Finding good learning games

Often teachers ask me what kinds of games help kids learn. I know they want a list of “good” games, so they can avoid the “bad” ones. But the problem is that to answer the question, “what’s a good game for learning?” – you really have to start with, “what do you mean by learning?” Now that’s a difficult, downright philosophical question that gets tough right away. But to really talk about whether games have anything to do with learning, and if they can help, you have to ask it.

We also know that most people talking about learning games these days are talking about video games, since they seem to have extraordinary abilities to enthrall kids for long periods of time. It’s obvious that when you play video games, you learn. You learn rules, you gain experience that allows you to adjust your play for greater success, etc. So when you look at educational games, you have to decide if this translates to the kind of learning that you believe in.

There are lots of educational games that use the vocabulary and look of games to create a game-like experience, except that it’s not really fun (unless you already know the answers.) Dragging or shooting things (the correct fraction, igneous rocks, the matching chemical symbol)  is not a game, it’s a fancy worksheet. So – do you believe worksheets and flashcards are good for learning or busywork? Putting it on a screen with 3D graphics should not change your answer to that question.

Do you believe in practice? Alfie Kohn says, “…practicing doesn’t create understanding.” If you have kids who can’t multiply, or haven’t grasped the concept of fractions, will shooting at the right answers with a galactic flamethrower help?

Do you believe in chocolate-covered broccoli? Do students have to be tricked into thinking that they are doing something fun to learn something important?

So the answer to the question, “what’s a good game for learning ____” – is not so simple as a list. It has to be answered with the question – “what do I believe about learning?” leading the way.

  • Do you believe learning is about making meaning – or memorizing?
  • Do you believe that learning is natural, or that children have to be tricked and cajoled into learning?
  • Do you believe that math is a set of skills – or deeper understanding of concepts?
  • Do you believe that faster answers are better answers?
  • Do you believe history is memorizing facts – or understanding complex relationships between events?
  • Do you believe “time on task” is a good measure of learning?
  • Do you believe that vocabulary can and should be learned without context?
  • Do you believe that practice creates understanding?

Even when teachers hear this, they say, “but surely practice is good reinforcement”, “if they gain speed and automaticity on easy problems, they can tackle harder ones”,  or “some students are so far behind they really need the practice” – to which I can only quote Alfie Kohn again, “In reality, it’s the children who don’t understand the underlying concepts who most need an approach to teaching that’s geared to deep understanding.  The more they’re given algorithms and told exactly what to do, the farther behind they fall in terms of grasping these concepts.” (my emphasis)

What this says to me is that using practice to reinforce skills may actually undermine a student’s confidence in their own thought process. They may come to look at learning as a rote skill that is supposed to be automatic, not thoughtful, something that if not immediately obvious, is unreachable.

So finding good games, then, means finding games that reinforce the style of learning that you believe in. Which, in a sea of hype about the benefits of educational games, might not be as easy as it looks!

What do you believe about learning?

Sylvia

Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions

“Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions” – a quick Google search didn’t turn up the source for this quote, but I’ve heard it for years. It’s one of those simple yet profound statements that sums up interconnectedness, yet vast difference between teaching and learning. “Managing” these conditions on either side without the core involvement of the teacher or the student is just impossible.

In this new report, Transforming School Conditions, 14 accomplished teachers from urban districts around the country merge their own experience in high-needs schools with the best current education research, to discuss conditions that are are needed for teachers to teach all students effectively. Their recommendations for school policy and practice offer a guide to developing systems of support for meaningful and sustainable school reform.

Their recommendations highlight the need for any reforms in teaching to come with a high degree of involvement of the affected teachers — not to be delivered from the top down, outside in, or by an imaginary superhero. The changes have to come from those “at the coalface,” as they say in Australia, meaning those who are in the trenches doing the real work.

 

Bill Ferriter provides a summary and perspective on this report if you don’t have time to read the whole thing (but you should!)

Words Gone Wild 2.0

Web 2.0’s value as a marketing term now far exceeds its value as a technical term. Anything Web 2.0 must be more techie, more interactive, and have more onlinier goodness than before, and therefore, just be better. “Web 2.0” is a straight shot into the brain, don’t worry about the subtle details of what it actually means.

What a handy shortcut …and a trap. I’ve posted before about the danger of adopting marketing terms as meaningful language. Marketing terms work because they are emotional shortcuts. Marketeers love these words because they can say more in less time, allowing the consumer to fill in the pesky details of whatever is being sold with what they were hoping to hear.

