old images, categorize all my uncategorized posts (from Blogger and MSN), work out a moblogging solution, add a custom favicon, and get some additional URLs pointed there. But meanwhile, I have a lot of posts I've been keeping queued up in Mars Edit and I want to start posting them this weekend.

So, head on over to edtechlife.com for the latest version of Educational Technology and Life, and use http://edtechlife.com/?feed=rss2 to subscribe via RSS.

You will find all the existing content and any future updates on all the topics you've grown to expect from ET&L.

As always, thanks for reading, and a special thank you for following me to my new home. ;)

UPDATE: If you've been kind enough to link to me, I'd also be thrilled if you update your links with the new address. Thanks to all who have!

Reinvention Chapter 2—"I Quit"

2006-02-08T00:41:00.000-08:00

Reinvention Chapter 2—"I Quit" (Via Weblogg-ed News: The Read/Write Web in the Classroom.)

Among edubloggers, this was the big news of the day... well, yesterday at this point. Will Richardson has quit his day job to be a blogvangelist... or whatever the future brings him. I commented and meant it.

As my own desire to be disruptive mounts, and as the need for some housekeeping and additional features here at this blog come to a head, I will soon be announcing some changes of my own. The first (of at least two) is already underway... I am once again planning a move, this time to a wordpress blog I host at a URL I own. Tonight I purchased the hosting (and URL), installed wordpress, and imported ALL of the content from this blog. This entire process was unbelievably easy! And I can't wait for the new features of wordpress, including categories and RSS feeds for comments. (Note that you can get free wordpress blogs at learnerblogs.org for you and your students.)

I started an Omni Outliner file for the issues that remain to be settled before announcing the new URL to anyone other than Mike Porcelli. Right now these include:

- [ ] theme
- [ ] images
- [ ] description and bio
- [ ] categories
- [ ] blogroll
- [ ] Import FURL content?

I will let you all know once I've closed escrow again.

Man, does it feel good to geek out a little bit. It was a nice break from all the serious "and Life" issues of late. :)

Housekeeping: Bloglines Blogroll Script Doesn't Work?

2006-02-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

Does anyone understand what is happening with the blogroll in the right hand column of this blog? It is generated by a smalls script provided by Bloglines, but a third of the links don't go anywhere... they reflect the user right back to this blog. This is both useless and embarrassing. I thought it was high time to post something about it incase the community can help.

Also, while I'm on the topic of housekeeping... my 1 year anniversary on blogger is coming up, and I am considering moving to a new blog tool to mark the occasion. I want something with categories, trackbacks, and comments, of course... and which works with MarsEdit preferably. I am considering buying some hosting and a real domain name for ET&L. I welcome any input on this, and I hope you will all follow me if/when the day comes.

Thanks for reading.

iPSP versus iPod w/Video

2006-02-07T00:26:00.000-08:00

I did try out iPSP a few days ago. It has a great interface for converting and copying any media to the PSP. It seems to directly tap into the user's various iLife libraries. Unfortunately, I ran headlong into the main drawback to the PSP as a multimedia device... memory! The PSP has less memory than the iPod (with video) by orders of magnitude!

So, in contrast to the PSP (with 32 MB of memory out of the box), iPod has 60 GBs, and iTunes, however misnamed at this point, provides a decent interface for getting audio, images, and video onto the iPod. Unufortunately, iPod has very little to offer in the way of games, and the video iPod in particular has very poor peripheral support thus far... no iTalk even. In fact, because of the iTalk and iTrip, I am continuing to use a 30 GB iPod Photo as my primary iPod despite having access to a newer model.

And so the one device dream remains elusive.

Also, at this point, with the exception of gaming, iPod is the clear winner over the PSP for educational applications.

Jerome S. Bruner, the Culture of Education, and Educational Technology

2006-02-07T00:14:00.000-08:00

Despite the still staggering "and Life" issues, tonight I've managed to keep up with my feeds, catch up on email (including comments from this blog), and now, finally, to blog. (And I completed a reference for a former student to boot!)

I started this post weeks ago, while digging through Bruner's The Culture of Education. My next paper is still in very early stages, so I am returning to these quotes and my annotations to complete this post for ET&L.

Meaning making involves situating encounters with the world in their appropriate cultural contexts in order to know "what they are about." Although meanings are "in the mind," they have their origins and their significance in the culture in which they are created. It is this cultural situatedness of meanings that assures their negotiability and, ultimately, their communicability. (p. 3)

Finally, I am getting to the social negotiation element in the subtitle to this blog! This quote speaks to the importance of allowing students to learn new content (and processes!) in a cultural context, rather than as abstract elements divorced from context, and culture. This is also important to relate to your students, not necessarily as friends (though I remain open to that idea), but at least as human beings. When I got to the point where I could do that, it changed my teaching... that was the door to success. And establishing that relationship is still the first thing I try to do in any professional development.

Education is not an island, but part of the continent of culture.

Similarly I often open with an activity based on a current event, or something I am currently passionate about (in an effort to provoke some passion in the participants). I think this is equally important (and effective) with k12 students. And, naturally, I think that blogs, wikis, and RSS can help students feel that their education is a part of a greater culture... and may even be contributing to that culture.

Native endowment may be as much affected by the accessibility of symbolic systems as by the distribution of genes. (p. 11)

Consider how much more important this becomes in the age of the digital divide! Already there is such a clear gap between those who can read and write academic language, and those who are functionally illiterate... a similar gap has formed between those who can use educational technologies such as an office suite, the internet, and email... and now another gap is forming between those who can use blogs, wikis, and RSS and those who cannot. I suspect a similar divide may be created when some students have access to games and simulations as part of their education (allowing them to learn cyclical and systems content in addition to linear content), while others are stuck using books - and office suites. Needless to say, I think this conclusion of Bruner's speaks to the need to be sure public education provides students with exposure to these tools and the support they need to master them. Personally, I think the need for a 1:1 student to computer ratio should be self evident at this point.

Works and works-in-progess create shared and negotiable ways of thinking in a group... [and] externalization produces a record of our efforts, one that is "outside us" rather than vaguely "in memory." (p. 23)

It is amazing how well this quote captures so much of what is exciting about the read/write web in education! Will Richardson in particular writes often about the benefits of writing as thinking, and I have linked before to suggestions that blogs can be our back up brain.

I thought that I should point out that when Bruner starts talking about "the tenet of identity and self esteem" (p. 35), he starts sounding like Jim Gee, but I suppose the opposite is true. Gee's work reflects Bruner's influence.

I think we have become so preoccupied with the more formal criteria of "performance" and with the bureaucratic demands of education as an institution that we have neglected this personal side of education. (p. 39)

Bruner knew that "...and Life" was more important than standards 10 years ago! This is much of what frustrates me about my job at the county. Though I have some freedom to be disrupted, I am inspired to do more.

Even under the least favorable conditions - psychologically, fiscally, educationally - we still succeed in giving some children a sense of their own possibilities. We do it by getting them (and sometimes their parents) to collaborate in an enabling community. (p. 76)

This is what it is all about! This is what our Expected School Wide Learning Results should be... students will develop a sense of their own possibilities! And note the nod to the parents. Here again blogs can help kids recognize their potential to contribute, and can help parents recognize their student's contributions. So, too, can games help... particularly games that can recast the student as the hero, or at least an effective agent of change within the game world.

Perhaps successful cultures... should be considered as "countercultures" that serve to raise the consciousness and meta-cognition of their participants as well as enhancing their self esteem. (p. 77-78)

Wow. Here is today's Hallelujah, brother. Did I mention I long to be more disruptive?

It is through this process of becoming aware of practice that the good school and the healhy classroom can provide even the child of poverty, even the outsider immigrant child, some working vision of how a society can operate. (p. 79)

This is why reflection through blogging can be a powerful tool for supporting professional learning communities (and small learning communities). In fact, as I sat in a SAIT meeting today and contemplated what in the world an Ed Tech guy was doing in a meeting about program improvement schools when no one in the room had any intention of tapping his knowledge base, it occurred to me how much focusing on the read/write web and other disruptive technologies (rather than focusing on remedial efforts) could change the culture of a school to support more meaningful student learning and achievement, possibly even raising test scores as a side effect.

"We probably have little better sense of where the culture is heading than did the French in 1789." (p. 83)

Scary isn't it? But very likely true.

We need a surer sense of what to teach to whom and how to go about teaching it in such a way that it will make those taught more effective, less alienated, and better human beings... then we can mount the kind of community effort that can truly address the future of our educational process - an effort in which all of the resources of intellect and compassion that we can muster, whatever the price, are placed at the disposal of the schools... all the standards in the world will not, like a helping hand, achieve the goal of making our multicultural, our threatened society come alive again, not alive just as a competitor in the world's markets, but as a nation worth living in and living for. (p. 118)

Perhaps when Bruner wrote this we needed that surer sense... now I think we have it (to the degree possible in our changing culture), and the question now is how to effect the changes he dreams of as well. This is what Educational Technology and Life is all about for me. At the best of times, this is what my job is about, too. I believe the read/write web will play a roll in mounting this community effort, because what Dewey calls our medieval educational system cannot serve us much longer, and the change is coming.

CUE Conference Concurrent Sessions Now Available!

2006-02-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

CUE Conference Concurrent Sessions Now Available! (Via CUE News.)

This is worth passing on here. If you live in California, I hope I'll see you in the OCDE Mac Lab at the CUE conference next month.

777 unread items in my aggregator...

2006-02-05T22:36:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been a particularly trying week at work and at home. I barely put four hours into writing my next paper... and since Wednesday I have barely read my feeds. I clicked through a few here and there, but tonight I sat down to 777 unread items. (Strangely, I also happened to glance at my dock a few days ago and notice 666 unread items!)

So, I'm getting caught up on some reading tonight, you should see some activity over at my FURL account, and I expect to be blogging more this week.

UPDATE: 2 hours and 14 FURLs later, I'm down to 227 unread items. It felt great to get caught up, but it feels even better to limit the time spent on this... and actually go to bed at a decent hour.

UPDATE 02/06/06: Thanks to Monday meetings I've finally got down to zero unread items! Woo hoo! Now I'm back in the flow... and I hope to be blogging tonight, personal life permitting. :)

Blogging Demo at OCCUE

2006-01-28T10:56:00.000-08:00

The teachers here are watching me post this.

Podcast: Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education

2006-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education (Since I used Apple's tools to make this, it is an m4v format video.)

It turns out some podcasters / RSS readers only deal with the first enclosure as a podcast, so here is that file again for you folks. ;)

Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education

2006-01-28T09:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not capturing all of Robert's presentation on video, but I did bring my iSight so I could do a 'proof of concept' for my presentation the following hour.

I set my iSight on the table and captured some video of Robert speaking, referring to Thomas Freedman's the world is flat, and introducing iPod as a communication tool. Then, using the share menu in iMovie, I posted a quick and dirty video podcast to my iWeb site. But, since iWeb doesn't support comments, I am linking to the file here, so it can appear as an enclosure (and thus podcast) in this feed, and folks can comment.

Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education (Since I used Apple's tools to make this, it is an m4v format video.)

OCDE Ed Tech Presents at OCCUE 01/28/06

2006-01-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

OCDE Ed Tech Presents at OCCUE 01/28/06 (Via Educational Technology at OCDE.)

For those of you not in Orange County (who might not be interested in subscribing to the OCDE Ed Tech Feed), I thought I'd provide this pointer to our presentations on iPod + Podcasting, the Read/Write Web, and Video Games... all in education of course. I hope to post some audio (or even video) tomorrow after the day is done.

iPods, Cell Phones, Computers, email, and IM in a Sixth Grade Classroom

2006-01-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

These stats come from an Orange County sixth grade teacher. Thanks to Mike Guerena and to the teacher's district technology leader for sharing the data. :)

Here is more than you wanted:

66% of my students have iPods (21 of 32)
1 iPod
2 iPod shuffle
9 iPod Mini
7 iPod nano
2 iPod video

Other things I surveyed:

38% have their own cell phone

100% have a computer in their house, 35% have one in their room

47% have their own email account

38% instant message almost every day, 60% i.m. at least once or twice a week

So, as Prensky has asked, how can we use the technology (and technology skills) that our students are bringing into our classrooms? As I've said before, I don't think restricting and policing are the answers.

I can't wait to see the comments on this. :)

On the power of IM, Priorities, ...and Sleep

2006-01-27T00:31:00.000-08:00

No Bruner post tonight. I've spent time playing with new software (which I always enjoy and haven't been able to do nearly enough this past year). A former student (who's planning to become a teacher) also contacted my via IM, so we chatted a while. We'll be meeting for coffee next week... and, naturally, I'll be helping him with a recommendation.

For several years now I've appreciated the power of instant messages to help me communicate with my students (and former students). Now, at the OCDE, I find it helpful for my professional development students, too... other teachers and tech coordinators.

It is also the only reason I have stayed as close as I have to old friends from college, and even from high school. My closest friends for the past several years have been those I could chat with on a regular basis anytime I was online.

Naturally, my coworkers and I also get a lot of work done via IM, and sometimes... it's what keeps us sane in the office.

So this time I've spent tonight gets logged (in a spreadsheet... no joke... resolutions folks) as "nurture friendships" time. After spending the first week of the year as a hermit, setting goals, prioritizing them, and making plans to reach them... I've found this profoundly powerful in helping decide how to spend my time. Strangely, I feel I am no longer letting my phd research fill up huge spans of time to the detriment of my other priorities and relationships - and yet I feel I am probably accomplishing more when I do study.

Another thing this has helped me to do is to continue to move toward a more regular sleep pattern, which turns out to feel surprisingly healthy, even for a night owl. This week, though, I've been getting to bed a little later each night. So, tonight, I crack this off and turn in instead of doing the heavy lifting necessary to finish the Bruner post tonight.

I'm not even staying up late for iPSP. :)

So, as I save and post this, my IM status goes from "Walden University" to "...and Sleep."

More on Mars Edit.. and OmniOutliner

2006-01-27T00:16:00.000-08:00

So, my use of Mars Edit is beginning to pay off in the way I compose for Educational Technology and Life. Last night, for an upcoming post on Bruner's The Culture of Education, I keyed in all of the quotes, applied blockquote tags with the pulldown HTML menu as I went, and then saved as a draft so I could come back when I had more time. (Not that I haven't saved drafts of posts and returned to them before, but somehow, having perspective titles sitting in my Drafts folder makes me feel I made progress despite not posting, and keeps me motivated to come back.)

I think Mars Edit also played a role in leading me to finally start using an outliner! (The fact that Mike Guerena recently ordered our team licenses for one helped too.) The experience is still very new to me (and I'm at the point where learning the tool detracts a bit from its usefulness), but I think this will really make a difference in the way I compose my coming KAMs and dissertation.

So I'm using OmniOutliner to compose my current KAM on principles of societal development. I am focusing on establishing the theoretical foundation for the use of video games and simulations as constructivist learning environments, based on the work of social constructivists such as Dewey, Vygosky, and Bruner. I hope to move forward to tie these ideas to the likes of Shaffer, Squire, and Steinkuehler. (I think I've more or less articulated this here before, but this does make it real and keep me on track.)

Now I'm actually wishing for outliner functionality in Mars Edit and am finally starting to understand what Dave Winer has meant when he's sung their praises as blogging tools.

More to come I'm sure...

Check out the EdTech @ OCDE Front Page

2006-01-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

EdTech @ OCDE | Front Page

Check it out. We've got two way communication happening on the OCDE Ed Tech website. And you might notice in the left column we're now offering staff generated content... our FURL archives, and this blog. :)

The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review?

2006-01-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review?

Can a certain type of academic blogging be a more adequate form of literature review than the traditional chapter in a dissertation? In this post, I employ the rubric proposed by Boote et al. (2005) to determine whether blogging can be considered a form of literature review. I also make some suggestions for how blogging may be incorporated formally into the research and writing activities of some doctoral students, although it certainly might not be useful to others. I am not suggesting that this single post is my literature review; I am merely providing a map that outlines how my blogging during the past years constitutes a form of ongoing literature review. (Via i d e a n t.)

This is a topic I have a great deal of interest in, and of course I found it worth passing on here (as opposed to in my FURL archive). I noted that Constance Steinkuehler used her web space as a part of her formal dissertation. Though this wasn't exactly a blog, it got me thinking along the same lines as Ulises at ideant. I definitely need to spend more time with his detailed post, too.

I would love to hear any comments any of you may have on this topic.

The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion

2006-01-24T23:32:00.000-08:00

BandaiGames.com - Games - The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion

This is the RPG I settled on for my PSP. The opening sequences were far too linear, but now that I am clear of those the game is starting to show its depth. The graphics are sharp, but decidedly "old school".

As a fan of the old Final Fantasy games I am enjoying this as my first "interactive paperback," as I've been calling it.

It also has the distinct advantage of being something I can play in bed without bothering Eva... which makes it better than either playing WoW in the other room or actually reading in the bed! Also, provided I don't want to switch games (and don't drop the machine or anything), I can save anytime and then I can use the instant on (and off) feature to play in very short bursts. I hope to get in more gaming this way than I have been able to with WoW, which competes for time with work and research.

Unfortunately, for my research into games and social constructivism, it's not massively multiplayer. :)

Still, I hope to post more reflections on it (and WoW) in the future.

Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and Educational Technology

2006-01-24T22:57:00.000-08:00

Normally, Tuesday night at the Wagners' means watching arguably the best show on television. But, tonight Eva took her friend Nancy to a cooking class, so I had time for a long session of Walden, with time to spare for blogging...

On Saturday I completed my whirlwind tour of Bruner's Actual minds, Possible Worlds and this evening I finshed blasting through The Culture of Education, much of which I slowed down for and read at normal speed. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, but as his newest work (and most explicitly culture related) I was not so surprised to find it may be the most significant of those I've read. (I also got a good deal out of The Relevance of Education, which I spent some time with tonight as well.)

Naturally, I found several excerpts in each that related to Educational Technology, particularly the read/write web and video games.

The following excerpt from Actual Minds, Possible Worlds captures a concept that should be central to the restructuring (or reinvention) of our educational systems and to the role educational technologies play in the future systems.

If [the student] fails to develop any sense of what I shall call reflective intervention in the knowledge he encounters, the young person will be operating continually from the outside in - knowledge will control and guide him. If he succeeds in developing a sense of self that is premised on his ability to penetrate knowledge for his own uses, and if he can share and negotiate the result of his penetrations, then he becomes a member of the culture creating community. (p. 132)

And later:

The language of education is the language of culture creating, not of knowledge consuming or knowledge acquisition alone.

Consider the role of the read/write web (and blogging in particular) in facilitating such "reflective intervention" as students process what they read (or experience), articulate their responses to it, and share these responses with a community of readers. More importantly, consider just how possible it is for our students to become members of a culture creating community. They are almost certainly doing that online (regardless of what we offer in schools) at places like My Space, where I'm sure a good deal of incidental learning is taking place... but as I am often advocating in my trainings, why not harness these technologies for intentional learning in formal education?

Incidentally, it's exciting that even students who are not strong in their linguistic intelligence can now participate via audio and video podcasts... or by photocasting images they've captured or created. I hope that early adoptors will not try to fit all students into the mold of a writer as they explore the power of blogs and the read/write web. I suppose I've caught a mild case of the "blogs are not a panacea" bug lately... despite my own personal drive to continue blogging in the face of serious time constraints.

In terms of the use of video games and simulations in education... at worst, there is a danger that students left alone with a game or simulation might indeed fail to develop the "reflective intervention" Bruner describes; they might indeed be controlled by the stimuli they encounter, rather than "developing a sense of self that is premised on [the] ability to penetrate knowledge." Aldrich and others (with Prensky being, at least at his most... humorous... a notable exception) advocate strongly for the importance of a teacher to help facilitate and mediate a student's experience with a game or simulation. After all, as Bruner interprets Vygotsky's work to suggest,

"conceptual learning [is] a collaborative enterprise involving an adult who enters into dialogue with the child in a fashion that provides the child with hints and props that allow him to begin a new climb, guiding the child in next steps before the child is capable of appreciating their significance on his own. It is the "loan of consciousness" that gets the child through the zone of proximal development. (p. 132)

Naturally, at best (and I think this is what Prensky is getting at when he says things like we don't need teachers... or instructional designers), a game or simulation might actually be designed to provide some measure of this facilitation and mediation for the student-player.

No Comments in iWeb?

2006-01-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

I only just now realized there isn't a comments feature in iWeb... maybe it's an option and I'm missing something. If not, then this is considerably less exciting than I thought.

Testing iWeb on the fly while podcasting at the OCDE

2006-01-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

We just recorded a few segments for our next podcast (links to feed). Simultaneously we were recording video for an upcoming webcast on podcasting.

Meanwhile, I was testing Apple's new iLife '06 suite, including iWeb, a blogging and podcasting tool. I was honestly impressed and pleased with the ease of use! While paying attention to something else - podcasting with my colleagues - I was able to create a new blog, post text (w/images), photocast, podcast, and vlog (or video podcast)! All this took quite a bit less than an hour! So there is something to this, even if Apple is not exactly sticking to an industry standard RSS implementation.

You can see the results of my experiments on my new iWeb blog hosted on my personal .Mac account here.

Fwd: New book for parents and teachers interested in video games and education

2006-01-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Pathfinder Linden posted this to the "Educators interested in using
Second Life as a teaching platform" listserv yesterday.

Marc Prensky (who has previously written very interesting stuff about game-based learning) has a new book coming out in a couple months.

"Don't Bother Me Mom - I'm Learning" : How Computer and Video Games Are Preparing Your Kids For 21st Century Success

You can preorder it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1557788588/sr=1-1/qid=1137705519/104-2887458-1475912

Just thought I'd share.

Podcasting from the AUHSD in AB 75 Module 3

2006-01-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

We were going to prepare a podcast of administrator comments, but something unusual happened... all of the participants were called out of the training for an emergency meeting for all principals and assistant principals! We still wanted to demonstrate the immediacy of podcasting when they return... so here's this.

