Thinking through technology & learning: Bass’s Engines of Inquiry

The imaginary/conceptual “game of perfect information” holds that, with the right setup computers can satisfy all our informational needs. When the language of this game enters into the conversation about technology and education, the conversation goes awry. According to Bass, when attempting to discern the impact of technology on learning we must consider: (a) how teaching/learning is a complex process that occurs and builds knowledge over time and (b) how learning contexts must be analyzed ecologically with the understanding that learning does not happen in one place, one way, via one device or method.

Before considering technology, instructors may need to take a step back and ask basic questions about their own teaching. From these considerations, we can ask: “what aspects of good teaching, and contexts of good learning, do particular technologies serve well?” Rather than engaging with technology as an add-on to our pedagogy, technology can act as a medium for our own pedagogical goals and aspirations. According to Bass, as scholars, our questions drive our desire to learn and this also holds true for students who often engage and learn the most when they are driven by questions that interest them. Questioning our motivations to learn and our pedagogy allows us to better assess the role that technology can play in facilitating and energizing our students’ engines of inquiry.

According to Bass, technology can help facilitate 6 aspects of quality learning: distributive learning, authentic tasks, dialogic learning, public accountability, and reflective and critical thinking. With increased access to information, responsibility for knowledge creation can be distributed. Students are able to deeply engage with rich, diverse, and expansive resources via tech platforms and digital mediums. Technologies can open up lines of communication, leveling discussion and participation, making it less high stakes and more democratic. Digital spaces allow for small group interaction, collaborative writing, and active reading where students can go at their own pace and draw their own connections (which they could later share with others in the space). Often some or all of these spaces are public; students can be held accountable and often take their work more seriously. And often, if instructors desire that their students begin to think reflectively and critically, they must begin by reflecting and considering their own teaching structures and habits.

Integrating technology into a course may reshape overall course structure, requiring a reconsideration of location, course architecture, and assessment possibilities. Courses have always had multiple learning spaces; in the past these have typically been defined as the classroom and elsewhere. Thoughtfully integrating technology into pedagogy requires a re-imagining and deeper conceptualization of ‘elsewhere’. Technologies can allow instructors to choose and define these new engagement spaces and promote quality learning in these spaces. Technology can coherently and easily connect these spaces and foster deeper engagement and communication. Connecting these spaces may provide students with a better understanding of how different aspect of the course come together and technologies can help connect concepts, integrate new viewpoints and resources, and allow students to develop their own constructive projects connected to the course.

Reimagining the course structure rests on the assumption that the “course” should be an independent unit with specific goals. But if reimagining the structure and practice of courses, why stop there? Course, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries often divide people, ideas, and applicable skills. When re-thinking pedagogy and how technology can support our teaching, it might be fruitful to use the intersection between tech and pedagogy to rethink how higher education functions to produce a well-rounded, proficient graduate.

Which begs the question, in 2015, how do we define the well-rounded, proficient graduate? A person who can get a job? A person who has transferable skills? A digitally literate person? Someone who has found a passion? Fights for a cause? Our answers to these questions are both ideological and pedagogical. If our main goal in teaching is to help our students get a job, do we only reinforce the capitalistic structures that often oppress and dominate the very students we teach? Can certain pedagogies allow us to prepare our students for the workforce while also providing them with the vision and tools to resist oppressive and dominant forces?

Reading Bass, at some points I wondered if his view of technology was too utopian. For example, yes, technology can help level communication and open up dialogue. But, I have also encountered students who resist any type of online discussion or engagement. And, yes, public accountability can be beneficial but it also can put students at risk if they hold radical views or feel pressured to conform to the status quo. However, in the end, I think this is where Bass’s question regarding how technologies can serve good teaching becomes most salient. How do we choose the technologies that best support our pedagogy? What questions can we ask ourselves to be sure that the technology works with our pedagogical needs and goals? And, if attempting to break down arbitrary disciplinary and institutional boundaries, what types of knowledge and skills would we our students to develop in order to have coherent experiences across various courses?

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!

