Category Archives: Discussion

Creative Mode

I sat down with my 9-year-old today to talk about games. I actually recorded an interview with her, but I’ll summarize some of the main points.

All Gender Bathroom, Minecraft, Made by Margot, age 9

Minecraft Bathroom, Made by Margot, age 9

  • Her favorite games are Minecraft, Monument Valley, and Toca City
  • You can play Minecraft in Survival Mode or in Creative Mode. In Survival, you need to find food, weapons etc. In Creative, those things are provided.
  • She says that she prefers Creative because “If you have to concentrate on staying alive all the time, you can’t think of many other things.”
  • In Minecraft, you build in a landscape. Nevertheless, she specifically said it is not a building game because the objective is not to out-build a competitor or to build up. You can do anything you want with the landscape. A “building game” for her would be defined by a requirement to build in some specific way.
  • Monument Valley is a puzzle-solving game. If she can’t figure out how to solve a challenge, she tries methods she knows first. If that doesn’t work, she taps areas of the puzzle to see if there are any hidden tools.
  • In Toca City, her favorite thing to do is to record plays in the town theater.
  • In school, they use iPads occasionally that have a handful of games available, in particular Math Blaster. But she doesn’t think of school as a place for games.

Keramidas: yay; Bogost: okay.

Keynote speech at 2015 CCCC by Adam Banks

In his article, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Ian Bogost grapples with (rants about) the political consequences of the rhetorical decisions we make in how we describe designing games for learning. In order to get a sense of the way in which game design is a radical departure from “many of the practices of industrialization that gamification silently endorses,” it’s useful to pair his discussion with the more in-depth attention to questions of design and pedagogy that Kimon Keramidas provides in “What Games Have to Teach us about Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course Design and Curricular Development.” But first, for those of you who are reading this to get the gist of the articles, I’ll summarize Bogost’s beef with “gamification.” As implied above, gamification according to Bogost involves applying an abstract, therefore vague, concept to an already-existing set and structure of practices (in this case, pedagogical practices) instead of creating a new system. A new system, my best guess suggests, would involve reorienting pedagogy from what Freire called the “banking concept of education” (Freire 72) to designing a learning process through encounters in and with a context.

 

This seems to be the main difference in a game-design system: that of switching from the priority of a teacher-expert passing knowledge to a student to that of a student using the teacher as one of a number of tools in a rewarding, stimulating, and challenging learning environment designed by the instructor. This learning process, I gather from Keramidas, depends on the student making decisions and learning how to make better or wiser decisions in a context that periodically gives them “value assigned” outcomes and opportunities for “meaningful play.” This is what Keramidas has described as a learning environment compatible with game design. Using Jesper Juul’s definition of a game, he outlines the elements of game design that parallel, in some way, course design and learning environments; and those that could parallel game design more than they currently do; or that differ in an important way. Regarding difference, for example, Keramidas notes that games are isolated from real-world consequences for the player unlike the learning environments that explicitly prepare students for their activities beyond the classroom. These “non-negotiable outcomes,” for Keramidas, add to the relative worth of classrooms over games.

 

Keramidas is careful to point out that, in many ways, the description of a game, and its individual essentials, is already compatible with contemporary pedagogy. Like games, learning environments have rules that set these spaces apart from others. They have variable, quantifiable outcomes. They have “value assigned to possible outcomes,” such as grades or new challenges. As in both games and learning, the “player” must exert effort to get anything out of the process. However, they don’t necessarily have play: certainly not enough of it. Play, in this context, involves much more than having a light-hearted attitude or a variety of low-stakes, creative activities. Drawing from Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, Keramidas stipulates that “meaningful play” includes multi-player interactions, an emphasis on interactivity in general; having tasks/work that are/is relevant to the next and future activities, as in the case of multi-staged assignments, and opportunities for the “player” to make choices. Keramidas also asserts, through Salen and Zimmerman, that the rules (or rule makers) of the learning environments could learn from games by including more student-led learning and more opportunities to negotiate outcomes and assessments for assignments.