Moblogging at the AUHSD in AB 75 Module 3

2006-01-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

To kick off the "Hard Fun" presentation, Michael Guerena asked AUHSD administrators, "what is interactive learning?"

Jeanie and Ronn touched on several important ideas related to interactive learning...

It's student participation, not stand and deliver presentations.

When you're doing labs its impossible not to be interactive.

It's out of seat instruction.

It's crosscurricular instruction.

It's the home/school connection and interaction.

They will also see how moblogging can play a roll in interactive classroom discussion.

Feel free to comment on their thoughts. :)

Jerome S. Bruner, Video Games, and the Read/Write Web

2006-01-17T22:49:00.000-08:00

I just spent much of the evening blasting through Bruner's Toward a Theory of Instruction... before catching this week's episode of arguably the best show on television. :)

As I got a little ahead today (I even started Actual Minds, Possible Worlds), I now have the luxury of sharing some of my thoughts on Bruner. He was much more of a psychologist, anthropologist, and linguist than I thought. Nevertheless, or perhaps on account of these things (as he might argue), much of what he wrote in the 1960's seems prescient today.

It may well be the case that not only are we entering a period of technological maturity in which education will require constant redefinition, but that the period ahead may involve such a rapid rate of change in specific technology that narrow skills will become obsolete within a reasonably short time after their acquisition. (p. 32)

Surprisingly, he also describes the reaction this country has had to such change (think of the emphasis on math and science in his time - and the focus on standards in ours)... but he suggests something else entirely, something a lot more in keeping with my vision of Educational Technology and Life. :)

The first response of educational systems under such acceleration is to produce technicians and engineers and scientists as needed, but it is doubtful whether such a priority produces what is required to manage the enterprise. For no specific science or technology provides a metalanguage in terms of which to think about a society, its technology, its science, and the constant changes that these undergo with innovation... If this change is to be managed, it requires men with skills in sensing continuity and opportunity for continuity. (p. 33)

It might not surprise you to learn I am not at all moved by alarmist reactions to the outsourcing or off-shoring of our technical jobs. Never-mind that I think its a very ethnocentric response to globalization, but this country will be just fine without its technical and scientific jobs... if we can focus on the "metaskills for dealing with continuity in change" (p. 35). (Bruner suggests the study of social or behavioral sciences as opposed to history, p. 36, and I think these things - along with more creative pursuits - may serve us well).

I further suspect that games and simulations might be an ideal medium for teaching such skills. (In fact, I propose that they already are, but I don't have the time to support that argument here, it will have to wait for a more formal paper, or a later time.) With respect to pedagogy, Bruner advocates the use of "games that incorporate the formal properties of the phenomena for which the game is an analogue" (p. 92-93), saying that a game can be "an artificial but often powerful representation of reality" (p. 93). Consider how much more powerful these representations can be given the technology of modern video games and computer simulations. Bruner also suggests (as does Jim Gee - and others - forty years later) that

games go a long way toward getting children involved in understanding loanguage, social organization, and the rest; they also introduce, as we have already noted, the idea of a theory of these phenomena... they provide a superb means of getting children to participate actively in the process of learning - as players rather than spectators. (p. 95)

Later he also suggests that "play must be understood as practice in coping with the environment" (p. 118).

I suppose games and the read/write web are the two primary themes of this blog, and I saw an interesting relationship between Bruner's writing and the use of the read/write web in education today as well. When it comes to motives for learning, Bruner talked about reciprocity, or "a deep human need to respond to others and to operate jointly with them toward an objective" (p. 125). There is little doubt in my mind that technologies such as blogs, wikis, and RSS facilitate this in a way that was never possible before, both over greater distances and - in some ways - with greater intimacy. Bruner identified "the will to learn" (p. 127) as an intrinsic motive, too, and as we work to inculcate our students with this will, I can also identify it as that which keeps me blogging when I should be in bed. ;) "Promoting reflectiveness" (p. 152) was a goal of Bruner's (concept of a) successful school, and is also the goal of blogging in education, as is "the basic skill, supporting all others... reading critically" (p. 169).

Finally, I want to finish this post with what I imagine is an oft quoted passage from Toward a Theory of Instruction: "Knowing is a process, not a product" (p. 72). That seems to encapsulate much of what my colleagues and I are trying to get across to educators in Orange County and everywhere.

The Dewey fans seemed to come out of the woodwork a few weeks ago. I wonder if there is anyone following Bruner on technorati that might drop in for a comment. Any Bruner fans among the regular readers? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

As always, thanks for reading.

Reference

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, Ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

RSS Ideas For Educators

2006-01-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

RSS Ideas For Educators:

Quentin D'Souza has put together a presenation called RSS Ideas For Educators. He's giving the presentation twice; at the Leading Learning 2006 Conference in February and again at the 2006 ECOO Conference (Educational Computing Organization of Ontario) in May.

He used a wiki to draft the document and has now copied the whole thing into a pdf file that you can download (RSS Ideas for Educators 1.0). It's an incredible compilation of concrette applications of RSS technology in education. I was flattered that he included some of my work in the links he mentions.
If anyone has been asking you about RSS in education this will make a great companion volume to Will's guide. Drop Quentin a line and let him know what you think.

(Via A Difference.)

A Difference is a blog I can definitely recommend to educators and educational technologists, and this post relates directly to many of the "Read/Write Web for Educators" workshops we have put on at the OCDE and through our Custom Training Program. I also just subscribed to Teaching Hacks, where the original post and RSS guide appears.

NESTA Futurelab - About us - MORI poll press release

2006-01-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

NESTA Futurelab - About us - MORI poll press release:

Poll investigating teachers' attitudes to mainstream computer games has revealed that 59% would consider using them in the classroom for educational purposes. The willingness of respondents to use computer games was reflected in the fact that almost one third have already used them in their classroom.

(Via Google News - Games Education.)

This is interesting data coming out of NESTA Futurelab. This may be explained at least in part by how many new teachers might be considered digital natives. At the very least it might represent the fact that the games generation is now filling teaching positions. I'd be interested in similar data for US teachers, or Orange County teachers at any rate... I suppose I could make that happen.

School Computing Home Page - School Computing

2006-01-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

School Computing Home Page - School Computing

(Via wikispaces.org : edtech - all changes.)

This link to the School Computing wiki appeared in the feed for a test wiki (focused on Ed Tech) that I set up at wikispaces.org, a great RSS enabled free wiki system, which I often recommend to educators.

Thoughts on the Mars Edit Solution

2006-01-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

Now that I see it, I am actually not sure how I feel about combining annotated referrals with my original content on Educational Technology and Life. It feels as if some things aught to just go away into a FURL archive. I've always been happy that this was a reliable source of actual original content, even if the posting was a bit sporadic. Perhaps I will use this feed only for elements I have a substantial response to.

However, if I am to follow the model set by Scripting News, which I really enjoy reading - both for the brief posts and the substantial ones, perhaps I should include my brief reactions to more referrals here after all. Perhaps I'll try it for a week. :)

Most importantly, what say you, readers? Anyone have an opinion to share?

Also, anyone have any suggestions for categories or tags in blogger? Or suggestions for importing MSN Spaces or FURL items into blogger? (Or alternatively, any suggestions for importing my blogger items into another tool altogether that could handle all of this?)

Thanks for reading. :)

How video games have become far more than play - USA Today

2006-01-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

How video games have become far more than play - USA Today

USA Today

How video games have become far more than play
USA Today'-42 minutes ago
Heather Chaplin and Aaron Rubys Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution, looks at how the video game industry grew to be so massive.

(Via Google News - Science Fiction.)

I sat next to Heather Chaplin during the opening keynote of the Serious Games Summit in DC. This is an article about her book.

Reading Planet for Kids

2006-01-15T18:49:00.000-08:00

Reading Planet for Kids

(Via Furl - The ewagner Archive.)

This is a site Eva FURLed... so it showed up in my feed reader, NetNewsWire. I clicked "Post to Weblog" and via Mars edit I was able to compose this annotation. This is one step shorter than opening the site in my browser to FURL it!

Very cool! This definitely solves my frequency of posting to the blog problem. The only FURL functionality I lose so far is categories. Maybe these custom tags can help... no that seems to be html. I'll keep playing...

EdTech @ OCDE | Front Page

2006-01-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

EdTech @ OCDE | Front Page: "Please join Apple for a FREE technology seminar..."

If you're in Orange County, and a Mac user, consider attending this at the OCDE on Tuesday.
Note: This is also serving as a test of the Mars Edit bookmarklet for saving and annotating a site directly to blogger. Grr. Now what about categories?

Mars Edit is a solution?

2006-01-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

So, based on my last post... and the fact that Eva is still working away on her Houghton Mifflin Technology Wiki right now, I thought it was time to check out Mars Edit again. I use and am very happy with NetNewsWire as my RSS Reader.

Mars Edit allows me to compose blog posts and then post them directly to this blog. It also comes with a bookmarklet that allows me to send a site straight into the editor for annotation. I'll test that next. Naturally, it also works with NetNewsWire, so that I can annotate and post anything in my feeds!

This is what I've been looking for! Amazing I didn't realize it earlier.

Now, how do I get trackbacks with blogger? ;)

Lev S. Vygotsky, The Read/Write Web, and Video Games in Education

2006-01-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

As part of the research for my current KAM on principles of societal development (tentatively titled "Social Constructivist Theory and Digital Game-Based Learning ") I've spent the week reading Vygotsky. In keeping with my new highly prioritized and highly structured weekly schedule (a result of well thought out new years resolutions), I have really kept my head down in the books - thus the lack of posts before tonight. (Those serious "and Life" issues I keep alluding to have higher priority now, too!)

There is much I wish I could take the time to blog about Vygotsky, but I will limit this for now. However, today's reading turned up the following quote from The Essential Vygotsky, which I thought was particularly relevant here.

"The simplest example of the transition from direct to mediated functions may be the transition from involuntary remembering and remembering that is guided by the sign. Primitive man, having first made some kind of external sign in order to remember some event passed in this way into a new form of memory. He introduced external, artificial means with which he began to manage the process of his own remembering. Study shows that the whole path of historical development of man's behavior consists of a continuous perfecting of such means and of the development of new devices and forms of mastering his own mental operations." (p. 472)

It is not difficult to extrapolate these remarks made in reference to the written and printed word to include computers and the Internet. Most importantly, I think the read/write web, and blogs in particular, may represent the current pinnacle of this trend in societal development. Blogs can serve as as your back up brain, and services like FURL are designed to do just that. Nevermind that if I post/store/share my thoughts on this blog, I can benefit from the feedback and comments of other readers!

Too, Vygotsky places a good deal of emphasis on the cognitive development of an individual being largely due to an internalization of social constructs. In terms of my personal experience, I can feel blogging (and FURLing etc) changing the way I think in my own mind. I reflect more readily (and in small doses), with a focus on making a judgement or synthesizing a new thought. Too, I miss being able to share my thoughts in order to receive comments and feedback.

Incidentally, I have long been disappointed that my FULR archive and feed has been separate from this blog's feed... and just today it finally occurred to me that FURL does not support comments (except for a members only email comment system, it turns out). I tend to annotate the sites I FURL, and have been FURLing in a way that is much more like blogging lately. I'm considering abandoning FURL and bring that content here... both for the comments and for cohesion of my online presence. However I really appreciate the one click FURL button on my browser. Does anyone have an idea how I might combine this functionality with blogger? Or is it time for me to move to real blogging software with categories and a client interface? If so, does anyone have any suggestions, particularly systems that might be able to import my blogger and FURL material (and maybe even my old MSN material)?

Naturally, I also see video games (and simulations), particularly serious games or educational games, as a part of this progression toward mastering (or, rather, improving upon) our own mental operations. In addition, games and simulations can certainly be used to closely observe students in the way Vygotsky advocates, and then to offer students challenges placed squarely in their zone of proximal development in order that instruction might lead the way to greater cognitive development. (I was particularly struck by Vygotsky's notion that instructing to a student's strengths can have the opposite effect - it can encourage a student to remain at the current or previous developmental state! It follows that we should address their weaknesses, while remaining in their ZPD for that weakness, in order to help them grow and progress.)

Before I wrap up here, I do also want to mention that Vygotsky's take on the relationship between life and education is very like Dewey's and also makes me increasingly happier about the title of this blog. I also appreciate his philosophies on the role of the teacher, and the teacher as a creative force in society. :)

Finally, in addition to being sure to spend more hours on my research each week, I realized I needed to work more efficiently as well if I am to complete my dissertation this calendar year. (I hope to walk in January 2007, though administrative timelines may postpone this until July 2007). So, sadly, I have committed myself to avoiding the temptation to read anything cover to cover and to read anything not directly related to my current project. Surprisingly, this feels more like reading RSS feeds and doing research online!

In any case, here are the books I plowed through this week:

Dixon-Krauss, L. (1996). Vygotsky in the classroom: media literacy instruction and assessment. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers.

Rieber, R. W. & Robinson, D. K. (Eds.). (2004). The essential Vygotsky. New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers.

Tryphon, A. & Voneche, J. (Eds). (1996). Piaget - Vygotsky. UK: Psychology Press.

Mooney, C. G. (2000). An introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget, & Vygotsky. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1997). Educational psychology. Boca Raton, Florida: St. Lucie Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1986) Thought and language. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Moblogging with gMail

2006-01-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Google's gMail service now has a mobile version optimized for handhelds. This is great news for me because I can now access my gmail on my blackberry nearly as well as I can access my OCDE mail (which, btw, is now, mercifully, Exchange based instead of Lotus Notes based).

Sitting here in the backyard in my bathing suit reading in the sun inspired me to finally try moblogging with gMail. Sorry to all those
in snow country... personally, I already miss what little winter we had in Orange County.

Yikes! Length is limited!

...and Life: On being a soul searching hermit... with email, voicemail, IM, videogames, and RSS feeds.

2006-01-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

You may have picked up on my offhand comments about dealing with some serious "and Life" issues these past two months. Well, unfortunately, that's still the case and is likely to be for some time. As with my work, my research, and many other parts of my life, I am just happy that I've kept this blog trickling along in the meantime. The content of what I'm dealing with really really doesn't belong on this blog (though I'm writing a lot about it... and I've considered an annonymous online outlet), but some bits of the process might be worth sharing.

While Eva is out of town, I'm spending this week being something of a hermit. I'm not returning emails or phone calls... and keeping my IM set to away. Still, that means I'm reading emails, listening to messages and, frankly, responding to brazen IMers... and it still feels like being a hermit... I suppose to a 21st century educational technologist, it is. I suppose I really need to get away into the woods. But perhaps that wouldn't help either.

But, soul searching is much more time consuming then I ever imagined! I'm also taking some time to really delve into new years resolutions, annual goals, and a concrete plan to follow through on them. Naturally, resolutions and soul searching really do go hand in hand... and resolutions (with concrete goals and plans) can be equally time consuming.

Meanwhile I am being sure to take time for some recharging type chores (organizing and cleaning mostly), and for entertainment, including actually playing World of Warcraft... and actually getting a PSP (and an RPG to play... it's something like an interactive paperback now).

Oh, and I've gotten back on my feet for the next phase of my research... I brought home a whole stack of Vygotsky and Bruner books from the UCI Library, ordered many more from Amazon, and added them to my stacks of Squire, Steinkuehler, and Shaffer articles.

Wouldn't you know it... I find myself making a To Do list for each day with undone items being fit into following days... just as if I were at work! I told Eva on the phone earlier that I think you could take away my job and I would still be busy all day everyday for the next year and barely notice the time go by!

At any rate, I found one particular resolution I've been working on worth sharing here. (Perhaps there will be more later). Resolution 8 (of the 10 I originally narrowed it down to) was this:

8. Blog Regularly.

Sub-points included posting at least once about my work, once about my research, and once about "and Life" per week. I'd still like to stick to this if possible, but when it came time to work out how many hours a week to allocate to each goal (you really do have to do this if you're both working and going to school full time), I still had too many goals and not enough hours.

So, I managed to cut it from 10 goals to 8, putting off some more things untill 2007 and finding an interesting solution for the old blogging resolution, which I think is relevant to helping educators (and others) sort out how blogs and RSS feeds can be worked into an already busy schedule.

Others have said it elsewhere, but the key is this... blogging and reading feeds must be integrated into the other pursuits you find important. So, I will read feeds as part of my job, part of my research, and part of my entertainment. And, I will blog this way, too. Work posts will come from things I write at work (with only a few minutes more overhead for posting them). Similarly research posts will come from what I am writing for school, and "and Life" posts from journals or other writing I do for life... or else come out of entertainment time. (Wow... I don't know if that sounds like a successful person or a crazy person!)

This has also helped me to clarify and focus on what I should be blogging. Additional posts on my Dewey readings will now wait until I actually start writing the next paper... in a few weeks time. (Sorry, Dave). There may be some Vygotsky and Bruner notes in my near future though, since library books necessitate some typing on my part - and because I think the annotation of my notes will be valuable when it comes time to write. (The books I own still get annotated in pen... and I'd still love a way out of this and into the digital world with my reading and annotations.)

I will really need to be more vigilant about identifying things I write at work that can also be used here.

As far as "and Life" goes, I like sharing posts like this one, which is still a hybrid of technology... and life. I'm not sure how I feel about truly "and Life" posts being here, so I've flirted with the idea of a separate ... and Life blog. I'm asking myself the same question everyone else is though... would anyone read it? Also, as I said earlier, I'm considering an anonymous outlet to fully differentiate it from my professional presence online - but there is also a part of me that feels part of the spirit of this whole thing is helping others to see the personal side of professional content providers and I am somewhat resistant to splintering my online identity.

As always, I'll appreciate any comments.There's a potential for some juicy ones here. And, thank you for reading.

-Mark

John Dewey's Pedagogic Creed, Educational Technology, and Video Games

2006-01-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

John Dewey's Pedagogic Creed, Educational Technology, and Video Games

Happy new year, all!

I dropped Eva and her girl friends off at the airport at 6am this morning and only 15 hours later, I'm back from my blog break. So, back to the John Dewey, Educational Technology, and Video Games...

I am not at all ready to tackle Democracy and Education or Experience and Education right out the gate, so I'll begin with the brief (but dense with quotable material) "My Pedagogic Creed", written by Dewey in 1897, 109 years ago. It still turns out to be a lengthy post. ;)

Dewey begins the first "Article" of his creed with an explanation of what education is. IHe believes that all education is social, even formal education, which can only organize of differentiate the social process. He also feels it is important to balance the psychological elements of education with these social elements. In this way his creed may represent both an early constructivist view (the psychological) and social constructivist view (the social) - the later being why I am studying him for the Knowledge Area Module (KAM) I am currently writing. Put another way, Dewey (as he writes later) believes that "education must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits" and must translate these "into terms of their social equivalents - into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service". This of course sits well with me as I become more committed to Walden's vision of effecting positive social change. (Dewey states the straightforward belief that "education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform"!)

I've often been struck these past few months but how relevant Dewey's writing sounds with respect to 21st Century education - and educational technology in general. This happened again at the end of "Article 1."

It is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently.

This concept is related to the use of educational technology in two ways. First, the same can be said of teaching any specific technology - attempting to prepare students to use the precise technologies they will be required to master in their future is a foolish enterprise, but preparing them to understand and master technology is a worth while pursuit. Second, computers can now be used as what David H. Jonassen calls "Mind Tools" to facilitate the development of such meta-skills (as Dewey is describing) by today's students. Consider the role of computers in the 21st Century Skills I am so often referencing.

Dewey's creed resonated with me again when in "Article Two: What the School Is" he declared that the school is primarily a social institution (an extension of community life) and that education "is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." He goes on to suggest that "much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life." His writing continues to make me happier with the title I chose for this blog... and with my own educational philosophy. I am particularly fond of his take on the role of the teacher... and the purpose of an examination:

The teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.
...
Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of most service and where he can receive the most help.

As for subject matter, Dewey's writing supports my early attraction to project-based learning, and later to constructivist teaching and learning:

The true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.

As a former literature teacher it is a bit tough to see him say that literature "cannot be made the basis" of education, but I understood even when I was in the classroom that part of what I enjoyed about the job was the feeling that anything I knew contributed to my effectiveness as a teacher and might in one way or another help a student make progress, though not always in the subject (or standards) I was formally charged to teach.

Though he doesn't mean it as constructivist educators do now, I often find it significant when Dewey uses the word "constructive" - as he does in this quote:

I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the centre of correlation.

This is followed closely by a point that may at first seem anachronistic, but which I found to be one of the most relevant of the paper:

I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.

This refers to what we might consider "vocational" education today, and today this would certainly include "technical" education of the sort offered by Introduction courses for productivity applications, programing, hardware troubleshooting and other classes of the sort that ROP programs often offer. Though he doesn't go into depth in this creed, he wrote elsewhere about how sewing can be the gateway to teaching all human knowledge... and the same could be said of computers... consider using Neal Stepheson's Cryptonomicon to teach the fundamentals of computing... some basics of venture capitalism, and a little history of World War Two. (Ok, maybe not with public school kids... but perhaps in college... still, I'll let the example stand.)

This bit requires more thought, particularly the second half of the sentence, but I thought I'd pass it on here for the time being:

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

Having studied Piaget for my last KAM, I can now see Dewey as a clear predecessor when he states that "the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests." (Like Piaget, though with considerably less clinical data to support his assertions, Dewey then suggests several stages of development... these too seem to be a bit arbitrary and simplistic by modern constructivist standards. Dewey too believes that actions precede ideas and the symbols play an important part in a child's development.)

I saw precursors to Dewey's own thoughts on waste in education when he explained that in traditional schools...

The child is thrown into a passive, receptive or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.

And I loved this next sentiment!

Interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.

Personally, I know I have only become interested in new subjects or new skills as my own zone of proximal development included the necessary pre-requesites. It is exciting to see early evidence of something like Vygotsky's theories in Dewey's work as well.