For educators, this is a cautionary tale about being swept up by what marketeers call an “empty vessel” – a term that evokes strong associations but actually is meaningless. (Think shampoo descriptions like “citreshine”, “silkessence”, etc. – made up words meant that evoke cleanliness, fullness, and the happy feeling of lush, shiny hair, but without any actual science behind it.)

You may have heard that Web 2.0 is “all about” interactivity, ease-of-use, democratizing publishing, collaboration, communication, connectivity, users vs. bosses, new business models vs. old, two-way vs. one-way, personalization, micro-functionality, customization, online apps, the new architecture of society, networking, a platform, innovation, long tails, style, transparency, participation, generative, folksonomy vs. directories, the wisdom of crowds, clouds, self-sorting, finding vs. searching, syndication vs. stickiness, services, an attitude, a network that learns, emergent, in perpetual beta, the collective intelligence, engagement, … should I go on?

All of these are true, and at the same time, none of them are the true single lens to see what Web 2.0 is. Something this malleable, this variable, this divergent, can’t also be meaningful in any one single sense.

And because Web 2.0 is essentially meaningless, what it means for learning is not known without more details. Talking about Web 2.0 tools and learning is meaningless as well – until you  explain what the tools are, what they are used for, and what the students do with them. It’s just not good enough to talk about how the Luddites don’t get it. Simply using the term “Web 2.0 tools” deliberately obscures the facts — no wonder people don’t get it.

Can this be undone? Can we nag people into proper usage? No, I don’t think so — it’s a done deal. Web 2.0 has reached escape velocity into the orbit of common use, one more empty vessel pretending to have meaning where there is none. It’s too easy, too convenient a shortcut to express the current new new thing. There is no way to wrangle it back down to earthly reality. These terms are typically short-lived, though, as the next new new thing will surely take its place.

Web 3.0 anyone?

Sylvia

Related posts:

Sugata Mitra’s new TED talk – creating environments for emergent learning

Be sure to watch this TED talk by Sugata Mitra, who has done pioneering research with computers, learning and children, especially about learning in parts of the world where, as he says, “good teachers don’t want to go.”

He talks about some of his old concepts, such as the Hole in the Wall project, where computers were placed in walls in the slums of India, and what happened as the children taught themselves and others how to use them. His concept of “Minimally Invasive Education” is based on these experiments, basically giving children fully functional computers and time to explore questions of interest. The results were amazingly consistent — children can achieve basic competency on computers completely on their own, even when the interfaces were in languages they didn’t understand. It calls into question the whole definition of technology literacy and how we traditionally teach it.

There is more about his projects here in my blog post from 2007 which has videos and links from those earlier experiments, and some thoughts on what this means about the role of the teacher.

Now for an update. Mitra has been busy, designing all kinds of environments to explore the range and limits of what children can do with computers. This new TED talk shows these experiments, future plans and how he sees education as a self-organizing system with learning as emergent behavior.

In it, he talks about his current experiments using a “granny cloud” and Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). Both of these are experiments where students had access to grannies, teachers, and other experts over broadband connections. For example, a “granny” might read aloud to the class, or to an individual student. What might this mean to a classroom where students have no regular teacher, an overburdened teacher, or an undertrained teacher? What might this mean to children who have no classroom at all? Could kiosks be placed in remote village centers?

These experiments, like the One Laptop Per Child project, seek to address the learning needs of the developing world. And we need to meet those needs, to bring education and hope to all people around the world. It is incredibly short-sighted to view education as a competition, where American children “win” only if children in other countries lose. We need people like Sugata Mitra to explore new ways of teaching and learning that can reach everyone on earth, not just those with access to traditional classrooms and good teachers. And as a bonus, in doing so, it provides new insight and raises questions about what conditions and environments really support good learning.

Some might see this research as an attack on teachers, questioning the need for any teacher in any classroom. I do not think this is the case, as I explained in my blog post from 2007 about this concept.

But what do you think?

Sylvia

The feeling of twitter as a metaphor for education

Repost from July 2008. Still relevant today!

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed – What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there… How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom – but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

  • The rewards of serendipity
  • Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
  • The importance of socializing
  • Choice
  • Freeing up time constraints
  • Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia

Reality check – is panic over technology overblown?

“NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – Mind Over Mass Media – NYTimes.com.

Student Leadership – Building Authentic 21st Century Skills

This is an archive from my webinar at the Cyber Conference for the Capitol Region ISTE affiliate (CRSTE) held on Feb. 27, 2010.

Student Leadership – Building Authentic 21st Century Skills
Clicking this link will launch the Elluminate web meeting tool and start the archived webinar. It may ask you to OK launching Elluminate. Once it starts, it’s just like you had attended the online webinar in real time. You can hear the recording, see the slides, and watch the chat log.