 

If any of you are involved in the College Composition community, and if any of you have attended a Conference on College Composition and Communication, you already know about and put into practice the principles listed above, and you’ve probably done so without thinking about games or gamification. That’s why it’s surprising that Bogost characterizes the compositionists at the C’s the way that he does. Tweed and patches and twin sets? I don’t know what lenses he was wearing. Teachers come to the C’s dressed like they’re looking for a hip publisher or a “conference boyfriend.” He implies that it took them forever to catch on to his ideas, but compositionists have emphasized play and interactivity since the 1970’s, and books like Geoffrey Sirc’s Composition as a Happening (2002) and Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011) trace and revise some of that history without ever even mentioning Ian Bogost.

 

Perhaps this historical precedent is why the conference organizers gave him one of the most prime spots for presenting—the second session of the first day. I was dismayed that Bogost took a long-time allay of responsive, interactive pedagogy with multi-staged assignment sequences, teacher-student collaborative assessment rubrics, and multimodal compositions that emphasize rhetorical decisions over mechanics, and turned this community into a straw man for his complaint about “gamification.” He must have been referring to the administrators (perhaps not present at C’s) who determine the budgets for those rad WPAs (writing program administrators) who provide the space and resources for composition classrooms to be some of the most playful and interdisciplinary spaces in the university. If we are to use criteria drawn up by Keramidas and Bogost, compositionists already are game designers. We are also extremely conscious of the real-world, non-negotiable outcomes and consequences of our courses, and therefore of our curriculum design. So, what kind of game is this? Calling compositionists the traditionalist keepers of poor practices? Perhaps it took him so long to get a spot at our conference because he didn’t bother to learn about it, or about us.

 

 

 

 

How do people learn?

In “How People Learn,” Bransford et al. (1999) provide a compelling overview of the history and recent landmarks in the study of cognition and learning. In particular, the author notes the developments in the understanding of knowledge organization, infant cognition, knowledge transfer, and situated learning. Noting the relevance across multiple fields of social science, the authors commend the contributions from a wide range of disciplines including social psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience. Advanced research methodologies have also greatly impacted cognitive science research, and in terms of scientific credibility, seem a great improvement from the initial introspective self-report labs from which scientific psychological and cognitive inquiry first emerged.

In previous readings about the science of learning, I have often found it to be an area that is difficult to discretely define. Not only does the science of learning extend throughout the course of human lifespan development, but it also aims to describe a personal process in a generalizable manner, to be multidisciplinary, and to be readily applicable. Seemingly inconsistent in its conclusions, with both Behaviorism and schema theory representing viable aspects of learning, the theories of learning area constantly evolving from their mechanistic origins. Today we recognize that the learning of facts and concepts are both of great importance, as the active integration of the former into the later, supports the construction of a foundational knowledge base. Yet, defining the basics of “how” learning occurs in education, it is surprisingly complex.

The current dilemmas in cognitive science research are also in some ways the most intriguing. In particular, the challenge of equitably evaluating learning make it greatly important to define related concepts such as pre-existing knowledge, understanding, comprehension, analysis, and other critical thinking skills.

The first chapter of the book highlights the significance of building a linkage between home and school-based learning environments. Among the principles, the authors recommend creating environments that are learner-centered, knowledge-centered by providing a justification for what, why, and how content is taught, afford opportunities for formative assessments and feedback, and pay appropriate consideration to the context in which learning occurs. The chapter ends with recommendations for constructing effective learning environments.

The second chapter presents the paradigm of the expert-novice. In this chapter, we learn that a unique mental characteristic that separates experts from novices is their ability to meaningfully chunk and organize relevant domain-specific conceptual information. Adaptive experts can also learn to apply original solutions to problems within their domain of expertise, while novices may require more direct support and lengthier time to produce solutions to problems. The authors suggest that to make this transition from novice to expert, the novice learner must undergo hours of meaningful practice before knowledge becomes conditionalized and can be retrieved with fluency when necessary.

The seventh chapter deals with the importance of pedagogical content knowledge, which in addition to expert knowledge, can lead to more effective instructional practices. According to Bransford et al. (1999, p. 155), “Expert teachers know the structure of their disciplines, and this knowledge provides them with cognitive roadmaps that guide the assignments they give students, the assessments they use to gauge students’ progress, and the questions they ask in the give and take of classroom life.” That is to say, that the experienced teacher with good pedagogical content knowledge also possesses a model of how the prototypical student would learn the content. Included in this chapter, are examples of teaching across multiple disciplines, including history, mathematics, and science.