When Dewey then suggests that "only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully," I immediately considered the importance of computers and video games in our students' social lives and ways in which serious games or games for change might be able to introduce adult society into a child's life.

"All reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile."

Hallelujia, brother. I am often arguing for educational technology policies that rely on education of the students in order to work, as opposed to those that rely on policing by the teacher.

While most of Dewey's creed made me proud to do what I do (particularly the bit about "education thus conceived mark[ing] the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience", which reminded me of the lyric of U2's Miracle Drug, "Of science and the human heart there is no limit"), there were never the less a few things that really made me jump at the end of "Article Five."

There was the bit about society recognizing its obligation to education and providing unimaginable "resources of time, attention , and money," not to mention "sufficient equipment", which just made me laugh.

Then there was the final belief... "the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God." This is a blog, so I think I can share my personal reaction, which was something like, "WTF?" On further reflection though, I realized I may not be comfortable with his language, but I suppose people can associate these beliefs and effects with whatever underlying meaning they choose - its no less positive a perspective. Also, this creed qualifies as an academic work; there are no works cited, and no data presented. (But, then, perhaps very little of Dewey's seminal work stands up to that kind of scrutiny.)

Thanks for reading on into a new year... I look forward to any comments you might share.

-Mark

Vacation Blog Break

2005-12-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

I don't like to let this blog go more than a week without an update, but I find myself with three good reasons for a blog break...

1.) I'm on vacation from the Orange County Department of Education - and from Walden University since I am setting my own schedule there - and so will not be generating much in the way of content that belongs here.

2.) I still have a very serious "and Life" issue that requires my full attention... and I can finally give it the time it deserves now that I am on vacation.

3.) I will have plenty of time to myself to catch up on my blogging next week, when Eva will be out of town on a road trip with her girl friends.

In the meantime I may find cause for interrupting the blog break... and I will continue to read all my feeds, so I may very continue posting to my FURL archive and feed.

These topics are in the queue for when I return...

- John Dewey's Democracy and Education
- John Dewey's Experience and Education
- John Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed"
- Reflections on World of Warcraft (Fueled by discussion with my brother James who grew up playing paper and dice role playing games with me.)
- And more... time for that break though. ;)

Happy holidays to all, and if I don't get back to it... happy new year! (Man, I just realized my blogiversary went uncelebrated back on December 7th... maybe I'll have to celebrate my blogger-versary instead... in February.)

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

What are the advantages and disadvantages of serious games?

2005-12-19T08:59:00.000-08:00

I received this question via email a few days ago. It prompted an interesting response from me... a brief summary of my thoughts on the subject actually... so I thought I'd share it here, too.

In short, I think the impact of serious games, or rather the potential impact, is to provide a powerful medium for education and for affecting positive social change. The advantages are many. For starters, games are engaging and motivating, and appeal to students (particularly young students) in a medium they are comfortable with (see Marc Prensky's work, particularly his writings on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants for more on this). Also, and this is what I am most interested in, games can provide a context for learning, opportunities for inquiry, and a framework for collaboration... all elements that are important in an educational environment, particularly in the constructivist philosophy (here, I hope, is where my research - and my blog, might come in handy). Finally, games - particularly those with many simulation elements - can be used to teach content that is typically very difficult to teach in the classroom, including non-linear content such as cyclical or systems content (see Clark Aldrich's work for more on these content types), and what some call 21st century skills of digital age literacies, inventive thinking (particularly risk taking), effective communication, and high productivity (see http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/skills.htm for an explanation of what I mean by these skills).

As for the disadvantages, there are several obvious ones... in terms of current commercial games, we have a ways to go to deal with the violence and gender equity issues. Too, most current games can be very sedentary activities. From an educational technology standpoint, most games will place considerable demands on schools' student-to-computer ratios, hardware specs, and infrastructure (connectivity and bandwidth). Development of the games, and an economic model, may be the biggest hurdles involved.

I hope this might help others who are newly interested in the subject. I'm also hoping some of you who know quite a bit more will share your thoughts on this summary. For instance... what'd I leave out?

-Mark

NECC Update: Context, Inquiry, and Collaboration: Video Games as Constructivist Learning Environments [Concurrent]

2005-12-18T21:23:00.000-08:00

I now know when I'll be presenting at NECC in July.

Accepted Proposals
The following proposals have been accepted to the NECC 2006 program. Click on title to review or edit. Click as indicated for other processes.

Context, Inquiry, and Collaboration: Video Games as Constructivist Learning Environments [Concurrent] (13997210)
• Scheduled: Friday, 7/7/2006 10:00am– 11:00am
• Participation Agreement Form has been confirmed.

With my exposure to event planning at the OCDE this year, I have a new perspective on this: I am amazed at how organized and streamlined (and ahead of time) their process is!

-Mark

... and Life: Tonight I am happy to work at the OCDE.

2005-12-14T17:12:00.000-08:00

I am sitting at my desk catching up on a very long to do list (including preparing comments from last night's class for post as a podcast). My good friend Dave Conlay is teaching Excel for Educators in the PC Lab. Robert Craven, a fellow Coordinator of Educational Technology here at the OCDE (and also a good friend) is teaching Podcasting in the Mac Lab. And as our teammate Stacy Deeble-Reynolds (again, a good friend) headed out with her carpool, she pointed out this sunset. I often complain about how boring the weather is in Orange County, but occassionally this is nice. :)

Now, I am off to do some holiday shopping for the office. We have a "silly slipper" exchange tomorrow afternoon.

-Mark

Educators Play Food Force!

2005-12-13T17:46:00.000-08:00

After an hour of theory, including the work of Prensky, Gee, Aldrich, and others, teachers are finally getting to go hands on with Food Force! They will be asked to reflect on their experience as players, on how well the game reflects the theories we discussed, and on how well the gameplay reflects the content and learning objectives of the game. (I know Clark Aldrich suggested I not have them critique the game, since they are not in the position of developing games, but this should make for interesting discussion.. and should aid them in critically assessing the educational value of a game.)

I hope to record and post some of their reflections this evening, too.

Introduction to Games in Education

2005-12-13T14:46:00.000-08:00

Today I am delivering my Introduction to Games in Education Class (note: links to a zipped powerpoint presentation) at the Orange County Department of Education Educational Technology Center from 4pm to 7pm in the PC Lab.

Finally. :)

Perhaps this will put some momentum back in my research.

-Mark

UPDATE: Here is a link to the Games in Education category in my FURL archive.

... and Life: San Francisco

2005-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

For the second morning in a row, I am enjoying free Wi-Fi in the Starbucks at the corner of Bush and Grant (just outside Chinatown) in San Francisco. I'm not paying for the t-mobile hotspot because there's a kimpton network in a nearby hotel that requires only agreement to their terms of service to get online. I like that approach. (It's kind of fun to feel like Dave Winer as I write this.)

As I catch up on my feeds (and a little bit of work) over coffee... I really appreciate the luxury to do so... I live such a life of privaledge that for $1.40 I can sit here in the warm starbucks enjoying coffee, a sense of contributing to the world as I work, and free access to nearly the sum of all human knowledge at my fingertips... while meanwhile the corner outside in the cold has never been without a beggar and a cardboard sign. I can't help but noting, by the way, that today's relatively young Gulf War '91 verteran in his fatigues is getting far more attention and donations than yesterdays bearded old man on his knees with his cup outstretched as if in prayer. May programs like the $100 laptop, and the efforts of educational technologists everywhere, allow more of the world's students to live with access to what I'm appreciating. Is that just a culturally centric thing to wish for?

These are today's "and Life" thoughts. Now it's time to go join my brother for a hike.

I should mention, too, though, that I have finished Democracy and Education and should finish Experience and Education on this weekend's trip, so there are more Dewey and educational technology posts ahead.

-Mark

Fwd: NECC Proposal Status Notification

2005-12-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

It only now occured to me that I can forward interesting email, or excerpts from messages, to this blog. I thought I might start with this... Good news! I'll be speaking at NECC in San Diego this July.

Begin forwarded message:

The NECC 2006 Program Committee has completed its review of this year's proposal submissions, and we are pleased to announce that you have been accepted to present at NECC. Please find the status of your submission(s) below:

Context, Inquiry, and Collaboration: Video Games as Constructivist Learning Environments (Concurrent)
Accepted

The OCDE Ed Tech News Feed Now Has Comments!

2005-12-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Woo hoo! Our intern, UCI Computer Science (and Film Studies) student Scott Harris, has added a comment feature to the web site and news feed he created for us several months ago.

I am amazed and proud to announce that our administrator, Sandra Lapham, was happy to move forward allowing annonymous comments on the site. Apparently Scott got them up and running last night. I'm excited that our site can now facilitate two way communication between our department and our visitors (and between visitors), and so serve as a better model of the read/write web in education.

So, I am trusting our visitors from Orange County and elsewhere will be generous with constructive feedback and tactful with any criticisms. Though I know a "teachable moment" may be in my future, I am hopeful about this.

Moblog Demo for Teachers

2005-12-06T17:32:00.000-08:00

"Good stuff" says Dan. :)
--------------------------
Mark Wagner
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

More Teachers Learn about Blogs at the OCDE

2005-12-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

After a day of AB 75 administrator training in Anaheim, I am back at the OCDE teaching an Intro to Blogs class for teachers.

A twelve hour day is a bit long, but did I mention I have the best job?

Moblog Demo for AUHSD

2005-12-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

This was written on my handheld.
--------------------------
Mark Wagner
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Presenting the Read/Write Web for Administrators in AUHSD

2005-12-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

Today 30 administrators are learing about blogs, wikis, FURL, and RSS! Isn't it exciting!?

I've got the best job!

John Dewey on The Psychology of Occupations, The Development of Attention, and The Aim of History in Education

2005-12-05T22:43:00.000-08:00

This is the last of my posts based on my transcriptions from The School and Society. After this I will move on to my reflections on Democracy and Education, which will not include such large block quotes for the very pragmatic reason that I had no need of transcribing large chunks of the book... because I own a copy I can annotate. I really hope we sort out a good electronic (searchable and cut and paste-able) way to read and annotate books... soon.

At any rate, I took fewer transcriptions from the final chapters of the book. Still these are themes that I have recognized in Democracy and Education also, and of course I find them relevant to Educational Technology in general, and Games in Education specifically.

The Psychology of Occupations

"By occupation I mean a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life." (p. 132)

The important thing here is that students' work aught to be driven by a social context.

"The work is reduced to a mere routine or custom, and its educational value is lost... wherever... the mastery of certain tools, or the production of certain objects, is made the primary end, and the child is not given, wherever possible, intellectual responsibility for selecting the materials and instruments that are most fit, and given an opportunity to think out his own model and plan of work, led to perceive his own errors, and find out how to correct them - that is, of course, within the range of his capacities." (p. 133-134)

Educational technologists struggle to express this to other educators (and administrators) today. I am thrilled to have this quote now. This happens to also be the antithesis of many of the content standards. The California English Language Arts standards can accommodate something very like this, but many of the others are much more prescriptive... and I can't speak for other states' standards.

"Thinking... arises from the need of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of over coming it, and thus leads to planning, to projecting mentally the results to be reached, and deciding upon the steps necessary and their serial order. This concrete logic of action long precedes the logic of pure speculation or abstract investigation, and through the mental habits that it forms is the best of preparations for the latter." (p. 135)

Here we again see a hint of what would become Piaget's stages, but the important thing is the articulation of why we might use problem-based learning.

The Development of Attention

"True reflective attention... always involves judging, reasoning, deliberation; it means that the child has a question of his own and is actively engaged in seeking and selecting relevant material with which to answer it, considering the bearings and relations of this material - the kind of solution it calls for." (p. 148)

This then extends the previous quote to provide a statement of why we might advocate inquiry-based learning.

The Aim of History in Education

"To study history is not to amass information, but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men did thus and so; achieved their successes and came to their failures." (p. 151)

Not only is this something I've heard countless times in reference to the history classes of our time, but this ties together many of the points above, including the need for a social context, and the need for students to learn the tools (and content for that matter) while using it.

Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Dewey was clearly interested in students studying occupations, and leaning through adopting the identity of an occupation, not unlike the theories espoused by Jim Gee. :)

-Mark

Contact Information Added to Side Bar

2005-12-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, after a successful skype call to my dad (me on my powerbook in California, and he on his Windows desktop in Quebec), I added this information to a new box in the sidebar of the blog. I hope some of you will take advantage of it. :)

Contact Information

John Dewey on Froebel's Educational Principles

2005-12-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

This will be a brief entry on this chapter of The School and Society. The first two of [Dewey's renditions of] Froebel's educational principles bear repeating on this blog:

"1. The primary business of school is to train children in co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the consciousness of mutual interdependence; and to help them practically in making the adjustments that will carry this spirit into overt deeds.

2. The primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the presentation and application of external material, whether through the ideas of others or through the senses; and that, accordingly, numberless spontaneous activities of children, plays, games, mimic efforts, even the apparently meaningless motions of infants - exhibitions previously ignored as trivial, futile, or even condemned as positively evil - are capable of educational use; nay, are the foundation-stones of educational method." (p. 117)

Could a school ask for a better mission statement than that first principle? I suppose I am slowly becoming something of a social activist... what with 2 and a half years of learning with the purpose of "transforming society" at Walden Univeristy and more recently with reading Michka Assays's amazing Bono on Bono.

Regarding the second principle, I think it captures the constructivists concern with the internal thought process of the learner, and also touches on the importance of play. One could easily imagine this excerpt being in relation to video games in education. The following, though, is more explicitly about the importance of play...

"Play is not to be identified with anything which the child externally does. It rather designates his mental attitude in its entirety and in its unity. It is the free play, the interplay, of all the child's powers, thoughts, and physical movements, in embodying, in a satisfying form, his own images and interests. Negatively, it is freedom from economic pressure - the necessities of getting a living and supporting others - and from the fixed responsibilities attaching to the special calling of the adult. Positively, it means that the supreme end of the child is fulness of growth - fulness of realization of his budding powers, a realization which continually carries him on from one plane to another." (P. 118-119)

This reflects the difficulty I've seen many theorists have in defining play - and in defining games. This is also what Henry Jenkins III is getting at when he says in our webcast, "when I do my job at MIT, I am engaged."

"The teacher must be absolutely free to get suggestions from any and every source, asking herself but these two questions: Will the proposed mode of play appeal to the child as his own? Is it something of which he has the instinctive roots in himself, and which will mature the capacities that are struggling for manifestation in him? And again: Will the proposed activity give that sort of expression to these impulses that will carry the child on to a higher plane of consciousness and action, instead of merely exciting him and then leaving him just where he was before, plus a certain amount of nervous exhaustion and appetite for more excitation in the future?" (p. 120)

Here I wasnt to point out the importance of teacher freedom in the games in education movement... and in educational technology in general! Also, these questions are important when it comes to selecting specific games or technologies for use with specific students.

"The materials, then, must be as "real," as direct and straightforward, as opportunity permits." (p. 124)

We live in a society where this is quite a bit less possible than in Dewey's day, yet simulations and game technologies can now provide a powerful alternative to lectures and traditional school experiences.

Through the end of the chapter Dewey discusses the importance of unity (in the curriculum), the concept of constructive or "built up" work, and quite a bit about the kindergarden, which, as my wife is a kindergarden teacher, I am plenty interested in despite having only taught in high schools myself.

-Mark

John Dewey on The Psychology of Elementary Education.

2005-12-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

This is the last chapter of The School and Society that I took such copious notes for. I transcribed 11 quotes, so I won't bother with cutting that down to 10. Here they are with annotations:

"At present the tendency is to conceive individual mind as a function of social life - as not capable of operating or developing by itself, but as requiring continual stimulus from social agencies, and finding its nutrition in social supplies." (p. 99)

This sounds like the genesis, or at least the essence, of the social constructivist movement. The following quote contributes to this feeling as well. I also appreciated the reference to the then much newer and more exciting theory of evolution.

"The idea of evolution has made familiar the notion that mind ... is developed in an environment which is social as well as physical, and that social needs and aims have been most potent in shaping it." (p. 99)

The next bit seems to address the distinction between the stimuli-focused behaviorists, and the constructivists that would follow Dewey.

"Nature must indeed furnish its physical stimuli of light, sound, heat, etc., but the significance attached to these, the interpretation made of them, depends upon the ways in which the society in which the child lives acts and reacts in reference to them." (p. 99)

Here Dewey is talking about our still familiar subject areas.

"That these classified sets of facts were simply selections from the social life of the past was overlooked; equally so that they had been generated out of social situations and represented the answers found for social needs." (p. 100)

Given what I've already read in Democracy and Education I know Dewey is interested in putting the subjects back into a social context. This is what we might call problem-based learning, particularly if the answer to the problem is actually important to somebody other than the student.

"The third point of contrast lies in the modern conception of the mind as essentially a process - a process of growth, not a fixed thing." (p. 102)

I suppose this is an element of constructivist philosophy, too... schema building perhaps. It sits well with me, as a philosophy of life, but I am living a century after Dewey. I wonder how... revolutionary that was at the time, or whether that sort of philosophy has always been common place. For someone who minored in philosophy, I suppose I should know that. ;)

"Now we believe in the mind as a growing affair, and hence as essentially changing, presenting distinctive phases of capacity and interest at different periods." (p. 102)

Ah! Now this begins to sound like a prelude to Piaget's stages. I've already written elsewhere that the stage theory doesn't resonate with me, and others have certainly critiqued it much more completely. Still, in terms of connecting this to my earlier research on Piaget and Papert... and thus computers and games... this is significant.

"To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education." (p. 104)

Hallelujia, brother! If one accepts the importance of risk taking, then the leap to this educational philosophy should be a natural one.

"Since the aim is not "covering the ground," but knowledge of social processes used to secure social results, no attempt is made to go over the entire history, in chronological order, of America. Rather a series of types is taken up... the method involves presentation of a large amount of detail... so the child can reproduce the material as life, not as mere historic information." (p. 108)

I've heard a lot of high school redesign folks talk like this lately. Dr. Dagget suggested throwing out 2/3 of the curriculum in order to do 1/3 well. If memory serves, Richard DuFour recommended something similar. (This guy has got to have a more up to date page... if anyone knows where it is, please let me know.)

"(1) The need that the child shall have in his own personal and vital experience a varied background of contact and acquaintance with realities, social and physical. (2) The need that the more ordinary, direct, and personal experience of the child shall furnish problems, motives, and interests that necessitate recourse to books for their solution, satisfaction, and pursuit. Otherwise, the child approaches the book without intellectual hunger, without alertness, without a questioning attitude, and the result is the one so deplorably common: such abject dependence upon books as weakens and cripples vigor of thought and inquiry, combined with reading for mere random stimulation of fancy, emotional indulgence, and flight from the wold of reality into a make believe land." (p. 112)

This is such powerful stuff, and I agree up until the last point... where, as I do with Plato, I strongly disagree with Dewey. Though I have a deeper appreciation of this point after my readings in Democracy and Education, I still feel there is a very important place for fantasy in a healthy life. My friend Benton Melbourne once said he believed that our imagniary lives (in games particularly) are at least as important as our real lives... while I know that is certainly debatable, I think there is some wisdom in it, but I will leave the exploration of that for another time.

"The problem here is then (1) to furnish the child with a sufficiently large amount of personal activity in occupations, expression, conversation, construction, and experimentation, so that his individuality, moral and intellectual, shall not be swamped by a disproportionate amount of the experiences of others to which books introduce him; and (2) so to conduct this more direct experience as to make the child feel the need of resort to and command of the traditional social tools - furnish him with motives and make his recourse to them intelligent, an addition to his powers, instead of a servile dependency." (p. 112-113)

Wow. Read that last bit again... "furnish him with motives..." this is the answer to why we are going to all the trouble to provide our students with authentic motives, and using educational technologies, including games, to do it.

"The common complaints that children's progress in these traditional school studies is sacrificed to the newer subjects that have come into the curriculum... (1) the more direct modes of activity, constructive and occupation work, scientific observation, experimentation, etc., present plenty of opportunities and occasions for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number work. These things may be introduced, then, not as isolated studies, but as organic outgrowths of the child's experience. The problem is, in a systematic and progressive way, to take advantage of these occasions. (2) The additional vitality and meaning which these studies thus secure make possible a very considerable reducation of the time ordinarily devoted to them. (3) The final use of the symbols, whether in reading, calculation, or composition, is more intelligent, less mechanical; more active, less passively receptive; more an increase of power, less a mere mode of enjoyment." (p. 113-114)

This is a powerful argument for constructivist education. Educational technology... and video games... can help. Especially with the systematic and progressive bit. Now I just need to explicitly argue for this connection in my paper. :)

I feel I've struck but one chord here tonight. Still I wanted to get something on Dewey up this weekend so I'd be rolling again. I have finished this book and am a good way through Democracy in Education, which I'll follow by Experience and Education before moving on to Bandura and the others.

I welcome comments... especially from the Dewey experts out there.

-Mark

... and Life: The Read/Write Web and Playing Music with Friends

2005-12-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

I started a blog for the "band" I am in with some friends who are equally passionate U2 fans. Check out the comment we got from Spain! We have a fan. :) This is what the read/write web is all about!

Your students can have these moments too.

-Mark

Karen Ibbitson on The Use of Complex Digital Games and Simulations in the Classroom to Enhance Engagement and Learning.

2005-12-03T15:32:00.000-08:00

Karen Ibbitson contacted me by email back in October when she stumbled upon this blog. Karen served as the media tech at Oak Middle School in Los Alamitos (which is a well decorated school!) for 5 years before getting her multiple subject teaching credential. She is now working on her masters in education at Concordia University.) We've corresponded a bit since she contacted me, and she's recently completed a paper as part of her masters degree on "The Use of Complex Digital Games and Simulations in the Classroom to Enhance Engagement and Learning." She draws on many of the resources I've cited here, and her reference list (and discussion) include several new gems I need to spend some time with. She's also been gracious enough to allow me to post the paper here (with her university's permission) for others to share.