Oppressed/Oppressor Dichotomy

Although it was not included in our reading assignment, I re-read the introduction. Immediately, Donaldo Macedo’s term “cultural schizoprhenia” (being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present) struck me (11). It seems as if many conversations around CUNY express this idea. I’ve heard the sentiment surrounding conversations regarding adjuncts and the changing CUNY demographics.

 

Freire’s  assertion that dehumanization negatively impacts those who are oppressed as well as the oppressors echoes one of Franz Fanon’s groundbreaking premises in Black Skin, White Masks (44). According to Freire, we cannot accept that this dehumanization is, historically speaking, the natural order of things. Here Freire states that the oppressed should assume a type of moral superiority and resist the urge to oppress oppressors as they (we) have been oppressed. It is therefore, our charge to free not only ourselves but our oppressors as well. Freire presents this idea as the foundation for his theory of problem-posing education.

 

I think that Freire still has a ton to offer us. Sadly, I’ve heard many professors across several CUNY campuses express contempt and/or pity for what they view as a body of students unworthy of their “knowledge”. This seems in line with Freire’s thinking. However, if we view CUNY through the same  lens of decoloniality as Freire, many, if not all,  teachers are also oppressed in one way or the other. All “professors” are not on the same socio-economic level; neither are we granted the same level of respect. Therefore, those practicing the same profession can fall on different sides of Freire’s oppressed/oppressor dichotomy. To complicate things even further, an “oppressed” professor can oppress students. Are these complications at odds with Freire’s manifesto? If so, can they be reconciled?Also, in the age of the corporate university, can our presence be described as cultural schizophrenia? How can we use technology to further what Freire calls libertarian education or problem-posing education?

 

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.

Errors and Expectations

Hi All,

I apologize for writing this so late in the week. I’m inundated by student papers at the moment. Perhaps this is the perfect time to be thinking about Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations. In the introduction, the most famous section of the book, Shaughnessy explains that the era of open admissions at CUNY presented a huge influx of students to the then-free CUNY campuses, many many many of whom were unprepared for college writing by the most generous of traditional standards. Much more importantly, instructors trained “to analyze belletristic achievements of the centuries” were completely unprepared for those struggling student writers. From this emerged the concept of the “Basic Writer” (BW), and a body of work aimed to assist Basic (or, now often called, developmental) writers “catch up.”

The big takeaway from this section is twofold. First, Shaughnessy warns instructors against assuming that student writing errors are random or lack an attempt to fulfill the requirements of the assignment. She urges instructors to recognize patterns in student error and to respond to the logic(s) they see within/behind those patterns. Additionally, she stresses that instructors should not see the ‘basic’ of basic writing [as] not how to write but how to be right” (6). Shaughnessy’s aim is not to make student writing error the focus of the class but to inform instructors the errors of their own common interpretations of basic student writing. “[Since] teachers’ preconceptions about errors are frequently at the center of their misconceptions about BW students, I have no choice but to dwell on errors” (6).

Shaughnessy concludes her introduction with an explanation of her view of the role of error in student writing. She describes the BW student’s struggle to write despite the writer’s awareness of the probability of the reader’s criticism over error, and she places the importance of error in no more prominent or important a place than in the economy of audience attention. If the text takes too much time and effort without a big enough payback (it’s not Milton, after all) for the audience then the prose needs reworking. It’s important to distinguish this outlook from one that would suggest BW textual errors amount to illiteracy or an illegitimacy of the writer’s place in college. From errors we’ll now move to expectations.

The major takeaway from “Chapter 8: Expectations” is simply (deceptively simply) that instructors can expect students to improve significantly with regular, though not intensive, instruction based on an understanding of the patterns and logics at work in BW texts. I should, here, note that when I use the phrase “patterns and logics” I’m trying to forward a sense of the concrete that Shaughnessy provides when she advocates for basic writers. I refer to the evidence, which she provides, of something at the heart of what Shaughnessy wants instructors to understand about basic writers: that they are fundamentally intelligent people who deserve a college education and a place in public discourse.

I’d love to elaborate further, but I need to return to my students’ papers. On Monday, I’d love to hear your thoughts about Shaughnessy’s premise in our current system. How much is education actually based on her fundamental premise? How much is your pedagogy driven by this understanding? Is this at the heart of things, or not so much?