Provocation:

  1. In “How People Learn,” we are given the sense that all learning is context-dependent. Do you agree or disagree and why? Is it possible that learning can occur across contexts such that information that you learn in one context can be readily applied to another? How could the context-dependency of learning affect how we interact online vs. in offline environments? Is this knowledge transferrable?
  2. In chapter 2, the authors suggest that instruction that is “a mile wide and an inch deep” is generally not a constructive form of learning and results in a superficial level of knowledge. In your own experience as a student and/or a teacher, how do you view this breadth vs. depth trade-off? Is there ever a risk in covering one topic “too in-depth”? In an ideal world, how should instructional time be allocated for sufficient coverage?
  3. The authors suggest that expertise in a domain does not necessarily result in good teaching ability. In fact, the automatization of expert knowledge can make it difficult to verbalize the information and to effectively communicate it to novices. What do you think this means about the nature of teaching? How does one revert to an earlier stage of expertise in order to communicate knowledge to a novice learner? Is this merely a process of deconstructing implicit knowledge into an explicit, readily verbalized form?
  4. In chapter 7, the authors cover some effective teaching strategies in multiple content-areas. If you were to provide instruction to novice students in your area, what strategies would you consider using? Would the strategies be similar or substantially different than those used in the content-areas described?

References

Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Eds.) (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

James Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy?

In 2003, the year that “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy?” was published, the prevailing sentiment about video games (at least in the culture of mainstream education) was that they were a waste of time at best, malicious influences, at worst. Most games were narrowly targeted to young, white, middle-class male players, and created overwhelmingly by designers fitting the same profile (they still are, but today to a lesser extent). The gaming habits of the perpetrators of the Columbine school shooting, which occurred just a few short years prior, were well-analyzed in the media. The games, supposedly, made the perpetrators “aggressive” and “anti-social” and allowed them to practice fantasies they would later enact in real life. This idea has certainly had its detractors over the years — with scores of think-pieces published about the tenuousness of the causal link between games and violence. I agree — these are the wrong questions to ask about violence and games in society.

But Gee’s work does locate “the theory of human learning built into good video games.” He draws connections between the kind of learning which happens through engagement in the semiotic domain of video game play, and the latest research on how people learn from situated cognition, New Literacy Studies, and connectionism. He extrapolates dozens of principles from games that promote learning.

First provocation, inspired by a talk I heard by Scott Price, now of BrainPOP: If we accept that games are powerful tools for active and critical learning, does that mean we accept that games can teach violence? What are the implications of that?

For Gee, active learning is when we learn to experience the world in a new way, gain the potential to join a new social group, and gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving within the semiotic domain we are entering (video games, biology, etc), and related domains. Critical learning for Gee is active learning PLUS the idea that the learner comes to innovate within the semiotic domain in novel and unpredictable ways.

His argument is that games promote both active learning AND critical learning. The caveat — and it’s a big one from my perspective — is that when he says “games promote…” he means, well-designed games played in specific ways, and within communities that promote active and critical learning.

Second provocation: When are games NOT promoting active and critical learning? Think about the Bogost piece. Should we worry about half-baked principles from games based learning, and poorly designed “edu-tainment” games encroaching on education spaces?

Last year, I ran a game design club at a high school in the South Bronx. I would classify the students who selected into the club as the “hard core” gamer kids of the school. In reflecting on their gaming habits, it’s become very clear to me that they were active learners in the semiotic domain of video games, maybe even, as Gee writes “on their way” to being critical learners in that domain. They were passionately vested, had encyclopedic knowledge of the in-game worlds, they could explain status hierarchies in their gaming communities, they were taking part in online forums of players and fans, creating and watching their own game walkthroughs on YouTube, diving into texts well-beyond their “reading levels” so they might mod their own Minecraft worlds. A lot of learning was taking place.