Ibbitson.doc

I appreciated how well she brought all of these ideas together into such a succinct paper. Enjoy.

Now I just hope she starts blogging...

-Mark

Blogging Advice Between Two Educational Technologists

2005-12-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

Ted Lai, one of my innovative counterparts in the Los Angeles County Office of Education recently sent me an email that included this bit:

I have a question for you... I noticed that your blog is being read and out there... How does that happen? I have two blogs/podcasts up and I don't know how to advertise them or get them listed for Google searches and such. Any advice?

Ted Lai
http://socalhockey.libsyn.com
http://technologyted.blogspot.com

Naturally this was flattering and I was happy to help. I also thought my response would be worth sharing here, for whatever it is worth. So, my reply included this bit:

Ted,

I have pretty limited advice regarding the blogs and readership, but I can share what I've picked up... I'd be happy to chat about it anytime, but here are a few bits I can share over email.

Most importantly, post good content regularly. At the very least it will be searchable and people looking for something similar will find it. If what they find is good they will link to it. I've learned others won't contribute unless there is something engaging and thought provoking already there. I can't believe how many people post simple questions as their first blog posts and wonder why no one responds. You need to give them something to dig their teeth into. (And even so, if people aren't responding it doesn't mean they aren't reading. I occasionally ask a question of my readers, but rarely get an answer. Rather it is the things I say, or am processing publicly, that seem to inspire responses.)

This leads to the next most important thing, and this I picked up from advice on other sites. Be generous with your links to similar content... and don't be afraid to let the other authors know you have linked to them (even via an email) so that they can check out your site. There is something of a "you link to me, I'll link to you" ethic out there. I don't actually do the email alert thing often, but people in ed tech circles seem to have a way to know when they are being linked to. (I even have a standing MSN search via RSS for my name and educational technology and have picked up a lot of connections that way.)

Also, simple stuff like using keywords if you can... and including them in your post titles and the body of your messages. It says educational technology and games in education so many times in my blog people can't miss it! When I started writing about Dewey and put his name in the title of my posts with my topics I started attracting a whole new group of people.

Finally, don't worry about gathering a big readership. The beauty of all this is that the one person who cares (or three people, or thirty, whatever) can find you. My readership is certainly not large, but it has sure helped me to connect with people working in this field. I've met with, spoken on the phone with, or emailed with nearly every influential author I am studying - and a handful of practicing educators. I only have about 40 subscribers that I can track, between bloglines and Feedburner. True there could be a lot more, but that seems to be enough for this magic to happen.

Incidentally, I don't know if you're following my FURL archive (I'm pretty active there), but I FURLed your hockey blog straight away... after your first email and before this one. :)

At any rate, I'd love to chat with you more about this... and I'm enjoying your posts.

-Mark

In his reply to me, Ted also included this bit (in addition to indicating his willingness to let me repurpose this conversation here):

One of the things that Leo Laporte said in his keynote at the Portable Media Expo was to "Podcast your passion." Don't worry about readership/listenership... It's good to be reminded of that. I do enjoy what I do, and I need to keep that in mind much more. I have no delusions of being really popular, but it is nice to be heard by some regulars (other than friends and family).

I hope our exchange might be useful to others. As Ted replied, "it's all for education."

-Mark

Excel for Educators at Thurston Middle School, LBUSD

2005-12-03T14:13:00.000-08:00

As long as I'm sharing photos this afternoon... on Tuesday I was in the Laguna Beach USD to deliver an Excel for Educators class at Thurston Middle School. Look at the view (right) from the parking lot where I left my little Ford Focus (not my car, but the exact model, wheels and everything). Can you imagine going to school there? Or teaching there? I feel like I am on vacation when I visit. :)

In two hours, we did the M&Ms lesson (as an introduction to data entry, formating, formulas, and graphing), covered David H. Jonassen's theories on using spreadsheets as Mindtools, and had time for each participant to brainstorm a classroom application for excel. My favorite? A history teachers plan to create a simulation using the four elements of imperialism as a variables. The English teachers also enjoyed Jonassen's poetry lesson plan, originally created for databases. (See Computers as Mindtools for Schools: Engaging Crtitical Thinking, pp. 44-45).

-Mark

... and Life: Roses Follow Up

2005-12-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

I know I haven't been consistent about my posts lately. I've been dealing with a healthy dose of "and Life" issues here. Though I respect, follow, and get a lot out of blogs that deal with personal issues like what I'm dealing with, the full story doesn't belong on Educational Technology and Life... not by a long shot.

Still, I can share this follow-up shot of the Roses in my back yard as a symbol of the importance of what I am going through right now.

The initial shot I posted here showed some flowers in full bloom, and a handful of fresh buds on a longer stem. This shot depicts the original flowers as they rot and fall away, while the buds have now blossomed into something spectacular. After changing jobs so much the last few years I began to come to a deeper appreciation of the limited time I have working with the exciting people I get to work with. This is now crossing over into my personal life. I have always maintained long term friendships, but some will blossom and fade while others will grow to replace them.

Now, I'm not at all sure what it means that the gardener has since paid us a visit and cut both of these stems back to prune the bush! I suppose it will still grow more beautiful flowers in their place, which would not be possible without the pruning. I suppose this former literature teacher can find some symbolism in that, too... and it is almost too bad I can't share the whole story here. Still, I offer this image and these thoughts up as my apology for being away.

Meanwhile, there is much more to come this weekend... on the read/write web, on Dewey, and on Serious Games.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

Another Read/Write Web Class at the OCDE!

2005-11-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

I'm blogvangelizing today, as Will Richardson would say. It's a small class, but we're planting seeds.

Moblogging at Golden West

2005-11-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

This is a moiblogging demo on the fly!
--------------------------
Mark Wagner
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The Read/Write Web at Golden West College

2005-11-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Today I'm talking to future teachers about the read/write web!

Oh, and I'm online again.

-Mark

John Dewey on Waste in Education

2005-11-19T02:22:00.000-08:00

Today - well, yesterday - I got nice new copies of Experience & Education and Democracy and Education in the mail, and I can't wait to write all over them as I annotate them. Meanwhile I am slowly working my way through the UCI Library copy of The School and Society. After a long work day and a healthy dose of "and Life" I stayed up and read Chapter three just now, once again jotting quotes down in text edit. This chapter was either less quotable than the last one, or else I was just more tired, but here are the top eight quotes, in the order they appeared:

"This is not a question of the waste of money or the waste of things. These matters count; but the primary waste is that of human life, the life of the children while they are at school, and afterward because of inadequate and perverted preparation" (p. 64).

Sounds like this could be said in frustration in any boardroom or department meeting in any school. It is also a great place to start a blog post about educational technology.

"... the fundamental organization is that of the school itself as a community of individuals, in its relations to other forms of social life. All waste is due to isolation. Organization is nothing but getting things into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully." (p. 64)

Can this possible be written a hundred years before the read/write web? And how well does this concept express the need for Will Richardson's concept of connective writing? (See his later posts, too.)

"I wish to suggest that really the only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life." (p. 72)

Dewey says this in response to the splintering of academic subjects and the isolation that occurs throughout the school system: between subjects, classrooms, and grade levels, but also between elementary, middle, high schools, and universities... not to mention district offices. This again touches on the philosophy of the modern senior project. I also think it encapsulates Dewey's message in a phrase.

"From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school." (p. 75)

This sounds like Prensky's talk about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, and like so many other educational technologists and games in education enthusiasts, including James Paul Gee, who declare both that students need to power down when they come into the classroom, and that they acquire better life skills playing games than in school.

"The child should study commercial arithmetic and geography, not as isolated things by themselves, but in their reference to his social environment. The youth needs to become acquainted with the bank as a factor in modern life, with what it does, and how it does it." (p. 78)

Only a five years ago or so, when establishing her life skills class at the middle school where she works, my mom used a very similar - and still very necessary - argument. This was written a hundred years ago folks!

"The pupil must learn what has meaning, what enlarges his horizon, instead of mere trivialities. He must become acquainted with truths, instead of things that were regarded as such fifty years ago or that are taken as interesting by the misunderstanding of a partially educated teacher." (p. 78-79)

I thought this quote seemed familiar... even trivial, though I agreed with it... until I got to the end and realized it was a reflection of just how radical Dewey was. Can you imagine saying that in a high school redesign committee meeting in 2005!?

"There are two great things in breaking down isolation, in getting connection - to have the child come to school with all the experience he has got outside of school, and to leave it with something to be immediately used in his everyday life. The child comes to the traditional school with a healthy body and a more or less unwilling mind, though, in fact, he does not bring both his body and mind with him; he has to leave his mind behind because there is no way to use it in the school." (p.80)

Dewey was harsh, but if it was true in his day, it is doubly true today... especially if the students are online out of school and offline or severely limited in school. Also, I guess the situation is worse now, since there is now no way to use your body in school either. :(

"When the child lives in varied but concrete and active relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all studies are of necessity correlated." (p. 91)

Is this evidence of some sort of early math-across-the-curriculum movement? I am once again shocked that this was written a century ago... and once again find that this excerpt articulates Dewey's philosophy well... relate learning to life.

He ended his chapter with something that bears importance for me... his vision for how an experimental school and a university ought to work together for the benefit of both. This is something I can see in my future. :)

-Mark

December 7th is my Blogiversary

2005-11-19T02:05:00.000-08:00

Yup... I just realized it'll be one year of blogging for me on the day that will live in infamy. My first post over at MSN Spaces, where this blog began, sure came at a meaningful time. I can't believe it's only been a year I've been fired up about the read/write web, and I can't believe all of the opportunities it has made possible.

So, how does one celebrate a blogiversary? I have some ideas in mind, but I thought that in the spirit of the whole thing I should post the question here and see what happens. :)

And, of course, thank you for reading.

-Mark

Comments on John Dewey

2005-11-17T01:33:00.000-08:00

I am always thrilled to get comments on this blog, and it seems my move to discussing John Dewey attracted some attention. I imagine this blog being read via RSS more often than not. So, subcribers, if you are interested, don't miss out on the comments on Monday's John Dewey Post.

Also, I'll take this opportunity for another periodic reminder that most of what I am posting right now is in my FURL archive, which can be subscribed to through this feed.

Now, it is very late... and I still have some "and Life" issues to take care of this... evening. (I'm a bit stubborn about the fact that it is not morning until after I've slept.)

-Mark

John Dewey on The School and The Life of the Child

2005-11-17T01:08:00.000-08:00

I am taking a similar approach for today's post as I did for the last one. Here are my top ten quotes from Chapter two of John Dewey's The School and Society. Once again, it was very difficult to narrow it down to only ten! It is a strange thing to find a brethren in an author who wrote a century ago. Actually, speaking as a former English Literature teacher, I know this happens all the time - it's just a shock in this field!

Incidentally, I am getting precious little time to devote to these studies right now... and on top of that I am having to read library books, which I cannot annotate; I'm transcribing notable sections into TextEdit for later reference and composition... so, my iChat status tonight has read "Reading Dewey... Slowly"... it's very frustrating.

So again, in the order in which they appear, here are the quotes:

"It is all made 'for listening... there is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child to work. The workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with which the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking." (p. 31-32)

These observations came out of a story Dewey related about searching for a student desk and discovering that they were all made for listening, not for doing. He winds up criticizing much of the physical layout of a school for this same reason. I also chose this quote because it was his first use of the word "construct" in a way that might be considered vaguely constructivist... more on this below.

"Another thing that is suggested by these schoolrooms, with their set desks, is that everything is arranged for handling as large numbers of children as possible; for dealing with children en masse, as an aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively. The moment children act they individualize themselves; they crease to be a mass and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in the neighborhood." (p. 32-33)

This has bothered me for some time! I'm not sure what the answer is... there are some strictly pragmatic reasons why this is so... but at the very least as educators we can strive to take every opportunity to allow our students to act as individuals. I see the read/write web, and certainly video games, as technologies that can facilitate this. Also, when asked how I envision the school of the future, I often must acquiesce that I run up against "the baby sitting problem" very quickly. I suspect necessity will mother an invention here, but I wonder how we will get around this.

"In this school the life of the child becomes the all-controlling aim. All the media necessary to further the growth of the child center there. Learning? certainly, but living primarily, and learning through and in relation to this living." (p. 26)

This is inspirational... and it once again sounds shockingly close to a modern educator speaking about media (say, a digital camera, iMovie, and a a site to post podcasts on). Also, it was at about this point that I started to be very proud of this blog's title, something that I've grown fond of but which never really sat right with me, Educational Technology and Life. Though I've used "and Life" to denote posts not relevant to Ed Tech, I see now that those last two words of the title are an integral piece of the equation. I'm sure I somehow felt that all along.

"Let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism, question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done, and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different" (p. 40)

There was a a host of quotable bits of advice related to the coaching model of teaching, but I thought this offered the most distinct strategies. :)

"Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests - the interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression - we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child." (p. 48)

Dewey built a case for each of these and then summarized with this statement. I was once again amazed at how many of these I feel are facilitated by the read/write web and video games in education: conversation, inquiry, construction, and expression.

"There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something." (p. 56)

This is just plain quotable, and I like to think if I were still an English teacher today it would help me to apply this philosophy to much more of my curriculum, so that if my students were writing, it would be for a personal purpose... again the authentic audience offered by blogging might be effective in helping to accomplish this.

"Reading and writing, as well as the oral use of language, may be taught on this basis. It can be done in a related way, as the outgrowth of the child's social desire to recoount his experiences and get in return the experiences of others, directed always through contact with the facts and forces which determine the truth communicated." (p. 56)

This quote builds on the last one, and I think it further illustrates my suggestion that student blogs might be a good tool for student expression.

"Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at its time and in its measure no less than the life of the adult." (p. 60)

I know this is a bit out of context... but it is the sort of writing that is attracting me more to Dewey than I expected, and it once again made me happy about the title of this blog. :)

"I have been speaking of the outside of the child's activity... the real child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative values and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment." (p. 60)

Now this is certainly a sort of proto-constructivist quote. Also, as someone who has always valued the importance of imagination, I am drawn to this philosophy. Finally, here are the inspiring words with which Dewey concludes the chapter:

"Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common wood, it surely is this - the growth of the imagination in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and society. When nature and society can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of experience, then shall there be an opportunity for this identification, and culture shall be the democratic password." (p. 62)

As always, thanks for reading.

-Mark

John Dewey on The School and Society

2005-11-14T23:29:00.000-08:00

I'm finally diving into the reading for my next research project, and I'm beginning with Dewey. I'm having to read actual library books at this point, and I find myself transcribing a shocking amount of quotes into TextEdit.

I thought I should share some of them here, and I've tried to cut it down to the top ten quotes from the first chapter of The School and Society, 2nd Edition... written in 1915. The original was written in 1899! It's amazing to me that these things are as true now as they were a century ago, or rather, the real shock is that the opposite is true.

And yes, over the next two months, all of this will be brought home, via Vygotsky, Bruner, Bandura... and then Squire, Steinkuehler, and Shaffer... and finally to serious games and games for change.

So, in the order they appear, the top ten quotes from "The School and Social Progress":

"[School work] is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of attention and of judgement that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead" (p. 12). This sounds like an educational technologist in 2005!

"The radical reason that the present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is because just this element of common and productive activity is absent" (p. 14). This has been difficult for me to articulate in 2005, but is still absolutely true.

"[When introducing real word occupations into the curriculum] the entire school is renewed. It has the a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child's habitat, where he learns through directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community." (p. 18) So let's see, we've got project-based learning, school to industry connections, and small learning communities - maybe even professional learning communities... sounds like cutting edge 21st century educational reform to me.

Dewey sees sewing as a "point of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and the mechanical principles involved" (p. 20) This reminds me of Seymour Papert's gears, which I talked about with AB 75 principles just today! This is of course, also the foundation behind inquiry based (and project based) learning.

"The children worked this out for themselves... aided by questions and suggestions from the teacher." (p. 21) Ah, I recognize a modern coaching model of teaching!

"Plato somewhere speaks of the slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those of some other man. It is our social problem now, even more urgent than in the time of Plato, that method, purpose, understanding, shall exist in the consciousness of the one who does the work, that his activity shall have meaning to himself." (p. 23) As a former philosophy minor, I really appreciated this one. I think I can build upon it by saying "it is our social probelm now, even more urgent than in the time of Dewey..."

"Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself" (p. 25) Dewey's accompanying arguments about the changes in transportation and communication technologies (and world markets) sound a lot like Friedman's The World is Flat.

"It is an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art." (p. 26) So, we are all calling this the industrial age system of education, but infact, Dewey, in the industrial age, called it mediaeval. I think I will now call this mediaeval in my presentations!

"The obvious fact is that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete transformation. This transformation is not something to appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by conscious purpose" (p. 28). This is interesting first for the call for transformation, which of course is even more intensely necessary now, and second for the suggesting that it cannot happen in a day. Dewey here was explicitly interested in an evolution of the educational system! This should sit well with educational technologists who have tried to implement too many changes too fast.

"When a school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious" (p. 29). This sounds like it come from a daring 21st century school district mission statement. How many people believe this? And when will we act on these beliefs. How about a serious game to help change people's perceptions of a 'good' education?

I'm sure some of you have had this awakening long ago, but I am glad to be starting this project by finally taking the time with Dewey. I hope it will serve as a foundation for my own work... and perhaps these quotes will serve as a foundation or inspiration for others. Thanks for reading.

-Mark

Spotlight Courses for District Technology Leaders

2005-11-13T16:53:00.000-08:00

I'll be speaking twice at the meeting next week, so here are the slides I'll be using to promote upcoming educational technology classes and professional development opportunities. I'm happy to say we're got exciting options in the categories of multi-media, iPod in Education, the Read/Write Web, and of course Video Games in Education. Some new partnerships with Pinnacle, Apple, SMART Technologies, and others are also announced, as is the 2nd Annual Assistive Technology Institute.

Incidentally, as I write this, the OCDE website seems to be down! But, the Ed Tech website is up for a change! :)

Go to register.ocde.us if you are interested in registering for any of these classes.

Incidentally, all you people who have been saying you're coming to my games in education class on December 13th, now is the time to register. :D

Serious Games for District Technology Leaders

2005-11-13T16:51:00.000-08:00

Here are the slides I've prepared for next week's District Technology Leaders meeting at the Orange County Department of Education. I doubt they stand up well on their own, but they might be interesting to some of you who are following this blog, and I'd certainly love any comments or feedback you can offer.

Frustration with Non-connective Writing

2005-11-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

Or would that be unconnected writing?

It's funny, just when Will is finally finding a name for (and struggling with) the writing we are all excited about, I am participating in a delphi study which necessitates that I keep my answers to questions confidential throughout several iterations of a survey. But I'm writing good stuff and wish I could share it here! How will I (or anyone for that matter) reap the benefits of connectedness if I can't... share.

Well, back to writing that won't be seen here for a long time. This is a really weird feeling... not unlike realizing some of my friends and colleagues would probably not appreciate the Mark's Mail project I dreamed up a few days ago. :)

-Mark

UPDATE: Jarek Janio, author of the delphi study I mentioned above has left a comment below and I've replied. I didn't want subscribers to miss it. :)

Serious Games Summit: McDowell, Cannon-Bowers, and Prensky on The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design

2005-11-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

I spent the final session of the summit at McDowell, Cannon-Bowers, and Prensky's panel discussion on The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design in Serious Games. This turned out to be a debate between Cannon-Bowers and Prensky moderated by McDowell. Apparently McDowell had the idea following Presnky's comments at then GLS conference which incensed so many teachers (and instructional designers, like Cannon-Bowers). At this point in what were a very long two days for me I sort of gave up on note taking and enjoyed the entertainment value of this session. We all laughed often, mostly at Prensky - or thanks to Prensky I should say - though Cannon-Bowers was a great sport about it. She argued for the use of sound instructional design when creating serious games to teach, and Presnksy advocated simply creating a good game, and he made frequent use of his "game developers suck the fun out" quote. The session was a blast, and I'm afraid you just had to be there. If you are interested though, you can read Dennis' reflections on it here.

This concludes my (belated) coverage of the summit, though I'm sure these thoughts will resurface here often in the coming months.

Now what were those other blogging topics I felt so behind on before I left? Or, better yet, where was I in my KAM research?

-Mark

UPDATE: For those who were there and will laugh, I want to say "Function F7." :)

There are a few other gems I found in an email I sent myself from my blackberry... I'm pretty sure these were all Prensky:

"Mouths making promises their brains couldn't keep."

"In the UK it's against the law to say 'you will learn.'"

"So, I'm for intelligent design."

In the end, it made me want to be funnier in my own presentations. :)

Serious Games Summit: Herdlick on Making Educational Games That Are Elegant, Fun and Really Educational

2005-11-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

For the eighth session of the summit I attended Catherine Herdlick's Making Educational Games That Are Elegant, Fun and Really Educational, which turned out to be - happily for me - an overview of game development for academics and others who might come to work with game developers.

Because this session was laid out in such a logical sequence I have only doctored up my initial notes and simply offer them here:

Herdlick talked about the development process in terms of these stages:
- concept
- design/prototype
- alpha
- beta
- gold / GMC
- launch

She framed her presentation with the question "How does this process shift when we have educational design values?" and the answer was integrated throughout her presentation.

She went into testing and code locks early on, but then settled into this outline of the partnership between a designer and educator...

Before you approach a developer... a checklist.
- Play lots of games.
- Embrace conflict. Or at least consider embracing it.
- Create educational design values:
Identify your concept (probably content related)
Specify what player is learning
Prioritize your educational goals
Identify the audience
Describe feelings you want the game to evoke
- Prepare documentation about the topic.
- Identify a project leader on your end.
- Clarify scope. (Really small games can impact people, too.)

Concept
- Provide documentation / overview of content
- Discuss design and educational values
- Select one concept from several - best fit

Design / Prototype
- In-depth research on topic, if necessary
- Re-evaluate and discuss scope

Alpha
- Prepare placeholder content
- Research distribution options and challenges
- Discuss assessment
- Re-evaluate & discuss scope

Beta
- Finish and polish written content
- Test with target audience
- "Shop" your game around
- Developer - integrate assessment tools, if applicable

Gold / GMC
- Evaluate usefulness of assessment tools

Launch - and change lives :)

She then discussed a few specific examples which I did not capture, and then answered some questions.

This was a good overview for me to take back to the OCDE, and for me in preparation for my own future work.

-Mark

... and Life: More Roses (because we are all fragile)

2005-11-06T13:29:00.000-08:00

I though I would break up all this text with another image. I'm not sure this quite captures what I saw when I was trying to get a shot of the blossom, but couldn't avoid catching the sagging and falling apart flower in the frame, and then realized the more powerful image was of both of them.

I'll also offer a brief editorial thought for the day: Be Gentle.

Serious Games Summit: Games for Change (Life Changing Stuff Here)

2005-11-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

By the second breakout session of day 2 (the seventh of the summit) I was feeling much better. I had a chair, and some food in my system.

I attended the inspiring Games for Change and the Theory of Change: The making of good social issue games.

Suzanne Seggerman, the acting director of Games For Change in New York kicked off the session by explaining they are talking about social change, and offering this mission statement:

Games for Change provides support, education and visibility to institutions and individuals using digital games for positive social change, with special assistance to non-profits and foundations entering the field.

I think she actually said aloud "to effect positive social change," which is straight out of the Walden University mission statement!

... Walden's student-centered programs prepare its graduates to achieve professional excellence and to effect positive social change.

(Unfortunately, I note that the mission statement has been revised on the new website... it has been tightened up, but I don't know if I like "transform society" as well as "effect positive social change.")

At any rate, lets say that what these people were talking about resonated with me and fits well into the work I've been doing at Walden for the last two years And it certainly fits into the KAM I am currently working on, Principles of Societal Development.

In New York Games for Change hosts a salon every other month and they encourage their satellite chapters to do so, too. I later got Celia Pierce's name as the contact person in the LA chapter, which I aim to get involved with, but I have yet to locate her or the chapter. I guess I'll have to start at the top... (Actually, creative googling finally helped here... as did remembering I met her at the Education Arcade in May and that she is associated with UCI.)

They recently held a conference in NYC, which featured 15 serious games for change. Presenters included Ben Sawyer, Ian Bogost, Erik Zimmerman, and many others. They discussed open source and low cost tools, and alternative business models. All good stuff. From the conference they learned that foundations and non-profits need to know more about this space and the possibilities, and academics need to know about the funders - and about others like Games for Change. (It was strange to realize I was there as academia... or at least they didn't even ask who was an educators during the show of hands!)

They spent some time at the outset establishing a definition for social change. Google, it turns out, will point you to 369 definitions. The definition she settled on went something like this: Social Change... a process whereby the beliefs and behaviors of a group become modified over time. It grows out of both the natural process of societal change, as well... (damn she went too fast!)

The focus of their organization, then, is the idea that games can act as a catalyst for change. Games can be directly transformative (something my brother James has been interested in when I talk to him about this). So, goes the presentation, these games should be driven by a theory of change and a concrete plan for how you will transform the audience.

Mario Armstrong, I think, got up to discuss "Why a Theory of Change (ToC)?" And wow, was he too fast for my notetaking, too! At any rate, he said a ToC defines the building blocks to achieve a long-term goal. Key elements include interventions and outcomes (he noted that the world is always changing, but we must intervene to get the outcomes we want!), and a pathway to change.

He was most interested in how a social context changes... not individuals, as is the tradition for most serious games. He also stressed the need for long term effectiveness, and offered the contrast between the short term effectiveness of showing starving children to get donations for food and the long term effectiveness of showing children's lives being improved. (In the first case people give like crazy, but then stop giving... it seems hopeless. In the later case, people become long term givers.)

He asked the question, "how do we change society?" and expanded this to mean how we change institutions, infrastructure, and cultural mores. In a pitch for a serious game he would expect to hear something like "this is my game for change and I think it will affect society in this way... because it will change cultural mores this way..."

Barry Joseph spoke next about his program, Global Kids (He's the online leadership director). The program aims to transform urban youth into successful students and global/community leaders by engaging them with, well, cool stuff. He was going fast, too.

He game a rundown of some of their other programs and then finally talked about Playing for keeps, a program in which students create a serious game each year, a process that changes their sense of self, their sense of power, and their level of efficacy. He was moving too fast for me to even transcribe the slides, never mind what he was saying... and it was all gold.

He showed off a prototype serious game created by students... a game about racial and gender profiling by airport security. It was powerful, though unsophisticated graphically. Some of the challenges they face in this process are unifying the content, meeting their educational goals, and mastering the core mechanics.

Catherine Herdlick, a developer, talked next but I took few notes. After lunch I attended her session, though, and took plenty, so stay tuned.

Finally Benjamin Stokes got up to talk about his Peter Packet project. Brilliant. Just brilliant. I only just now visited and check it out. This teaches social responsibility and the principles of networking! Not to mention the implicit value that the Internet should be used for altruistic purposes. (The embedded add for Cisco routers made me laugh, too!)

Stokes asked what kids can do as far as advocacy, and explained that they built the skin of a game around real world advocacy strategies, such as "invite adults to contribute" or "email your senator." He claimed that kids can and will opt-in to raise awareness and funds, and he relayed stories of kids checking their points, or "total money for poverty" online.

It occurred to me that perhaps the ONE campaign needs something like this... the ONE Game. I find this a doubly good idea now that I know about Bono's interest in serious games, too.

It also occurred to me that none of my doctoral work thus far would be lost if I were to refocus my efforts into this space. Hmm...

They concluded the session with the suggestion that the funding community loves "theories of change."

They offered to put each of us on their mailing list, and I'm sure the offer would extend to anyone reading this... check out gamesforchagnge.org/maillist.html or email suzanne@weblab.org to be added to the mailing list.

Then, with a final stroke of brilliance, they asked us to go get our box lunches and return to the room to talk more over lunch!

At lunch we each were able to introduce ourselves, what we do, and why we were there. A few points of discussion were worth capturing as well (just using my blackberry at the time as we ate)...

Some of the developers suggested development tools: RPG Maker 2003, Gamemaker.nl, Kids Programming Language (.net), Squeak, and Alice 3D.
One of them suggested that 2D programming is better for younger kids. Later they mentioned MUPPETS for MMOs, NEL, and moved into a discussion of "open" development for games; there seemed to be agreement that open source development works for technical things like software, but that it might not work for an artistic team endeavor like a serious game.

Someone said this gem: "Saying I want a game is like saying I want a meal. How much does a game cost is a similarly flawed question."

Here was another that sat well with me. :) "Don't think that because you are doing good, you have to be poor."

Also, participants recommended these books: Buzzmarketing, and Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing.

I'm sure I will be writing about these folks again...

-Mark

The OCDE Educational Technology Podcast

2005-11-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

Hey! I almost missed this. While I was out of the office, Robert Craven got our first podcast posted!

Check it out!

Serious Games Summit: Michael and Chen on Assessment in Serious Games

2005-11-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

If you've been following along you may have noticed that the first day was a bit slow for me at first, but got better, and then much better as it went along. The same can be said for the content of the second day. I did not make it to the morning keynote, which did look interesting however not terribly relevant to my work, so I started at rock bottom.

For the first breakout session of the day, the sixth of the summit, I attended Michael and Chen's Beyond Q&A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games. Michael and Chen are the co-authors of Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform, the book I read on my way out to DC. Unfortunately, this was a round table, so like Prensky they did not prepare a presentation. They did however prepare some questions to prompt the participants.

It's worth noting that this session was very full and I was trying to take notes while standing in the back. Neither the powerbook nor the blackberry proved terribly comfortable for this, and I wasn't feeling too well, so I have considerably fewer notes for this session than the others. I don't think I missed much, though.

The moderators lead in with this question: "What do you see as the future of assessment in serious games?"

Howard Phillips of Microsoft replied that many games have been nothing more than assessment (speaking of the edutainment variety I presume), and that in the future we will assess fuzzier elements of knowledge. This was something of a running theme throughout the summit. Jim Belanik (spelling?) from the Army Research Institute reported that they are doing to do just that; they are trying to create technology that will be able to make judgement calls without the human present... but right now the human is necessary, he concluded.

Others were very interested in the use of pre-assessment to level students before beginning a game. At which point someone jumped in with the question of how we will get picky teachers to use this? Later, someone offered the opinion that our biggest barrier is teachers... and that if we can help them feel comfortable with games, then we're in. Much later someone suggested that games should be promoted as tools for teachers, and that after school programs might be the gateway to the schools.

This was followed by the question of the difference between a test and an assessment, which oddly enough, occupied them for quite some time. I hadn't seen that conversation since I was in my credential program. An English professor named Dennis put this one to rest with the very math teacher comment that "tests are a subset of assessments."

Dennis also suggested that success in a game could be a form of assessment. Someone echoed this later by saying that "games are assessing the player all the time, you just don't notice it." John Fairfield (of Rosetta Stone?) pointed out that there will be a wide variety of skills displayed in success of any given game and that successful players do not necessarily acquire the same skills.

Erick Lauber was sitting up front, though I didn't see him, and he brought up what he called a serious issue... the transfer of training is not being dealt with head on. He's fascinated by the power of serious games to jump this hurdle we've been facing for so long. None of these lines of conversation led anywhere, but perhaps they will spark someone elses' thinking if I share them here...

Someone from simSchool mentioned that they are trying to represent how a learner grows... from an AI standpoint.

A representative from the Navy asked another important question... what will you get out of a game that you won't from traditional training?

Owen (and that's all of his name he was gonna tell us) said that we want to teach knowledge, skills, and confidence... efficaciousness.

About the time I noted that I was getting bored (my fault, not theirs), Jake Troy, who is involved in language learning games, said "there is a war for kids attention" (a metaphor that resonated with me), and that "we can assess when they are getting bored" by tracking when they start exploring instead of pursuing a goal, or when they stop playing, or switch games, etc.

This question went unanswered... what methodologies are game developers using?

A strand of discussion did come up around Chen's prompt: when you bring games into the classroom, how do we deal with cheats? And if you put things in player logs, how can we protect these from hacking? I think the most hopeful response was that playing the game has to be the easiest and most engaging way to learn things. There was also a comment that this is where the instructor comes in.. if a student is running around invulnerable (or whatever) then they are clearly not getting anything out of the game, and the teacher can clearly see that; the teacher must provide a context such that playing the game legitimately is the most rewarding. Finally, someone suggested using biometrics to combat cheating. Ha! That way lies policing, something I am not at all interested in; with policing comes cheating.

In a related comment, someone expressed their feeling hat students must know if and how they are being assessed. That way exploring is not punished. Then, too, they will be more motivated to play by the rules... because of the context.

Another brilliant suggestion was that we can track players' access to reference or help in game. (Oh, and by the way, this guy said, games are cheating... you get to restart and try again!)

Toward the very end, some discussion of multiplayer games arose. How will we assess? A game like WoW stores amazing amounts of data, but we are back to fuzzy issues when it comes to assessing or evaluating that data. One participant said that in his project he found MMO data overwhelming, but having sat with the guys from Linden Lab at the Games Learning and Society conference I have a sense of how a good programmer can make use of overwhelming data to draw conclusions. (See this previous post.) Someone did point out that the same computer that stores an MMO's data can be used to sort through that data. Another even suggested a way to sort and analyze the data by defining flag points and comparing players' and experts' paths through the game. Others also said this data was just what they wanted, complete with text to speech and speech to text!

Ha ha ha... I just stumbled on Dennis' weblog, and he has some very detailed notes on the sessions he attended - they rival or exceed mine. In the case of this particular session, they definitely exceed! Check them out. Dennis is D. G. Jerz of Seton Hill University. Check out his blog and his other Serious Games Summit posts as well. The link to his RSS feed is a bit hidden on the page, so I've offered it here too.

Thanks for reading. I once again hope some of you find this helpful... even if the link to Dennis' weblog is the most useful part. ;)

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Burak and Sweeney on PeaceMaker

2005-11-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I took a lot of notes on this session, and it was beginning to frustrate me how long it was taking to write this, so I just powered through and the organization may lack for it. And of course, I've left much out. Regardless, I rediscovered a few gems and hope they will be helpful for others, too.

Now, the fifth breakout session (on Monday afternoon) was the essence of why I attended the summit - even more so than the previous session on Food Force. I attended Burak and Sweeney's PeaceMaker: A Game That Teaches Peace in the Middle East. (The game's website can be found at peacemakergame.com.)

I'd been looking forward to a game like PeaceMaker since first reading Jim Gee talk about the Palestinian first person shooter Under Ash. He mused (if memory serves) that this would be a powerful thing if American teen agers could play both sides of the conflict and come to understand it from the inside out. This is exactly when Burak and Sweeney have painstakingly created.

The game comes out of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, which has the first masters degree in entertainment technology (an MET), and which focuses on multi-disciplinary group projects, including the "first responder" training game, Hazmat: Hotzone.

Burak and Sweeney pitched their idea for a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to their faculty, and were originally told their proposal was "widely out of scope." So they refined their mission, focusing on a 2D simulation of the conflict, on a young audience (high school students it turns out), and free online distribution. The looked to serious comics, such as MAUS as a model of how a traditionally "low" art medium could be used for a much more serious purpose. Because they wanted to teach both perspectives on the conflict, they suggested that a game was a more appropriate medium than a book, and they took great efforts to present a balanced view, involving representatives from both cultures from the very beginning of the project. As for non-violent gameplay, they felt that "peace is challenging", that there are "warriors for peace", and that "this is not less challenging than going to war." In peace, and in game development, they offered this advice "Don't be afraid to take small steps."

In the Israeli version of the game, which was made first, allows the player to take on the role of the Israeli Prime Minister and two work with the leaders of eight different factions to achieve peace. A sort of thermometer display similar to the depictions of relationships in the Sims is used as feedback. Some events, such as the first event - a suicide bombing, happen and players can react and take various actions throughout the game. Though the game is about peace, the player can take military action, but in most cases this is not the right choice. However, in extreme situations, this can improve the situation. Clearly the underlying systems of the game will reflect the designers beliefs about reality, but I for one find it important that there is at least some reasonable motivation behind violence in the game - for it to be otherwise would I think miss the point of much of the conflict. To achieve the desired emotional impact, the designers used real pictures and real footage as much as possible. (They even showed screen shots from the news and from violent games to express the thought that "emotional impact comes from real events, not just the spectacle.")

The Palestinian version is newer and more sophisticated. It was also more difficult for them to sort out simple things such as an answer to the question "what can this person do?" (In answer to this, many actions are greyed out at the beginning of the game, because the Palestinian president simply doesn't have those options until some progress has been made). Ultimately, though, there are more groups to balance and more actions to take in this version of the game. I think it is important that they pointed out "peace" was a suitable victory condition for an Israeli, but nor for a Palestinian... a two-state solution must be reached. The struggle here was now between national approval and world approval.

The research necessary to create these games offers something for other serious game developers to consider. The began by exploring paper based negotiation simulations, both from Carnegie Mellon professors and from the US Institute of Peace. They also explored existing computer simulations including Kuma War, and Under Ash.

The leap for then was how to make a game about peace. Conflict was still a key, but instead of A vrs. B, they wanted A, B, C, and D to cooperate for equality. For gameplay (and verisimilitude) this had to be engaging and challenging! They offered players actions to take, but other (AI) actors in the game would act if their needs were not being met (Hamas for example).

They shared some graphical representations of some iconic games and where they fell on a chart of goal orientation v. open endedness (on the x axis) and simulation v. game (on the y-axis). Peace Maker was just left of the origin toward goal oriented, but was balanced between sim and game elements. They also charted pace and mood by action oriented v. slow paced (on the x-axis) and heavy v. light in tone (on the y-axis). Here PeaceMaker was heavy and slow paced (in the upper right quadrant).

The first prototype was a board game. It has many elements they wanted, and "sounded right", but was not engaging. They were able to categorize the actions into Fighting, Helping, or Waiting, and they realized that the core struggle was between the security of the players' people and the trust of the other side. It is significant, I think, that they said at first it feels as if each action hurts one and helps the other, and that is only when you learn to "climb" the actions that progress is made. They reached this point as a dice game. Then, the vision team worked on interface, visual, xperience, sounds, videos, and scripted a flash demo. Meanwhile, an engine team worked on code, balance, fleshing out actions, and a working java game.

The underlying assumptions behind the system they created are powerful ones.. in life, I mean:

- You can make a difference.
- The other side wants peace, too.
- You lack complete control of your own side.
- Small concrete steps, not grandiose plans.
- "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible!"

Incidentally, though I didn't get to see his poster session, Mark Baldwin had some powerful things to say about using games to teach positive mind habits. (See his Self-Esteem Games: Modifying Mind Habits Using Science-Based Psychology Games session for more information.

There is a Pilot program currently underway, both in Pittsburgh, and in the city of Qatar. Students in the two cities will play the game and communicate about it as an assignment. They are currently testing the game, the content, and the educational message. Already they are getting emails from the community, from gamers, and from non-gamers interested in the game.

Currently they plan to publish online in the spring, in a manner similar to Food Force for free download. They hope to create a 2 player version when they are done, and eventually a multiplayer version. In the long term, they suggested they might move on to other conflicts, because after all "unfortunately we have many of them." Also, they hope to move the game beyond the university realm to a profit or non-profit home. I wrote in my notes at this point "this is brilliant." (Earlier, I wrote "TOO MUCH SITTING" at that point in the day.)

Some interesting questions (and suggestions) came up in the Q & A at the end of the presentation. Someone asked if the game was open source. It is not, and their are no plans to make it open, but it will be multi-platform (it is built in Flash). They were asked how long they've been working on it... and it's only been just over a year! When asked "what about people who are not supportive of your ideas?" they responded that most responses are positive, except when it comes to the two-state solution. They acquiesce that people from Hamas would not want to play the game, but many Palestinians feel the game is a way to make their dreams come true in a way they cannot in real life.

When asked how hard it is to play, they relied that the Palestinian version is slightly easier because they've had more time to design it. They said a new player is only 30% likely to pass the game in the first try. Most still get caught up in it. Some get frustrated... "and by the way, the fact that peoplecome to this game and feel that this problem is difficult to solve is a good thing." What is really important, they concluded, was that players feel challenged.

One particularly important question was "are players learning something they didn't know?" To this, the speakers responded that they only have player testimonials and that they want a mehod to measure changes in attitudes. Some testimonials, though, are powerful: "It's crazy, anything you do, someone gets angry", "I wanted to take revenge sometimes, and I couldn't... these guys made something that made me change my attitudes to win." Wow.

Another participant asked if they have an educational person or team involved in the inter-disciplinary design team, too. Apparently they did not on the design team, but they do now for creating teaching materials to accompany the game; they are working with education students at Carnegie Mellon. They are not interested in asking questions, though, they want to record players' actions and through the game see what changes they make. They want teachers to be able to look at the history of a student's game and discuss the choices they made. They would prefer to offer tutorials and hyperlinks online, but are not sure about lesson plans.

Another participant then made the brilliant suggestion to let the teachers create a community around the game, because they will create and share lesson plans etc. I thought this was a beautiful intersection of serious games and the read/write web.

I came to a personal conclusion by the end of this session as well. suppose I will still keep playing WoW for the MMO experience, but I need to start playing Serious Games, whatever their quality. I need the hands-on exposure to these games, too. And most are free. :)

Note: I haven't played WoW since I've been back... though there may be other reasons (in the "and Life" category) for that as well.

-Mark

... and Life: Roses Overhead

2005-11-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

It's finally Saturday after a crazy week of traveling and trainings. I have much more to write today before moving on (and there's the gym and household chores), but thought I would take a moment to share my appreciation of the roses in our back yard.

I took some pictures of the bushes that are over head high. The yellow roses are the most impressive right now, and this is my favorite shot. I was standing on a chair to capture this. :)

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Roche on How the United Nations Fights Hunger with Food Force

2005-11-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

After lunch on the first day the summit began to really hit its stride... at least in my experience, the following sessions were the reason I attended...

For the fourth breakout I attended Justin Roche's How the United Nations Fights Hunger with Food Force.

The session opened with some amazing, amazing statistics. Though the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP) is feeding 90 million worldwide, 60 million of them children, there are 800 million that need food! The WFP owns 20 planes, 40 ships, and 5,000 trucks. "Thousands and thousands" of people work for the WFP, and while the US is the biggest donor in total, he Netherlands are per capita. Every 5 seconds a child dies of hunger.

There is a great need to mobilize people behind the efforts of the WFP. But, why develop a game like Food Force? Roche suggested that it has a powerful effect on children (and young adults, and people of all ages it turns out), and the WFP is targeting future decision makers. (Their target was 8-15 year old students). Though there are ways that students can help right away, this is an investment in the future of the program.

The development of the game was an effort to match the distribution profile of America's Army which can boast of 17 million downloads since 2002 (and which absolutely drives the Serious Games Summit). This has certainly been successful: the WFP's game, Food Force has been downloaded 2.2 million times in 200 countries since it was released this past spring. (There are 500,000 hard copies in circulation, and it has been the #1 action and adventure game at Apple.com.) When it was first released, BBC Technology ran the story and the Food Force servers crashed with the first 10 minutes. :) They approached Yahoo for support, and got it. Yahoo still hosts the game for free, a donation that amounts to something in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 thousand dollars each month.

The story behind the game's design was as bitter sweet as the work of the WFP. Apparently the game was conceived in 1999 by an italian lady (whose name I could sadly not capture while taking notes... should've been recording all of these), but she was tragically killed in a plane crash in '99. It took another year for the passion to transfer to others... and another two years before the funds were found. (They could, of course, not use funds earmarked to feed hungry people!) Roche, then, was brought on to finish development and launch the game, which came online in April 2005. The game was developed for about $475k dollars, but the commercial value (had many not donated their time and resources) would probably have been 5 times that.