But their arguments about why they liked their favorite games lacked reasoning, evidence, and formal vocabulary. It was difficult to see how they’d parlay the problem-solving they’d cultivated through gaming into problem-solving in other domains. They needed opportunities to make the connection between domains. That’s where we as facilitators came in. We taught vocabulary like mechanics, pace, components, and personality traits of gamers like “killers,” “socializers” and “explorers” and then guided them as they wrote and filmed their own video game reviews. It was clear that their knowledge gained from hours of play and engagement outside of school was crucial to their success on the assignment, but I do believe the facilitation work we did in the academic domain pushed them to a next level. The students needed all kinds of experiences in order to become active and critical learners: play experiences, social experiences (in and outside of games), AND academic experiences. That’s connected learning!

Third provocation: Can one be a critical learner solely through play, self-guided tutorials, socializing, and peer-to-peer exchanges within a semiotic domain? To what extent does critical learning require intentional facilitation, and to what extent does it happen in the juncture BETWEEN semiotic domains, rather than in one or another?

Finally, the high school students I worked with were all from the South Bronx, most of them Latino and/or Black, and low-income. Only one was female. Gee touches a little bit on the identity of the learner as an important factor in determining the extent to which one feels comfortable learning in a new semiotic domain, ie: the example of the African-American student who feels that learning science is “acting white.” He writes about how one can “repair” (and I don’t like that deficit based term, but I’m going with his words here), a students’ identity as a learner through “good teaching in socially and culturally diverse classrooms.” I welcome thoughts on Gee’s notions there, but I also want to know:

Fourth provocation: Teachers can work to control, to some extent, students’ introduction to semiotic domains like science, math, English, and Social Studies. But if we are using gaming as a model for learning principles, how do we reconcile the fact that the semiotic domain of video games, which students are engaging in on their own time, can be overtly sexist and racist spaces? (Just Google gamergate)

A lot going on for me this week in reading Gee — looking forward to the conversation!

Games for change…

Hello all,

Of course in reading Gee this week, all I want to do is procrastinate by playing games. At least there are some awesome “games for change” or the so-called “serious games” out there which might even provide interesting fodder for conversation next week. Here are some of my faves, in case you too, want to procrastinate:

LIM, about navigating the world as a transgender person, though its message can be more broadly applied to navigating the world with a difference of some kind.

The Republia Times

McVideo Game

Trauma, a game about bullying and discrimination

Ayiti, Cost of Life, a game made by some students in the program I used to work for at Global Kids (though before my time at the org)

Tampon Run, made by some teens at a Girls Who Code event.

A game created by some students of mine on Scratch in 2014!

Darfur is Dying 

The Migrant Trail – About undocumented immigrants

Click on the link on this page for some interactive fiction created by Auntie Pixelante in Twine

Please add to this list in the comments if you play any fun ones… these are all playable for free online!

Lecture Me?

Did any of you have a moment to catch this Sunday Review piece today? Lecture Me. Really. It’s far from the only of its kind (it might be a mildly amusing exercise to collect and compare lecture-defense articles) but I think it bridges well between our in-person discussion of class formats and expectations, and this week’s readings on pedagogy.

Response to Pedagogy

While removing the work of Paulo Friere from a cultural and historical context is an oversight that the author himself would likely condemn, I think many of the ideas expressed in the first two chapters of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” still resonant within the current setting, and so will not attempt to venture into the historical significance of his work. Friere (1970) writes describing the concept of co-intentional education “Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.” This method of education stands in contrast with the more transmission or “banking” model of education, where the student is treated as an empty receptacle where information is transmitted directly to the student who passively receives it. In such a model, emphasis rests on the recitation of learned facts rather than the personal development of individual thought structures to support a more meaningful process of learning.

Given that the title of these certificate courses includes the word “interactive,” it likely represents some central aspect of an ideology of pedagogy in which we have vested some interest. What is the significance of interactivity in teaching and learning? What elements of education can either hinder or facilitate such interaction and the co-construction of knowledge between “student” and “teacher”?

While the namesake may not be translated into a concise English equivalent, how would you attempt to define to concept of conscientização?

How can technology be used to resolve the “teacher student contradiction (Friere, p. 72-73)? Consider the ten attitudes and practices that are provided as examples.