At this point in his story, he showed us a demo. The missions are structured to help teach about specific aspects of the WFP's work, and each has four components...

1.) A briefing
2.) The actual mission
3.) Feedback on player performance
4.) A video that explains the real world consequences of WFP's work (and which also serves as the motivation and reward for finishing missions).

The six missions are related to jobs performed by the WFP: air surveillance, creating energy pacs, air drops, locate & dispatch, the food run, and future farming. My primary critique remains that the game interface in these missions really has nothing to do with the point the WFP is trying to get across in the game. Still, it is undoubtedly successful. Roche shared that he often has kids tell him they want to work for the WFP. Even I had that reaction when I played it! In fact, Roche considered this desire for players to work for them to be their best feedback on the effectiveness of the project when asked how they evaluate their success.

Due to the success, several big name gaming companies are now helping them localize food force in other nations... Konami in Japan, Shandra for China, Ubisoft in French, Rai Television in Italian, and the TNT Corp in dutch. Naturally, Roche said further partnerships were necessary as well. He says they attract the attention of these partners because it is a good deal for them... they can frame it as part of their corporate responsibility and they can have their brand associated with a proven product in the educational and serious games marketplace. This is something of an inspiration for similar games in the future, or for future installments of the Food Force "franchise", which Roche suggested is possible, though unfunded at this time.

In addition to the serious game, the WFP also provides online educational resources and and works with a variety of educational partners as well: Feeding Minds Fighting Hunger, the American Federation of Teachers, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and others. Roche mentioned that the website offers a community for teachers. (Actually, now that I click on the "Discussion Area" link in the teacher menu, it turns out this vitally important read/write web feature is only "coming soon"!) Students are encouraged to use the website to post their scores (which is easy to find) and to discuss the game and the real world issues. (Although, now I realize I can't find a student discussion area either).

While the web site seems to still need some work, Roche also talked about next steps for the game... more partnering, CD-ROM production for distribution, and more language translations. He said they realize they may have a franchise, and that they obviously want to move toward a multiplayer game. Later he suggested he'd like a mobile phone version and a console based version - perhaps on playstation, or as an XBox 360 Live downloadable game. Perhaps most importantly, he said, "there are definitely more stories to tell." He was also using the session to recruite developers who want to contribute. Unfortunately, all of this is currently unfunded.

As far as lessons learned for others, he suggested identifying the needs of your partners, and to simply keep pitching a great idea.

Incidentally, and as always, any errors or inaccurate reporting in this post are mine. :)

-Mark

Craven and Guerena at "Just DO it!" PLC Training

2005-11-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

Robert Craven and Mike Guerena demonstrate collaboration... and the use of technology to support our professional learning community... as they try to get the sound system to work for presenter Richard DuFour. :)

Can you tell I managed to get back online today? For some reason I still can't get on the wireless here... but Mike can at the end of the table, so he's sharing his connection over an ethernet cable! Cool.

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Sandford on COTS Games in Education

2005-11-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

There was no question where I was going for the third breakout of the summit, Richard Sanford (of NESTA Futurelab) in Teaming Up for COTS Games in Education: NESTA Futurelab & EA.

Before the session I got an opportunity to re-introduce myself to Jim Gee after interviewing him by phone a few weeks ago. He was sitting in the same row with me... engrossed in his Nintendo DS. I felt bad for interrupting his game. :)

Sandford opened with an intro to teaching with games, answering the questions what is it? and why? His focus was on education between the early years and university, mainly in school settings. He was not interested in edutainment.

He then gave an overview of two approaches of teaching with games. The first was Racing Academy, a drive to re-establish engineering in schools. (Pun intended by Sanford?)

Racing Academy is a massively multiplayer car racing and vehicle engineering simulation which allows students to engineer and race realistic virtual models of cars. Online facilities allow teams and communities to collaborate and compete on the web. The prototype is aimed at older teenagers but there is scope for it to become a multi-generational learning environment.

The second was the Homicide project.

Homicide is a criminological role-playing game aimed at teaching natural science and other subjects to pupils in lower secondary education. The game places the pupils in the role of investigators trying to solve a series of murders in a fictitious small-town called Melved.

He also mentioned that NESTA Futurelab is preparing a Games Handbook based on a three year lit review. The document is aimed at an audience of academics and policy makers... and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

In discussing their partnership with EA: Europs, Sandford talked about the negative perceptions of gaming - and recalled that at one time Socrates was against writing! (I wish I knew the source of this claim though.) Of course, he also focuesed on what he called the positive reality, that people learn a lot from games. With several of them in the room, he cited "people like Gee, Prensky, Squire" in his explanation. He suggested that games are broadening their reach in society and introduced a partnership between EA and Futurelab - a 1 year investigation into the use of commercial mainstream games in the classroom, which will provide practical evidence of the potential for school use of these games. This has been done (by Squire for example), but never on this scale. Sandford saw this as "running to catch up with teachers" who are already implementing these games. He is asking "how are games used in the real world?"

After 4 or 5 months of investigating titles through a rigorous and comprehensive selection procedure, Futurelab decided to focus on The Sims 2 (which can be used to create content), Knights of Honor (an RCS game, like AoM), and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 (which has a detailed physics engine). The study includes 4 schools, 12 teachers, hundreds of students (ages 11 to 16), and a broad range of curricula in both UK and German school systems.

The most significant thing about this project, for me, was that they are currently taking the time from September 2005 to January 2006 to work with teachers to improve their understanding of the games and to develop materials to support their use in class. The project will first be implemented with students from January to March 2006. This will include pre and post polls of student attitudes toward games for learning. Sandford made an interesting point here... "No one ever asks students what they think... but research already shows students are as hard to sell on this as the teachers are." I suspect this is true, myself, given my experiences teaching the hero's journey through Star Wars, including field trips. Fifteen year olds literally told me "Do we have to watch those movies, their lame!" (This was around 2000). Sandford was proud that their project is "giving a voice to students."

Toward the end of the hour, Sandford asked "what's next?"... He called for a better dialogue leading to shared expertise between industry, academia, and practitioners... a true integration between learning and play... and a second change to make good our edutainment mistakes!

In terms of the challenges ahead, he focused on assessment (proving the value of serious games), consistency (value for all - though I didn't entirely understand this point), and wider attitude changes (to overcome the prejudices against games).

He also argued that games literacy should be pursued; we can't presume that all students know about games. Also games are still threatening to teachers' competencies. Of course, these ideas are nothing new to educational technologies.

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Prensky on Mobile Serious Gaming

2005-11-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

Sweet! I got this posted before work! I hope it's not too sloppy...

For the second breakout session of the summit I attended Marc Prensky's round table on mobile serious gaming... primarily because it was Prensky, but also because it is something I am interested in and know little about. I was already familiar with Prensky's recent What Can You Learn From A Cell Phone? - Almost Anything.

I was shocked by two of Prensky's opening comments right off the bat. He did not prepare a presentation, and it was a round table session after all, but he mentioned he had just found out he was doing the presentation the day before. I figured that was odd since it was in the program and all, but then, I learned this week that he really exercises his sense of humor freely. :) I was also happy to realize that he concludes thoughts with phrases like "that would really be a lot of fun" and "that'd be neat" and "which would be a very cool thing to do"... when following comments like "imagine kids got to play real games while parents are ligging them around on history trips" for example.

The other surprise was that he said he didn't know of many mobile serious games. Again, it was a roundtable and he was quickly mining the expertise of those in the room, which if you've been reading this blog you'll know I think is a perfect use of face to face time.

It was however no surprise to hear Prensky roll out his favorite quote, from a game developer's round table years before: "When you add an instructional desigher to the team, the first thing they do is suck the fun out!" (He used this again in a very entertaining way during the final "debate" of the summit!)

The rest of this post may or may not be useful, as this was a fast moving round table and I was only typing notes. I've chosen to err on the side of sharing too much, just in case it might be useful to someone who was not there... though I did cut some random notes that had too little context to pass on.

I wish I had taken better notes, but someone mentioned Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games), something about an airport security game that is meant to be played while waiting in line at the airport! (Or perhaps Ian mentioned this?)

Karen Schrier of MIT spoke quite a bit about the role of mobile gaming in her thesis. She worked on a location based (or augmented reality) game using PDAs (pocket PCs) with GPS. Students are asked to think critically and answer the question "who fired the first shot" at Lexington, Mass by collecting evidence from around the battlefield (and by collaborating - not competing - with others to share this information... they all get slightly different information, so they need to count on each other). They interact with virtual historic figures and items before making their own hypothesis about what may have happened. It seems it was a mod of an existing .net based augmented reality game being developed at MIT. Someone said something about "River City" and it was all very reminiscent of Chris Dede's work at Harvard University with MUVEES. (Incidentally, did anyone else notice that the screen shots all changed there recently... from something very like Second Life to something a good bit less sophisticated looking?)

Prensky mentioned that most mobile games are developed on PDAs, Pocket PCs in particular... perhaps because of availability... or difficulty of developing on phones. Someone asked how the students get the machines... it turns out a historical society at the site signs them out to families. (But I have question marks after this in my notes, so perhaps it was just hypothetical... still the thought is worth recording and sharing.)

Another participant mentioned YellowArrow.net, which was described as something of an art project which can be used for a whole lot more... something about challenge and texting. It seems it may be an example of using a web based back end for augmented reality.

A man I think identified himself as Alan Jackson (I think) introduced the Gizmondo, a handheld device with a camera, SMS, GPS, etc. They called it the mondo for short.

Once the amazing possibilities of this device were tossed around a bit, someone else brought up a game platfrom Georgia tech was working on, which would use simple mobile phones in conjunction with real world objects (such as stickers) and Skype to turn the entire campus into a learning environment. The point here was that they wanted anyone with cell phones to be able to use their system, instead of requiring special devices. They are not making anything for the phone, but rather something to use the phone with. This takes the most advantage of the high phone to student ration Prenksy has observed. In fact, it was suggested that even if you only use sound, you can use "phone tree" technology to create a game.

Louis Johnson from USC suggested that sound is nice, but that the games we want will demand more, and that we need to be able to use all the various functions of a phone at once. Imagine taking a call while playing through a level... while in line.

He also talked about his explorations into an interactive speech enabled game for learning language and culture. He felt that people want a mobile device that they can take with them. It sounds like USC is exploring the PSP as a platform for text to speech and speech to text. Prensky mentioned that there are already some Chinese and Japanese mini games for learning languages.

There were many other ideas and terms tossed around, including DS training for adults, mobile language studio (which lead to Johnson's remarks), flash mob (which I mostly didn't understand), a partnership with NASA, and a game related to the author Herman Hess in some way.

Prensky asked what I think are a few more important questions, too.

"Look at the affordances of this platform," he said, "and consider... what would benefit from a game designed on these platforms?" Later he added these thoughts: "These are always on, always connected, and always with you! Can you put business executive training on a phone? If there is competition? Now kids have cell phones that are made for them. Kids and parents can talk for free... is there something we can make for them that would contribute to their lives and communication?" (If so, and its a game, it sounds like a serious - and noble - game in indeed... perhaps even a Game for Change.)

"How can we use use this for storytelling?" he also asked. "How can we story tell on these machines? Interactive stories?" As someone who has studied and placed a great deal of importance on stories, I was particularly interested in this idea.

Someone else brought up that as AI improves and virtual things become more real, perhaps bonding benefits might be realized (for old people who might benefit from pets for instance). To editorialize for a minute... I'm very much looking forward to bonding with AI, and finding what common ground there may be, but I've finally realized that even if we have other intelligences to talk to, they won't have the same sort of biological impulses we do, which is so important in creating who we are, and we may always find more in common with our flesh and blood counterparts. Ok, enough science fiction... back to mobile gaming.

It is important to note that an representative from an education company asked, "How do we get one for every kid?" At this point I was about to finally contribute something to the conversation (rather than just taking furious notes), when Prensky spoke up again and gave a great response, which he concluded with the suggestion that these days he's happy to say "ok, kid. Find a computer" if a student doesn't have one. I feel the same way, by assigning collaborative group work (never mind differentiated instruction), teachers can take advantage of the technologies students are bringing into the classroom in stead of restricting them through some misguided sense to deliver something equal. I feel public education, including individual teachers, often deliberately delivers instruction to the lowest common denominator, which can't possibly be good for our society (to say nothing of teacher expectations). I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir when I say we need to put these devices to work rather than trying to regulate, control, or ban them from schools.

Prensky actually went on with this point, talking about the wonderful number of things these devices can do and expressing his frustration that all we're used to hearing about is phones and cheating. I was shocked! People in the room argued with him here! They seemed genuinely concerned about phones and cheating. Clearly I need to find a way to deal with this. I think Prensky asked "How can we improve [our teaching] using what we have? Open cell tests?"

BTW, three people in the room... of around 40 I'd say... didn't have cell phones! (At least, not on them.) I had two, my ancient Nokia, and my blackberry from work.

More to come...

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Mayo on Games for Science and Engineering

2005-11-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

I'm catching up on Serious Games Summit posts...

Kurt Squire's morning session was canceled (I later overheard he arrived late... must've been travel troubles), so I attended Merrilea Mayo's Enders Game for Science and Engineering: Games for Real, for Now, or We Lose the Brain War.

This session was rather alarmist in tone, but did provide a steady supply of statistics that those interested in serious games can use when making the case to policy makers. Unfortunately, it was lacking in concrete examples of serious games for science and engineering. And sadly, it had little to do with Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel. (Incidentally, I have an interesting Orson Scott Card story that really ought to be blogged at some point... later.)

Mayo focused on the brain war, or talent war between the US and the rest of the world. (Editorial: I'm not at all sure why this is framed as a war. Why is it good for us to bring free enterprise to other countries, but then not participate in a global market by keeping our talent to ourselves and denying others their talent? I suppose there is something to say for competition, but I'm not convinced that America losing the #1 spot in some of these fields isn't... at least ok.) She even explored the bell curve and the way that China's smartest people will be smarter than our smartest people - never mind that there will be more of them. She noted that the US does not have a strategy for being 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or even 10th place in these fields. Here she may have a point. Perhaps we need a strategy for survival, and reaching our potential, in a more level playing field.

This was all very reminiscent of Friedman's The World is Flat, which incidentally is now available for download on iTunes, too.

My favorite contribution of Mayo's was the phrase that "games might be a bronze bullet"... a useful bullet, but not a magical silver one. (Again we see a rather violent metaphor at work here, though.) One of her most intriguing subpoints was that if we educate through games, we need not work through the school system in order to have a national impact. In addition, the possibility for individually tailored learning experiences according to learning style and rate are great. At the same time, each copy of a game would be of uniform quality, while teachers are not. Using statistics of MMO subscriptions, Maya also made the suggestion that games that teach have the potential to reach more people than all of higher ed. (Turning this potential into reality would require an extraordinarily compelling game, though!)

She went on to provide some evidence that games can actually teach people better than lecture can. I missed much of this, as she was moving rather quickly, but I did latch on to one compelling statistic: In a traditional lecture, a student has the opportunity to ask an average of 1.1 questions per hour... about what I've had here, I might add... while in 1 to 1 tutoring situations a student might get to ask 20 to 30 questions per hour... and in a game, students will have to make a decision (admittedly, this is not a question) every second or so! (Prensky cited this again in the final session of the summit as well.)

She also made a strong point that games can help deliver information along with an emotional component, thus encouraging recall.

She concluded that "the opportunity is now" by making comparisons between the fledgling serious games industry today and the fledgling nano-tech industry of ten years ago, in which she was a participant. (So, is nano-tech no longer a fledgeling industry?) Naturally, she finished with a call to action and the slogan "Innovation or Third World Nation" - which, while alarmist, was at least catchy.

"Help us avoid being a third world nation," she said.

Finally, it's worth noting that this session was very full! I even saw Jim Gee lying on the floor in the isle. There were other familiar faces as well, from the Education Arcade and GLS Conference, but I've yet to get to know them all by name. When I mentioned this to Mike Guerena over iChat he responded that high attendence is good. And yes it is; these are all people, relatively smart and powerful people, interested in making the world a better place.

-Mark

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and why we are here...

2005-11-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

It's a funny thing to attend Teacher Expectaion Student Achievement (TESA) training and Professional Learning Community (PLC) training on either end of my time at the Serious Games Summit... it's framed my cutting edge experience with a strong reminer of why we (as educators) are here and how technologies such as serious games should be applied. They must serve as tools for helping students and educators (and thus society) to reach more of their potential.

If only my pBook was online here (there is patchy wifi, but I haven't got a good IP address yet) I could multi-task and get some of my other posts up... perhaps I can at least work on them... but at the risk of appearing "arrogant" and "disengaged" in front of my OCDE colleagues (and we can't have that anymore).

Oh well. 'Doing my best to uni-task, which admittedly includes the necessary level of distration, such as emailing my blog. As a card carrying digital alien - a digital imigrant (Prensky 2001) who has achieved resident alien status (to extend the metaphor) - I really do find it tough to "power down" and listen to someone present an all text powerpoint, however visionary the content.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark
--------------------------
Mark Wagner
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Computer Using Educators and Professional Learning Communities

2005-11-03T07:02:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I am posting this the morning after writing it. Blogger was down last night... and Google News (my browser homepage) and Google! Did anyone else experience this phenomenon? It was downright weird. I'm not sure if this is exactly what is under Dave Winer's skin, but perhaps we have come to depend on Google too much. Anyway, my post, which is itself just an update...

Today I was in Palm Springs for the conference planning committee meeting... preparing for the Computer Using Educators conference in March, something I highly recommend to all California educators! This year the OCDE Educational Technology unit will be running a room (with a mobile iBook lab) throughout the conference, hosting CUE workshops, and providing some exclusive OCDE content.

Tomorrow and Friday I will attend a Professional Learning Community training with the DeFours, finishing my 7 (working) days out of the office, which will make next week a busy one, too... but I suppose that never changes.

Regardless, I have notes on nine more sessions at the Serious Games Summit, though, and will be blogging that before moving on with my research this weekend. I think the re-processing will be useful for my coming project, which explores social constructivist principles of societal development. The comments on my keynote post are a powerful motivator, too! Thank you for those.

I've been FURLing some good stuff in the mean time. Subscribe.

-Mark

Serious Games Summit: Keynote

2005-10-31T10:15:00.000-08:00

Ok. I've attended the morning sessions, and fueled up on the box lunch, so it is time to compose some reflections for Educational Technology and Life.

The keynote session was designed

to explore new ways of applying fundamental concepts about wargame design to extract science from the art of wargame design. Those dynamics affect all of the six key dimensions that a wargame must use to represent reality: time, space, forces, effects, information, and command.

Dr. Peter Perla and Douglas Whatley were the presenters. I was much more impressed with Whatley... perhaps because his work has more relevance to my work in education, but also perhaps because he was a more dynamic speaker and didn't use a twenty year old picture in his bio, which Perla clearly did. ;)

I have written here before about my feelings on face to face trainings and presentations, and I found Dr. Perla's opening comments ironic. He opened with, "you guys are gamers, and gamers crave interaction, not lectures" and very quickly fell back on "to make sure I don't skip anything important I will inflict upon you what you see on the screen... some powerpoint." Not much later I noted: wow. this is boring and I'm already zoning out.

While that was not a great way to start the conference, Perla is undoubtedly an expert in his field, and did have something to offer. He related his experiences trying to describe the "art" of wargaming in terms of "scientific" principles that might be modeled. The general lesson for the participants (listeners) was this: it is worth out time to identify the principles of a field before creating a game for it. Perla suggested the following (paraphrased):

Identify basic principles.
Identify the philosophers.
Identify the basic concepts the game will represent.
Consider how to make the concepts tangible in the game universe.

This final point is becoming a common phrase in this field, and rightly so, I think. Clark Aldrich finished with a similar thought when I interviewed him for the OCDE a few weeks ago... he was talking about teachers using existing simulations in the classroom, and here Perla was speaking to developers. I hope people heed this call... because my overwhelming impression of this conference after three sessions is this: there are far more questions than answers. Each presenter I have seen has opened with something like "I don't know of any examples of this, but...."

Perla ended with a humorous reference to Alton Brown's Good Eats: knowing the science and history of food aids in its preparation and enjoyment. So is it with the subjects of games. Later, Whatley would suggest that developers become the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) when designing a serious game.

(Hey, there is a poster session for Dimenxian: Learn Math or Die Trying happening right next to me in the hall.)

Whatley offered a few gems right off the bat. Quoting Donald Thompson, he lead in with this quote:

"Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the education of young people is that we apprentice youngsters into 19th century science, rather than letting them play scientist."

He then offered his definition of serious games:

A product that is not specifically entertainment, but which uses entertainment or the techniques and processes of the entertainment business, to achieve a purpose.

The next bit was particularly targeted to attendees like me... non-developers. Whatley said "when people work with game developers they want to understand our process... so I've laid out a timeline here that is a rough overview of the development process." He suggested that game publishers have adapted to this process well, but the serious games market has not, and that prescriptive government contracts harm creative design process. Here are my notes on the process he presented (in a much more effective graphical form... and I see my tabs were not respected by blogger so I'll have to clean this up later):

1st Phase of Game Design: Concept Phase (1 mo.)
Craft a vision statement for product.
Have a separate statement for the project itself.
NOTE: Here is where our NSF project needs to begin.
2nd Phase: The Design Phase (1-3 mo?)
Design document
Technical design document
Risk mitigation document
What are the risks?
Understanding of pedagogy?
Hardware availability?
You don't need to solve the risk now, but you need a plan.
3rd Phase: Prototype Phase (3 mo)
Satisfy risk issues
Prove the concept
It'd be nice to finish this phase with a working prototype
4th Phase: Pre-production (6 mo)
Get one of each thing in the game to finished game quality
"a slice of game play"
(Sorry, he didn't flip this slide until too late and then skipped over it.)
5th Phase: Produciton Phase (6 mo.)
Crank out the work
6th Phase: Testing Phase (3 mo.)
Test, test, test
Code complete (you may want to lock down early)
Content complete
7th Phase: Support
Ongoing...

He also related several concept issues and design issues. I may have seen these things mentioned before, but this was effectively my introduction to the design document, the technical design document, and the risk mitigation plan. This is also where he called for a transfer of knowledge between the SME and the developers... and I presume, from his presentation, the opposite as well. Ultimately he wanted developers to make a project their own and to become passionate about their work. It is clear that he is passionate about his, and the work seems to be excellent.

He returned to Perla's six elements of a wargame (from the description above) and replaced Forces with Entities as a more general formula for serious games.

It is also worth noting that he pointed out (and questions were asked about this) that many games are designed more around "effects" than around "physics" in other words "skill charts" and "hit points" etc. instead of ballistics and anatomy.

Finally, he asked the rhetorical question... "are we tilting at windmills? Or can we really change the world!" And, yes, he ended that question with an exclamation point.

I was left with a few questions, still... what is an OODA loop? (I understood the concept, but didn't sort out the acronym.) And what did he mean by "design needs to be fungible"?

In the meantime I found myself at a table with Heather Chaplin, the author of Smartbomb and with someone from Breakaway Games among others. It may be interesting to note that there is a much more balanced gender ration here than at E3, and perhaps even more so than at Education Arcade or the Games, Learning, and Society Conference.

Naturally, the fact that I've been blogging this means I am not engaged in conversation at lunch, which is a negative in my book, but once again, as an educator I am something of an outsider at these conferences of developers... even one about serious games, including educational games. At least I find this valuable going into the afternoon sessions...

And I hope some of you find this helpful, too. (I've also been FURLing as much as I can during the session, so check out my archive and feed.)

Gotta go...

-Mark

Serious Games... and World of Warcraft

2005-10-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

Today I'm on my way to Washington DC and the Serious Games Summit. Right now I am on a layover for several hours in Denver... not far from where my faculty advisor, Dr. Jock Schorger lives, but he's away on vacation.

Earlier this week I got an apportunity to begin the book Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform by Michael and Chen and plan to finish it tonight in time for the summit tomorrow. I'm about half way through, but while I am on the ground and online, I am going to take a break and see how well it works playing World of Warcraft over airport Wi-Fi.

When I put both of these things in the title of this post, I realized this is also an opportunity to blog about a passage of the book I read on the last leg of the trip...

Noting the usefulness of multiplayer simulations, the military has been eying the potential of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Robert Gehorsam, now C.E.O. of Forterra Systems, approached the militarty in 2002 with an idea for using technology from There to simulate "warfare against insurgents in urban settings." There is an MMOG that pays particular attention to realism, especially in regard to player avatars. The realism of virtual worlds makes MMOG's ideal for dealing with urban warfare situations, such as occupation and dealing with insurgencies. In October 2004, Joint Forces Command officials tested the waters by conducting the largest real-time computer urban warfare simulation in history with gamers at three different sites controlling up to 100,000 entities.

In a December 2004 Millitary Simulation & Training article examining the capabilities of MMOGs. Jason Robar of the AISA Group wrote, "It is clear that a technology that can host 600,000 concurrent players in an environment of competing guilds and clasns, each a politico-military organization, has some military applications." MMOGs he went on, "offer some compelling new capabilities that may be able to augment and enhance how warfighters and the intelligence community prepare and train for... the 21st century."

... with MMOG technology bringing together troops from around the world, ... operations can be done for much less expense and with much more secrecy.

This passage turned me on to There, which looks similar to Second Life, and worth a look. Perhaps it might be useful for one of the projects we have underway at the OCDE. Also, Terra Nova posted excerpts from a related interview with a There excec, but the links they provide are now dead.

I look forward to seeing how MMOGs appear in the other parts of this book, particularly the section on education. (This reference was in the Military section, as you might imagine.)

I have been downloading a patch for World of Warcraft while typing this out (I normally play on my desktop PC), and it is eating up harddrive space... I had to ditch 1.3 GB of unwatched Rocketboom (I'd been saving for a plane flight) to make room. :(

Serious Games Summit

2005-10-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

It turns out I will be able to make it to the Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC this week afterall. I get into town Sunday night and fly out Tuesday night. If any of you will be there and would like to meet up, please leave a comment below or email me.

I endeavor to do a better job blogging this event than I normally do. :)

As for this evening... after a long day at work, tennis with Eva (we're in a league here in Irvine), a few hours of research, and now sticking to my new "blog before playing" policy (barely), I'm off to work on a quest as a paladin in World of Warcraft - and to see what I can learn from other players. :)

-Mark

Video Games in Education Webcast

2005-10-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

We have not solved the issue with the streaming server, but the Video Games in Education webcast is ready for download. Below I've recreated the announcement on our department website.

Video games are an important part of many student's lives. When playing games they are clearly engaged and motivated. They are also active, thinking critically, and taking risks. There is little doubt that a good deal of incidental learning is taking place when students play these games, but can we harness this powerful new media for intentional learning in formal education?

The Orange County Department of Education has produced a webcast that explores how computer and video games show a great deal of potential as teaching and learning tools.

Mike Guerena and Mark Wagner interviewed Henry Jenkins of the MIT Media Lab, James Paul Gee of the University of Wisconsin, and Clark Aldrich, author of "Simulations and the Future of Learning." The video includes commentary from Dave Kosak of Gamespy.com and from David McDivitt, a High School World History teacher who has integrated a computer game into his curriculum.

This is the first in a series of programs that create a dialogue with leading experts to explore the innovative use of new technologies in K-12 education. In November, we explore the use of iPods in the classroom.

Download the webcast here (To download, right click this link. On a PC choose "Save Link As" and on a Mac choose "Download Linked File" to download).

Since we don't have comments on the OCDE sight, please leave feedback about the video here.

-Mark

Serious Games Summit (with some "and life")

2005-10-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

After reading Beck and Wade's Got Game, my trip to USC last week, and my purcahse of Serious Games by Michael and Chen, I am seriously considering a last minute (and expensive) registration and trip to the Serious Games Summit in DC next week. I can actually clear my calendar those days and plan to approach my boss about it tomorrow.

If any readers would like to offer me any feedback on this idea, please leave a comment below or email me. I'd especially love to know if any of you are going.

Now, because blogging in bursts can be as bad as a blogging lull, I shall save the rest of my posts for later in the week, and turn to actually playing a game... at least until Eva is done watching her Harry Potter movie and assembling her stamps. I'll be playing World of Warcraft, which I actually hope to get Eva to start playing with me, since we've enjoyed (and completed) a few console based RPGs together. :)

-Mark

Update on the OCDE Video Games in Education Webcast and Podcasts

2005-10-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

I offer this post in the same spirit in which Peter Jackson is offering insight into the making of King Kong, frustrations and all, at KongIsKing.net...

A few days ago I announced that the project that Mike Guerena and I have been working on was as finished as it will get. The first OCDE Video Games in Education webcast was to be available in the archive at http://vc.ocde.us by around 4 pm Thursday. (There will also be two companion audio podcasts available at http://edtech.ocde.us soon after if is finally posted.)

Unfortunately, it's now Sunday night, and the webcast is not up yet. I'm glad announcing here is not the same as announcing on the OCDE site. We were adding things down to the wire and apparently there was trouble rendering, trouble compressing, and trouble posting to the webcasting server! I suspect it will be up on Monday as we've now cleared two of the three hurdles.

-Mark

David Shaffer on Epistemic Games

2005-10-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

It's time to catch up on some article annotations. This a brief annotation of Epistemic Games by David Williamson Shaffer.

Shaffer builds upon Gee's article by delving more deeply into the ideas of "authenticity" and "professionalism." I am most interested in his focus on communities of practice as I go forward with my research into social constructivism and principles of societal development.

Shaffer discusses the "reproductive practices" of a community, the ways in which newcomers develop the community's "ways of doing, being, caring, and knowing." The suggestion, of course, is that games or simulations might facilitate the reproducion of a community's values. This is the controversial power of games that Gee mentioned in his 2003, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, the controversy I'd very much like to be at the heart of.

Shaffer also discusses pedagogical praxis, and cites Dewey, who serves as the first theorist in my upcoming KAM. (He also later cites Vygotsky's thoughts on play, and I will be including Vygotsky in the KAM as well.) According to Shaffer, "Dewey argued that knowing and doing are tightly coupled." Once again, the suggestion is that games or simulations might facilitate this coupling by allowing a greater degree of doing than the traditional classroom might. This is a suggestion also made by Clark Aldrich in his latest work, Learning by Doing.

Perhaps most importantly, particularly for a researcher such as myself who is interested in the power of role playing games, Shaffer suggests that such games can be valuable "not in order to train for [specfic] pursuits in the traditional sense of vocational education, but rather because developing those epistemic frames provides studetns with an opportunity to see the world in a variety of ways that are fundamentally grounded in meaningful activity."

Unfortunately, here Shaffer also fall prey to the Planet Jar-Gon effect, which Prensky pointed out in Gee's work. The discussion of epistemic frames and epistemic games may be valuable to researchers, but may not be accessible to educators looking to implement these theories in their classrooms. Thankfully, in this article Shaffer offers a very concrete example of an epistemic game in Madison 2200, a project - along with several others - aimed at an audience of middle and high school students, the subjects of my own research.

-Mark

PS. As you may have noted in the previous post, Shaffer, too will be a focus of my next KAM.

Learning Agreement: Social Constructivist Theory and Digital Game-Based Learning

2005-10-23T19:52:00.000-07:00

Here is the Learning Agreement I sent to Dr. Nolan this evening for his feedback, and hopefully his approval to move forward with my second KAM.

I post this for the benefit of anyone else who is interested, and so that if there are any errors, readers of the blog might point them out or steer me in a different direction. Keep in mind I haven't actually read all of this yet, so I am somewhat out on a limb in terms of the introductions and in terms of the relationship between these theorists. Completing the reading and writing process will almost certainly change this significantly. Note that there are three sets of references, so keep scrolling down if you are interested in all parts of the learning agreement. I apologize in advance for the format of the references in blogger. At least all the data is here...

Learning Agreement for Core Knowledge Area Module Number 1: Principles of Societal Development

Social Constructivist Theory
and Digital Game-Based Learning

Mark D. Wagner

Dr. Joseph Nolan
Assessor

Walden University
October 23, 2005

Overview of the KAM
This Knowledge Area Module (KAM) will focus on the relationship between social constructivist theory and the application of digital game-based learning in formal k12 education. The breath section of the KAM will begin by presenting a synthesized working theory of constructivist societal development, with a focus on the works of Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bandura. This will be followed in the depth section by a critical examination of digital game-based learning theories in light of the working theory of constructivist societal development. This section will focus on the work of Squire, Steinkuehler, and Shaffer. Finally, the application section will conclude the KAM with the design of a three-hour hands-on professional development session to provide educators with guidance in using digital game-based learning, informed by theories of constructivist societal development, to facilitate student learning.

Breadth Objective
Synthesize a working theory of constructivist societal development, with a focus on the works of Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bandura.

Breadth Demonstration
In a scholarly paper of approximately 30 pages, a working theory of constructivist societal development will be presented.

Breadth Introduction
The purpose of this breadth portion of the KAM is to synthesize a working theory of constructivist societal development, with a focus on the works of Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bandura. The paper begins with an investigation of Dewey’s early twentieth century theories on democracy, experience, and education, particularly his expression of education as a social function. Following this is an exploration of Vygotsky’s later theories, including the role of the social environment in his concept of the zone of proximal development, and his belief that an individual develops primarily on a social level. Bruner built on Vygotsky’s theories with his inquiry-driven approach to learning and this paper will continue with an articulation of Bruner’s theories. Because “Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others” (Kearsley, n.d.), Bandura’s theories will be reviewed as well. Finally, this portion of the KAM will conclude with the presentation of a working theory of constructivist societal development synthesized from the work of these four theorists.

Breadth References
Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. New York: Collier Books.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. The Macmillan Company.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/dewey.html

Dewey, J. (1910) How we think. Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath.

Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School journal vol. 54 (January 1897), pp. 77-
80. http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm

Bandura, A. (2002). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. In Bryant, J., &
Zillman, D. Media effects: advances in theory and research. 121-153. Mahwah, N.J. : L. Elbaum Associates.

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective. Annual Review of
Psychology, 2001. Retrieved October 23, 2005, from Questia database:
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000979014

Bandura, A. (1999). A social cognitive theory of personality. In L. Pervin & O. John
(Eds.), Handbook of personality (2nd ed.), pp 154-196. New York: Guilford
Publications.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge University Press.

Bandura, A. (1997a). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: Freeman.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A . (1973). Aggression: a social learning analysis. Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A. & Walters, S. (1963). Social learning and personality development. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Bruner, J. S. (2004). Acts of meaning: four lectures on mind and culture. (Reprint).
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1997). The culture of education. (2nd Ed.) Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.

Bruner, J.S . (1991). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1977). The process of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1987). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.

Bussey, K., & Bandura, A. (1999). "Social cognitive theory of gender development and
differentiation." Psychological Review; 106, 676-713.

Kearsley, G. (n.d.) Social learning theory (A. Bandura). Available:
http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/tip/bandura.html

Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). Educational psychology. (Classics in Soviet Psychology Series)
CRC Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. MIT Press.

Vygotsk, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological
processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

NOTE: References may be added or removed throughout the process of writing the breadth portion of the KAM.

Depth Objective
In light of a working theory of constructivist societal development, critically examine theories of digital game-based learning, with a focus on the work of Squire, Steinkuehler, and Shaffer.

Depth Demonstration
In a scholarly paper of about 30 pages, theories of digital game-based learning will be critically examined in light of a working theory of constructivist societal development. In addition, an annotated bibliography of 15 articles will be amended to the paper.

Depth Introduction
The purpose of this depth portion of the KAM is to critically examine theories of digital game-based learning in light of a working theory of constructivist societal development. The focus is on the work of Squire, Steinkuehler, and Shaffer. Squire’s 2004 dissertation and subsequent work focused on the implementation of a multiplayer commercial off the shelf video game in formal k12 classroom environments. Similarly, Steinkuehler’s 2005 dissertation and subsequent work focused specifically on cognition and learning within the social spaces generated by massively multiplayer online games. Their colleague, Shaffer, has also produced work exploring the use of epistemic games to model professions, thus allowing students to learn by doing in a social context. This depth portion concludes with recommendations for how digital game-based learning, particularly multiplayer and massively multiplayer games, might be used in a formal k12 educational environment to support constructivist societal development, and thus student learning.

Depth References
Barab, S.A. & Squire, K.D. (2004). Design-based research: Putting a stake in the ground.
Journal of the Learning Sciences. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/jls-barab-squire-design.pdf

Beck, J. and Wade, M. (2004). Got game: How the gamer generation is reshaping
business forever. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Holland, W., Jenkins, H. & Squire, K. (2003). Theory by design. In Perron, B., and Wolf,
M. (Eds). Video Game Theory. Routledge. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/theory.doc

Jenkins, H., Klopfer, E., Squire, K. & Tan, P. (2003). Entering the education arcade.
Computers in Entertainment 1(1). http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/tea-acm.pdf

Jenkins, H. Squire, K. & Tan, P. (2004). You can’t bring that game to school!: Designing
Supercharged! In B. Laurel (Ed.) Design Research. Cambridge, MIT Press. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/laurel-curlers-images.doc

Klopfer, E. & Squire, K. (in press). Developing a platform for augmented reality gaming.
To appear in Educational Technology Research & Development.
http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/ETRD-handheld.doc

Shaffer, D. W. (in press). Epistemic frames for epistemic games. Computers and
Education. http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/ef4CE.pdf

Shaffer, D. W., and Clinton, K. A. (in press). Toolforthoughts: Reexamining thinking in
the digital age. Mind, Culture, and Activity.
http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/toolforthoughts-sub1.pdf

Shaffer, D. W. (2005). Multisubculturalism: Computers and the end of progressive
education. Under review by Teachers College Record. http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/multisubculturalism-draft1.pdf

Shaffer, D. W. (2005). Epistemic games. Innovate, 1(6). Reprinted in Computer
Education (in press).
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=79

Shaffer, D. W. (2004). Pedagogical praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial
education. Teachers College Record, 106(7), 1401-1421
http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/TCRpedprax.pdf

Shaffer, D. W. (2004). When computer-supported collaboration means computer-
supported competition: Professional mediation as a model for collaborative learning. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 15(2), 101-115.
http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/CollabCompetJILR.pdf

Shaffer, D. W., & Gee, J. P. (2005). Before every child is left behind: How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education. Under review by Educational Researcher. http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/learning_crisis.pdf

Shaffer, D. W., & Squire, K. D. (in press). The Pasteurization of education. In Education
and Technology: Issues in Policy, Administration and Application. London: Elsevier. http://coweb.wcer.wisc.edu/cv/papers/pasteurization_inpress.pdf

Shaffer, D. W., Squire, K. D., Halverson, R., & Gee, J. P. (2005). Video games and the future of learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(2), 104-111.
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers/Working_Paper_No_2005_4.php

Squire, K. (2004). Replaying history: learning world history through playing Civilization
III. Dissertation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html

Squire, K.D. Giovanetto, L., Devane, B. & Durga, S. (in press). From Users to designers:
Supporting a culture of simulation. To appear in Technology Trends.

Squire, K.D. (2005). Changing the game: What happens when videogames enter the
classroom?. Innovate 1(6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=82

Squire, K.D. (2005). Toward a theory of games literacy. Telemedium 52 (1-2), 9-15.

Squire, K. and the Games-to-Teach Research Team. (2003). Design principles of next-
generation gaming for education. Educational Technology.

Squire, K. & Jenkins, H. (2004). Harnessing the power of games in education. Insight
(3)1, 5-33. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/insight.pdf

Squire, K. (2003). Video games in education. International Journal of Intelligent
Simulations and Gaming (2) 1. http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/IJIS.doc

Squire, K.D. (2002). Rethinking the role of games in education. Game Studies, 2(1).
http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/squire/

Squire, K. D. and Steinkuehler, C. A. (in press). Generating CyberCulture/s: The case of
Star Wars Galaxies. In D. Gibbs & K. L. Krause (Eds.), Cyberlines: Languages and cultures of the Internet (2nd ed.). Albert Park, Australia: James Nicholas Publishers. http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SquireSteinkuehlerCYBER2004.pdf

Squire, K. D. and Steinkuehler, C. A. (2005). Meet the gamers. Library Journal, April 15.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516033.html

Steinkuehler, C. A. (in review). Situated identities as styles of play in massively
multiplayer online games. Manuscript in submission.

Steinkuehler, C. A. & Williams, D. (in review). Where everybody knows your (screen)
name: Online games as "third places." Manuscript in submission. 
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerWilliams2005.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. A. (in press). Cognition and literacy in massively multiplayer online
games. In D. Leu, J. Coiro, C. Lankshear, & K. Knobel (Eds.), Handbook of Research on New Literacies. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum.  http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerNEWLIT2005.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. A. (in press). Massively multiplayer online videogaming as participation
in a Discourse. Mind, Culture, & Activity. http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerMCA2005.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. A. (in press). The new third place: Massively multiplayer online gaming
in American youth culture. Tidskrift Journal of Research in Teacher Education, 3, 17-32.  http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerTIDSKRIFT2005.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). Why game (culture) studies now? Games and Culture, 1(1).
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerGC2006.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: a
critical approach. Dissertation. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin. Available: http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html

Steinkuehler, C.A., Black, R.W., & Clinton, K.A. (2005). Researching literacy as tool,
place, and way of being. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(1), 7-12.  http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerRRQ2005.pdf

Steinkuehler, C. A. (2004). A Discourse analysis of MMOG talk. In J. H. Smith & M.
Sicart (Eds.), Proceedings of the Other Players Conference. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen. http://www.itu.dk/op/proceedings.htm

Steinkuehler, C. A. (2004). Learning in massively multiplayer online games. In Y. B.
Kafai, W. A. Sandoval, N. Enyedy, A. S. Nixon, & F. Herrera (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 521–528). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/SteinkuehlerICLS2004.pdf

NOTE: References may be added or removed throughout the process of writing the depth portion of the KAM.

Application Objective
Design a three-hour hands-on professional development session to provide educators with guidance in using digital game-based learning, informed by theories of constructivist societal development, to facilitate student learning.

Application Demonstration
A written rationale of about 10 pages, appended with all session materials, will describe the professional development session, the justifications behind it, and the ways in which social constructivist theory is put into practice to guide educators in using digital game-based learning.

Application Introduction
The purpose of this application portion of the KAM was to design a three-hour hands-on professional development session to provide educators with guidance in using digital game-based learning, informed by theories of constructivist societal development, to facilitate student learning. The first hour provides participants with an overview of the theories discussed in the breadth and depth portion of this KAM. The second hour then allows participants the opportunity to experience some multiplayer games, such as those discussed in the first hour, hands-on. The final hour provides a facilitated discussion of how participants might return to their own practice and implement these theories. Though the actual delivery of this professional development session is beyond the scope of the KAM, it is designed for use as a pilot class for educators in the Technology Center at the Orange County Department of Education during the spring quarter of 2006.

Application References
NOTE: Though there may be additional references listed in the final product, it is anticipated that most references for this portion of the KAM will be drawn from the previous sections. There are no additional references to list at this time.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

PS. With only two minor changes, this was informally accepted by Dr. Nolan tonight. The formal process will take a bit longer, but I will begin tomorrow after work. Unfortunately, one of the first steps is to get my hands on a lot of books.

Objectives - Video Games and Social Constructivism

2005-10-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

Here is my first repurposed email post, addressed to Dr. Joseph Nolan of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who has agreed to be the assessor on my next Knowledge Area Module (KAM).