Borrowing from the tradition of de Beauvoir, Friere advocates for changing the situations of those who are oppressed rather than the consciousness of that which oppresses them. Do you agree that this is an admirable goal? Why or why not? If we change the nature of a social consciousness, by equivocating the teacher and the student, is it possible that we have changed nature of knowledge acquisition itself?

 

Reference

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed.). New York: Continuum,1970.

Kerr needed a rap session with Freire

First, I’ll start with a very terse critique of Kerr’s The Uses of the University turned “multiversity.” I give anyone, including Kerr, credit for engaging in any reasonably thoughtful discussion of the university because higher education discourse often inspires a deer in headlights level of frustration (I would say he pushes, at the very least, to the brink of paralysis).

I felt a palpable sense of angst throughout this reading, despite agreeing with a number of points throughout Kerr’s account. I couldn’t shake a constant sense of distrust towards an individual at the pinnacle of privilege, speaking so clinically, and dispassionately about his own subject – ironic considering his biography. Kerr took the structuralist portrayal of the university slightly too far for me, but considering his time, and position (I am calling the kettle so black right now…) it would seem pretty difficult to avoid. This is not to say that there isn’t tremendous value in revealing the skeleton and arteries of large institutional organisms. I think in part, his methods are an overture to what I believe is a core purpose of the university (see 4th paragraph). But since we live in America, and it’s election season, the myriad problems of bureaucratic systems with gargantuan societal mandates are all too familiar to us. And in national politics as in the university, binarism rises to the top of the discourse most of the time.

My fatigue with partisan, radical discourse in mainstream politics today makes me loathe to broach the “university” and “multiversity” nomenclature. I also didn’t find it particularly riveting. Instead, I want to talk about what I think Kerr’s discussion missed. His account of the two great university traditions, the British undergraduate system, and the German graduate system, is the most he speaks on the role of teaching and learning in the university, besides a brief aside about technology’s potential to supplant instruction, and free up research time. This is a true blunder. If the academy were to put the same level of value on teaching as on scholarship, (and perhaps unsilo the two) I think it would help clear up a lot of discord about the “university,” inside and out.

How to improve teaching and learning? Hire scholars who are good teachers. They exist, and the two practices don’t need to be mutually exclusive. I’m talking about people who care deeply about critical pedagogy. I think critiques on the merit of liberal arts colleges versus community and technical colleges matter a little less when students are equally given the space to develop critical literacies and are empowered to become scholars in their own right, no matter their discipline of interest or level of advancement. Unfortunately, the current system of faculty tenure and promotion fails to make room for teaching, let alone incentivize it. The contingent faculty labor band aid damages the situation more. Yet despite this, many faculty still find opportunities to drive critical pedagogy into their curricula. They’re doing this without fanfare or additional remuneration? There must be something to this teaching thing.

Provocations:

Relate any number of topics to the text: the university’s role in perpetuating the class system, fueling neoliberalism, the corporatization of the university, college as commodity

What can critical pedagogy fix? What can’t it?

Respond to this quote:

“This creates new roles for education; but it is also part of the process of freezing the structure of the occupational pyramid and assuring that the well-behaved do advance, even if the geniuses do not. The university is used as an egg-candling device; and it is, perhaps, a better one than any other that can be devised, but the process takes some of the adventure out of occupational survival, and does for some professions what the closed shop has done for some unions.” p. 83-84 of The Uses of the University by Clark Kerr.

Lepore and Bosquet

Of course when I responded to Robert last night and mentioned how there weren’t any other posts up, I didn’t realize that I was responsible for provoking this week! So sorry for the delay.

I already summed up some of my thinking about the Bosquet and Lepore readings on Robert’s thread, so rather than repeat myself, I thought I’d cut right to the chase with some questions.

Lepore:

  • Lepore traces the history of theories of change, from divine providence to historicism, progress, evolution, growth, innovation, and now disruption — “a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.” One historical theory of change that Lepore leaves out is Marx’s, which in some ways borrowed from Darwin’s evolution, but as we know from our reading and David Harvey’s lectures, relied on a dialectic of many other components. How might we use Marx’s ideas about how societies change to help us understand disruption’s popularity, or to help Lepore debunk it?