These objectives will define much of the research I am doing at Walden over the next three months, and so will consequently determine much of the content posted here. Please keep in mind that these are only in DRAFT form. That being said, I'd love any feedback that any of you might be able to offer here, particularly in terms of games in education theorists whose work might touch on societal development. Unfortunately, in order to cover new ground I need to avoid Prensky, Gee, and Aldrich who were featured in my last KAM. Anyway, fire away...

Dr. Nolan,

Here are some draft objectives. I love that they build on what I did in my first KAM, and I am excited about the direction of this inquiry. But, I wonder if social constructivism really qualifies as societal development theory? How do these read to you, and do you think this, or something like it, will fly? I'm anxious to hear your feedback.

KAM I Objectives

Breadth

Sythesize a working theory of constructivist societal development, with a focus on the works of Thoreau, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bandura.

Depth

Critically examine theories of digital game-based learning in light of a working theory of constructivist societal development, with a focus on the work of Squire, Steinkuehler, Shaffer, and Beck and Wade.

Application

Design a three hour hands-on professional development session to provide educators with guidance in using digital game-based learning, informed by theories of constructivist societal development, to facilitate student learning.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

Blogging Lull and a Video Games in Education Announcement

2005-10-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

This post is partly inspired by the call for personal status pages over at 43 folders. At any rate, with work at the Orange County Department of Education, my phd efforts at Walden University, life with my wife, and finally actually playing World of Warcraft (as part of my research... of course), I have been having trouble finding time to blog. In truth, the WoW time has probably replaced my occasional end of the day blogging. I really aught to be blogging about it though. (Actually, I feel I should be blogging about all of these things! The time required would be prohibitive, but I think I would get a lot out of blogging about other parts of my life.)

In any case, one of the ways I have recovered from a blogging lull in the past has been by repurposing writing that I am doing, because for work and Walden I am always writing, and much of it is relevant. What I have been writing tonight is email, so I plan to repurpose some of it as posts here.

Which brings me to another way I have combatted a lull in the past... I have announced some topics I have in the queue. Most of these are games and education related of course:

I have annotated the rest of the articles in the August/September issue of Innovate.
I also read and annotated Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by Beck and Wade.
I've interviewed Clark Aldrich and James Gee through work at the OCDE.
My colleague Mike Guerena interviewed Henry Jenkins for the same project. (See the announcement below.)
I visited USC to meet John Beck and Adam Carstens of Northstar Leadership Group, and to hear Gerard LaFond of Persuasive Games and Douglas Lowenstein, President of the ESA speak to John's graduate students.
And, of course, I am becoming personally familiar with the systems that facilitate (and describe) learning and collaboration in World of Warcraft.

And now for the announcement alluded to in the title of this post... the project that Mike Guerena and I have been working on is as finished as it will get. The first OCDE Video Games in Education webcast will be available in the archive at http://vc.ocde.us by around 4 pm today. There may also be two companion audio podcasts available at http://edtech.ocde.us soon after. (UPDATE: It's Sunday night, and the webcast is not up yet. I'm glad announcing here is not the same as announcing on the OCDE site. We were adding things down to the wire and apparently there was trouble rendering, trouble compressing, and trouble posting to the webcasting server! I'm sure it will be up on Monday as we've now cleared two of the three hurdles.)

Thank you for your comments and emails of encouragement over the past few weeks. I hope you'll continue to find value in what I post.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

Curious about the future of history based simulations?

2005-10-16T11:24:00.001-07:00

I FURLed this post form the Learning Circuits Blog yesterday, but thought it would be good for testing the Blog This feature of Google Reader.

Curious about the future of history based simulations?: "As I have said before, I hate it when e-learning hacks make superficial, overly-broad analogies to hot trends. 'E-learning should be like hybrid cars; Training should be like Ipod Nanos; Lessons learned from FEMA.' Having said that, I love a real analogy. For example, six years ago, I found it very useful to apply experiences with ERPs and CRMs to the then emerging area of LMSs. It did provide"

Robert Craven Presents to Los Al High School

2005-10-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Robert Craven led the interactive learning discussion.

The audience needed coffee.

What is Interactive Learning?

2005-10-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Here at Los Al High School, Jim says it's "Learning by doing... for example acting out a play... Shakespeare."
--------------------------
Mark Wagner
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Video Games in Education: Application

2005-10-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted much this past week, in part because I have worked too much, but also because I am now in the application phase of the research project I have been working on for the past few months. Once again, though, I have found myself lacking in motivation and structure for my work in this open-ended phase of the project, so I am once again turning to this blog as a possible solution - it worked wonders during the research phase.

So, I have been working on a 3 hour course titled "Introduction to Video Games in Education", which I will actually teach at the OCDE tech center on December 13th. (Sign up if you live in Orange County!) Tonight I offer up my draft of the slides I will use during the class. I have almost certainly over planned at this point, but all of the theory in the opening section I have previously presented in an entertaining 15 minutes at the Walden residency this summer, so this may be do-able, even if it may make participants' heads spin a bit.

In any case, if you are interested, take a look at the powerpoint file and let me know what you think. (I hope you have the fonts I used, but if not, that will be valuable feedback, too.) Thanks.

Click here for a zipped version of the powerpoint file. (2.7 MB - sorry, I have cable and don't usually bother resizing my images.)

In the coming days I hope to start posting reflections on articles again, too. I've been making my way through last months' Issue of Innovate.

Also, I had the good fortune of interviewing / chatting with Clark Aldrich on the phone last week. If all goes well, I will also be talking with James Paul Gee this Thursday afternoon. Parts of these talks will appear in the "Video Games in Education" webcast scheduled to be available October 13th through the OCDE at http://vc.ocde.us. At this point we also plan to produce a companion podcast in order to share more of the audio only conversations, so keep an eye on our RSS feed at http://edtech.ocde.us. Henry Jenkins will be interviewed via iSight for the webcast this week also (again, if all goes well), and other educators are submitting video of their implementations of games in education. I'm more than a little excited about this project, as you might imagine.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

PS. I finally received "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever" in the mail this afternoon. :)

Video Games in Education: An Annotated Bibliography

2005-09-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

The following is a draft of the annotated bibliography I've prepared for my advisor based on the last fifteen entries on this blog. (This has been reformated for sharing on this blog.) Perhaps others may find these brief annotations useful...

Annotated Bibliography

The study of computer and video games’ educational value is a relatively new field. Though there were earlier explorations of these ideas, all but two of the articles below were published in 2005, the same year this bibliography was written; one was published in 2004, and one was published in 2000. As cutting-edge theories, few of these articles represent formal research studies. However, all but one were published in peer-reviewed journals, and all of the authors are leading academics and practitioners with a depth of knowledge and experience in the subject of games and learning. They are paving the way for the brave educators of tomorrow, and for the formal research studies that will validate or improve upon these theories.

Appelman, Robert. (2005). Designing experiential modes: a key focus for immersive learning environments. TechTrends. 49 (3) 64-74.

In the tradition of John Dewey experiential learning, Appelman introduced a framework of Experiential Modes (EMs), the smallest components of learning environments: the observable attributes and non-observable perceptions of learners. He also discussed the use of existing and emerging technologies for new learning environments, giving the example of Sasha Barab's work with Quest Atlantis, and the use of existing commercial games as learning environments, such as Kurt Squire’s exploration of Civilization III in his dissertation. Though this article does not represent a formal research study, Appelman draws on his decades of experience in many mediums as an instructional designer, researcher, and educator to support his discussion. This article is heavy in new jargon, but such efforts at defining a vocabulary for the design of twenty-first century instruction will pave the way for further innovative instructional design.

Blumberg, F. C., and Sokol, L. M. (2004). Boys' and girls' use of cognitive strategy when learning to play video games. The Journal of General Psychology. 131 (2), 151-158.

In a formal qualitative study, Blumberg and Sokol tested 104 diverse second grade and fifth grade children to discover how they learn to play a video game. All recorded responses were coded, and statistical analysis of their data did not support the hypothesis that girls would show greater inclination toward external strategies (of learning and problem solving) and that boys would show greater inclination toward internal strategies. However, the authors cautioned that continued investigation is needed in order to understand "the continuing distinctions between boys' and girls' preferences for games that may have different ramifications for cognitive gains” (p. 157). In addition, the closing discussion touched on several more important issues, such as the age of the players and their self-efficacy as frequent gamers.

Carstens, A., and Beck, J. (2005). Get ready for the gamer generation. TechTrends. 49 (3) 22-25.

Carstens and Beck provided little specific evidence for their argument that the brains of gamers are "hard wired" differently than non-gamers. However, they commissioned a formal study of 2,5000 Americans and used instruments of previously established reliability to investigate the difference in belief systems between gamers and non-gamers. They found that “gamers showed a range of different opinions and behaviors compared to their non-gamer brethren.” (p. 23) They suggested that gamers have little respect for traditional authority and training, and they provide suggestions for trainers serving gamers, including the suggestion that traditional leaders and leaders of the gamer generation be trained side by side so that they might benefit from the strengths of both styles.

Caperton, I. (2005) For Seymour Papert "hard fun" is the essence of good games AND good education. Telemedium: the journal of media literacy. 52 (1 & 2) 16-19. Madison, WI: National Telemedia Council.

Idit Caperton was the first to graduate with a Ph.D. from the MIT media lab in Papert’s epistemology & learning research group. Seymour Papert has remained her mentor and collaborator for 22 years. Caperton shared stories of Seymour Papert and his philosophies, including his playful style of brainstorming, the story of how he came to love mathematics through his love of gears, and his concept of hard fun. She also related his belief that video games can be like constructionist projects and can help students to learn concepts and ways of thinking that might otherwise be beyond them.

Dede, C. (2005). Planning for neomillenial learning styles: implications for investments in technology and faculty. Educating the Net Generation Educause. www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/

In this chapter of Educating the Net Generation, Dede explored how emerging media affect learning styles, with a particular focus on virtual environments and augmented realities. He found learning situated in these environments important because of the capacity for transfer of learning to real problems. Like James Paul Gee he found that individual and group identities can also be developed in virtual or augmented environments. He explicitly mentions Whyville, Quest Atlantis, and the commercial MMORG Everquest in his discussion. He also cited Steinkuehler's research into the social spaces of MMORPGs. Dede's article also contained examples from his own research into the applications of MUVEs (multiuser virtual environments) in education, and his results were promising. Like Klopfer and Yoon (see below), Dede pointed out that professional development and support will be needed to implement these technologies for educational purposes.

DeKanter, N. (2005). Gaming redefines interactivity for learning. TechTrends. 49 (3) 26-31.

DeKanter, vice president of Muzzy Lane Software, was interested in using technology to develop peoples’ skills, and he believed that networked game simulations can provide a constructivist learning environment. Such games can provide a context for learning by making learning tasks authentic and anchoring them to a larger task or problem. DeKanter also discussed ways in which networked game simulations can provide opportunities for inquiry and collaboration, and ways in which they can provide support for constructivist teaching and learning. One example of such a game is Muzzy Lane Software’s Making History. Though DeKanter writes from the perspective of a commercial developer, his unique experience in developing a multiplayer video game simulation for educational purposes is valuable.

Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: how engagement strategies in popular video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development. 53 (2) 67-83.

Drawing explicitly on constructivist and cognitive research, educational psychologist Michele Dickey discussed ways in which "the strategies of design which lead to engagement" (p. 67) in video games might by put to use by instructional designers. She discussed point of view, narrative, setting, characters, and interactive elements, or hooks. Throughout the article, Dickey gives special attention to the importance of multiplayer games. This article does not represent a formal study, but does present a rich scholarly review of literature.

Emrich, Alan. (2005). The gamer generation: and why baby boomers shouldn't worry about them. Inspired by the book Got Game, John C. Beck, Mitchell Wade (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). http://www.alanemrich.com/SGI/Week_10/SGI%2010%20GAMER%20GENERATION.PDF

Ludologist Alan Emrich summarized key differences between the way Baby Boomers and the Gamer Generation grew up, between their resulting psyches, and the way they operate in the business world (or school). In addition there is a discussion of the sexism, violence, stereotypes, and isolation issues related to video games which is neither the usual panic inducing line of reasoning, nor the equally unsophisticated debunking argument. Though this article does not represent a formal study, Emerich’s report is a valuable overview of the issues regarding video games and society.

Gee, J. P. (2005). What would a state of the art instructional video game look like? Innovate. 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=80

Linguist and cognitive scientist James Paul Gee suggested that "the best commercial video games are already state of the art learning games" (p. 1) because they allow learning to take place situated in activities and experiences. However, he advocated for the importance of teachers, and for a balance between telling everything to learners and letting them experience everything on their own. Gee provided a vision and broad framework for those interested in harnessing the power of video games for educational purposes. However, because his theories are based primarily on his own (rich) experience with games rather than on a formal study, much work needs to be done in order to test and verify his theories, and in order to realistically implement his recommendations.

Jenkins, H., Wright, W. (2005) "Buy these problems because they're fun to solve!" Telemedium: the journal of media literacy. 52 (1 & 2) 16-19. Madison, WI: National Telemedia Council.

This article is a transcription of the conversation between Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, and Will Wright, creator of successful games such as SimCity and The Sims, at the Education Arcade conference at E3 on May 11, 2004. Like Caperton (above), they discussed the importance of fun in games, in education, and in problem solving in general. Wright imagined a very different education for students, one in which a game might be marked up with links to web-based information with an option for students to annotate he information. Wright concluded with a series of visionary questions followed by the suggestion that students are already living the education of the future when they get home from school. Though this article does not represent a formal study, it does provide a valuable window into the thinking of a leading academic and a leading developer in the field of games in education.

Kirkley, S. E. and Kirkley, J. R. (2005). Creating next generation blended learning environments using mixed reality, video games, and simulations. TechTrends. 49 (3) 42-53.

Instructional designers Kirkley and Kirkley addressed "the challenges and issues of designing next generation learning environments using current and emerging technologies" (p. 42). Throughout the discussion they were concerned with how to "balance design tensions between meeting learning objectives and creating engaging and fun learning environments" (p. 42). They discussed elements of context, collaboration, and support for student learning, and they included a section about the importance of fun in constructivist learning environments. The article concluded with a discussion of a game authoring tool for instructional designers which is under development by Kirkley and Kirkley. This article does not represent a formal study and the authors write from the perspective of commercial developers, but their development experience and their background in academic research contribute to the value of this discussion.

Klopfer, E., and Yoon, S. (2005). Deveoping games and simulations for today and tomorrow's tech savvy youth. TechTrends 49 (3) 33-41.

Eric Klopfer, director of the MIT Teacher Education Program, and Susan Yoon, a post-doctoral fellow in same program, were explicitly constructivist, opening their article with their interested in an authentic learning context and in collaborative learning (p. 33). Later, they also explicitly discuss the importance of inquiry-based learning (p. 40). Parts of the article are reminiscent of Prensky and Gee’s work, and the authors also drew on the work of Dede (above), the MIT Teacher Education Program, Games to Teach, and the Education Arcade. Finally, Klopfer and Yoon do not ignore the importance of professional development and assessment when these ideas are implemented in a real-world school, especially in the political climate of No Child Left Behind. Though this article does not represent a formal study, the authors write from a rich background in the formal development of new educational software tools and pedagogy to support these tools.

Noble, A., Best, D., Sidwell, C., Strang, J. (2000). Is an arcade-style computer game an effective medium for providing drug education to schoolchildren? Education for Health. 13 (3) 404-406.

With a subtly constructivist perspective, the authors explored an "interactive approach" (p. 404) to drug education for children. In a formal study they tested the effects of "an interactive CR-ROM based arcade-style motorcycle racing game" (p. 405) on students' understanding of the drug cocaine. Through analysis of interview responses gathered from 101 students aged 10 or 11, the authors concluded the game was successful in transmitting their message to the students, in large part because of "high levels of acceptability, even enthusiasm" from the students (p. 405). They did, however, caution that implementing the program would require "careful piloting and ongoing management" (p. 406).

Pillay, H. (2005). An investigation of cognitive processes engaged by recreational computer game players: implications for skills of the future. Journal of research on technology in education. 34 (3) 336-450.

Working from a constructivist perspective, Pillay explored "the value of computer games as a means for enhancing educational instruction" (p. 338). His formal study aimed to "analyze the cognitive processes engaged in while playing recreational computer games to help us understand how they might affect students' performance in subsequent tasks within a computer-based learning environment" (p. 340). With some qualifications, he was able to suggest that "playing recreational computer games may increase the time efficiency in accomplishing set educational tasks and obtaining correct solutions" (p. 345). The most serious limitation of his research was that he explored only the transfer of skills from games to other computer-based activities, and not to other non-computer-based activities. Also, the games used in this study were unsophisticated games that were very like the other computer based academic activities. Still, as an exploratory study, this research was valuable.

Williamson, B., and Facer, K, (2004). More than 'just a game': the implications for schools of children's computer games communities. Education, Communication, & Information. 4 (2/3) 255-270.

“Drawing on recent research on children’s use of information and communication technology out of school, and on complementary research within media, cultural, and youth studies” (p. 255), Williamson and Facer provided an overview of "policy, industry, and educational research perspectives" (p. 256), which are focused "on exploiting the potential of games' interfaces in schools" (p. 256). However, they were more interested in "how children's existing habits when playing computer games are situated within social contexts and practices, and how these practices, rather than the games software on which they are centered, might provide insights of relevance to more formal educational settings" (p. 256) They discussed playing games in peer groups (p. 259), expert gamers (p. 260), wider social resources for learning about games (p. 262), social contexts for learning in online games (p. 263), gender (p. 261), socio-economic status (p. 261), and "the potential applications of games practices to the formal educational setting" (p. 264). This included references to Gee, Prensky, MIT's Games-To-Teach project, and the Education Arcade consortium among others. Their closing discussion also included online role-playing as an example of "authentic practice within social context" (emphasis in the original, p. 267). Though this article does not represent a formal study, the authors, both from the NESTA Futurelab in the UK, provide a valuable overview of the topics above.

Winograd, D. (2005). Chris Dede on emerging technologies that enable distributed-learning communities. TechTrends. 49 (1) 39-40.

Winograd, an assistant professor of Academic Computing and Educational Communications York College in the City University of New York, recounted Dede's keynote at the AECT Conference in Chicago. Dede discussed ways in which multi-player video games could provide a context for learning and a framework for collaboration. He had previously been interested in the potential of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORGPs), such as Everquest, but spoke in Chicago about Multi-User Virtual Environments Experiential Simulators (MUVEES). While the games may provide support for student learning, Dede pointed out that educational technologists will need to serve as change agents and provide support for the implementing teachers. This article does not represent a formal study, but as an educational technologists impressions of Dede’s theories it is a valuable resource.

... there is more to come, too. I am working on the application section of my current Knowledge Area Module, but will move on to more research soon... and am reading the rest of the Innovate issue in the meantime. Also, I've finally gotten my feet wet in World of Warcraft. Eva and I finished playing Lord of the Rings: The Third Age together, so I am hoping to talk her into playing WoW with me. :)

Educational Technology and Life

FINAL POST: Educational Technology and Life has Moved

Reinvention Chapter 2—"I Quit"

Housekeeping: Bloglines Blogroll Script Doesn't Work?

iPSP versus iPod w/Video

Jerome S. Bruner, the Culture of Education, and Educational Technology

CUE Conference Concurrent Sessions Now Available!

777 unread items in my aggregator...

Blogging Demo at OCCUE

Podcast: Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education

Robert Craven, iPods, Podcasting, and Education

OCDE Ed Tech Presents at OCCUE 01/28/06

iPods, Cell Phones, Computers, email, and IM in a Sixth Grade Classroom

On the power of IM, Priorities, ...and Sleep

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The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion

Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and Educational Technology

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Testing iWeb on the fly while podcasting at the OCDE

Fwd: New book for parents and teachers interested in video games and education

Podcasting from the AUHSD in AB 75 Module 3

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Jerome S. Bruner, Video Games, and the Read/Write Web

Blogroll Updated

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Lev S. Vygotsky, The Read/Write Web, and Video Games in Education

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John Dewey's Pedagogic Creed, Educational Technology, and Video Games

Vacation Blog Break

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NECC Update: Context, Inquiry, and Collaboration: Video Games as Constructivist Learning Environments [Concurrent]

... and Life: Tonight I am happy to work at the OCDE.

Educators Play Food Force!

Introduction to Games in Education

... and Life: San Francisco

Fwd: NECC Proposal Status Notification

The OCDE Ed Tech News Feed Now Has Comments!

Moblog Demo for Teachers

More Teachers Learn about Blogs at the OCDE

Moblog Demo for AUHSD

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John Dewey on The Psychology of Occupations, The Development of Attention, and The Aim of History in Education

Contact Information Added to Side Bar

John Dewey on Froebel's Educational Principles

John Dewey on The Psychology of Elementary Education.

... and Life: The Read/Write Web and Playing Music with Friends

Karen Ibbitson on The Use of Complex Digital Games and Simulations in the Classroom to Enhance Engagement and Learning.

Blogging Advice Between Two Educational Technologists

Excel for Educators at Thurston Middle School, LBUSD

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Another Read/Write Web Class at the OCDE!

Moblogging at Golden West

The Read/Write Web at Golden West College

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December 7th is my Blogiversary

Comments on John Dewey

John Dewey on The School and The Life of the Child

John Dewey on The School and Society

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Serious Games Summit: McDowell, Cannon-Bowers, and Prensky on The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design

Serious Games Summit: Herdlick on Making Educational Games That Are Elegant, Fun and Really Educational

... and Life: More Roses (because we are all fragile)

Serious Games Summit: Games for Change (Life Changing Stuff Here)

The OCDE Educational Technology Podcast

Serious Games Summit: Michael and Chen on Assessment in Serious Games

Serious Games Summit: Burak and Sweeney on PeaceMaker

... and Life: Roses Overhead

Serious Games Summit: Roche on How the United Nations Fights Hunger with Food Force