Bosquet:

I’m making lots of Marx connections today. Bosquet focuses on changing labor relations in the academy, writing: “Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university, the university makes late capitalism happen. The flexible faculty are just one dimension of an informationalized higher ed — the transformation of the university into an efficient and thoroughly accountable environment through which streaming education can be made available in the way that information is delivered: just in time, on demand, in spasms synchronized to the work rhythm of student labor on the shop floor” (44). 

  • Bosquet’s notion of disruption is far different then Christensen’s — he’s writing about grassroots actions that adjuncts and graduate students might take to raise consciousness about and organize for better working conditions, higher salaries, and tenure. What role might stronger unions and this form of disruption play as universities seek to address “the crisis of higher ed” through tech innovations, as described in the other readings?
  • We extended Marx’ analogies about the machine, the tool, and the power source to computers a few weeks ago in class. How might Marxist ideas about the role of the machine and technology come in to play in thinking about the mechanization of university teaching and learning? To what extent does the analogy hold? Where might it break down?

The Historical Expansion of Higher Education

In Chapter 2 of Dr. Steve Brier’s text, we see the extensive history of public education in California and New York as a result of the Zook Commission of the 1940’s. Driven, like many institutions, by the economic shifts (positive and negative) of a post-war state, both states institute a tri-part system of higher education. As a native Californian, I was impressed by Brier’s clear discussion of the hierarchical structure in California, a structure that he admits still maintains its hold today. While a handful of California State Universities grant doctoral degrees, the exclusivity of this terminal degree is still largely reserved for University of California students. The prestige of these universities is akin to that of exclusive private universities. As a result, community colleges and CSUs educate the vast majority of practitioners and professionals at a variety of levels.

The “success” of the tri-part structure was not as strong in New York, but the tensions between the private elite schools and the growing public institutions were much like the UC-CSU wars on the west. The fight for access to education for all students was clear on both coasts, but New York actually maintained this commitment for a lengthier period of time than its western counterpart. What we notice is this need for public education but a state government refusal to provide necessary funding.

As the student population grew and the number of institutions followed suit, the hierarchal tension trickled down to student populations and manifested itself in student resistance (50-58). Ironically, the UC Chancellor’s attempt to maintain a bureaucratic structure bent on UC elitism did not account for the student-led Free Speech Movement’s mission to undermine such systems. Sadly, while these movements led to the revitalization of the social sciences and an expansion of community colleges (along with an increase in consciousness raising among the masses) on both coasts and in-between, they eventually adversely affected the blurring of the stratification of these growing public institutions. Consequently, remediation was essentially removed from the CUNY senior colleges, and student tuition was integrated at the junior, senior, and graduate levels on both coasts.

Dr. Brier’s work elucidates the contradictions of equitable access to education and the maintenance of systems of economic power. It speaks to this nation’s simultaneous attempt to meet the needs of marginalized populations as it adheres to business management models. At the risk of sounding like Marx (and a number of radicals), I read this work as an explanation of the inevitable tensions that arise from an educational system that is born out of an industrial capitalistic (and sexist and racist) economic structure and political structure. While the aims of the Zook report carry significant merit, the deeply flawed economic and governmental structures of the nation ensured limits. And the current neoliberal movements have spurred a new wave of defunding of higher education (65-66) that could very well mean a retrogression.

Upon reading this text, I could not help but think of my longstanding love-hate relationship with UC schools (not meant to incite convo). Outside of that, I was riveted by the live broadcasts of over-enrolled undergrad courses, the connections to Little Brother, the rich historical accounts, and the mention of the mechanization of education. A number of questions came to mind:
*What do I do with this new information?
*Is there an underlying conversation of “quality” across these higher ed systems?
*What does this history reveal about power? Did the students REALLY win?
*What do we make of education now? How close/far are we to/from the Zook vision and how do we gauge that?
*How do we explore curriculum & pedagogy at these three levels of education?
*What does this narrative of education funding politics say about our history and future in higher ed?

Please don’t answer all my questions–just thinking aloud…