See the list of all archived sessions

In this session, I talk a bit about how empowerment and engagement are an essential part of the cycle of learning. Hope you give a listen!

Sylvia

How deep are video games?

How deep are video games? « Computing Education Blog.

Interesting post by Mark Guzdial and comments discussing some of the hype about how video games are “the new liberal arts.”

Games are “the new liberal arts”?  Games as the “folk music of the 1960s”?  My experience with games don’t go that deep.  I find if I think about them too hard, there’s nothing there but the assumptions and world-view of the game author.  A great example of the bottom not being too deep is the SimCity game player who famously told Sherry Turkle in The Second Self, “If you raise taxes, people riot.” Can games really be as deep as great literature, or great music?  I suppose it’s possible, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Sylvia

Constructing Modern Knowledge 2010

It’s back!!!

Plans are shaping up for an amazing 3rd Annual Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute, July 12-15, 2009 in Manchester, NH USA (near Boston).

In addition to master educators and edtech pioneers, the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2010 faculty includes history educator James Loewen and bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me; popular provocateur and author, Alfie Kohn; MacArthur Genius and incomparable school reformer, Deborah Meier; and children’s author, illustrator and animator, Peter Reynolds. Cynthia Solomon, Brian Silverman, Sylvia Martinez (that’s me!), Gary Stager and John Stetson round out the amazing faculty.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a minds-on institute for educators committed to creativity, collaboration and computing. Participants have the opportunity to engage in intensive computer-rich project development with peers and a world-class faculty. Inspirational guest speakers, pre-conference expedition and social events round out the fantastic event.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is about action, not listening to speakers. Attendees work and interact with educational experts committed to maximizing the potential of every learner. The rich learning environment is filled with books, computers, robotics materials, art supplies, toys and other objects to think with.

The real power of Constructing Modern Knowledge emerges from the collaborative project development of participants. Each day’s program consists of a discussion of powerful ideas, on-demand mini tutorials, immersive learning adventures designed to challenge one’s thinking, substantial time for project work and reflection.

CMK 2010 info

21st Century educators need to develop their own technological fluency and understand learning in order to meet the changing needs and expectations of their students. Constructing Modern Knowledge will help participants enhance their tech skills, expand their vision of how computers may enhance the learning environment and leave with practical classroom ideas.

Spend four cool summer days in New England making puppets roar, robots dance, animations delight, movies move, simulations stimulate, photos sing and leave with memories to last a lifetime!

Each participant receives a suite of open-ended creativity software from Tech4Learning, LCSI, Inspiration Software, FableVision and other members of The Constructivist Consortium free-of-charge for use at Constructing Modern Knowledge and beyond. The software alone is worth the registration fee!

There is also a July 11th preconference Science and History Tour of Boston available for a nominal fee. Explore the future at the MIT Museum and visit the past during a private guided tour of the Boston Freedom Trail.

The institute is less than an hour’s drive from Boston in picturesque Manchester, New Hampshire. Free transportation is available from the convenient and affordable Manchester Airport. Discount hotel accommodation has been arranged at the institute venue.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is sensitive to the budgets of schools and educators by keeping registration costs affordable and by offering school/district team discounts. The institute is appropriate for all K-12 educators, administrators and teacher educators – private or public. CEUs are available for an additional fee.

Save $75 on early bird registrations! Register online now!

Sylvia

Reflections from previous years:

What Works: Effective Technology Professional Development

I’d like to share a book with you about technology professional development. Meaningful Learning Using Technology: What Educators Need to Know And Do by Elizabeth Alexander Ashburn (Editor), Robert E. Floden (Editor) (Amazon link)

Many educators are looking for research that shows “what works” in technology professional development. This book is an excellent starting point for discussions about new strategies and best practices. In one chapter, GenYES was one of four models selected for correlation to key dimensions to successful K-12 technology professional development. GenYES and the other models were selected as “… large-scale efforts that were shown to be effective in affecting teachers’ use of technology.”

Fostering Meaningful Teaching and Learning with Technology: Characteristics of Effective Professional Development
Written by Yong Zhao, Kenneth Frank, and Nicole Ellefson of Michigan State University Michigan State University (MSU), these researchers studied four “large-scale efforts that were shown to be effective in affecting teachers’ use of technology”:

1. The Project-Based Learning Multimedia Model (PBL+MM)
2. The Galileo Education Network Association (GENA)
3. Project Information Technology (PIT)
4. The Generation Y Model (previous name of the GenYES model)

Based on data collected from hundreds of teachers, the study determined that several key factors positively influenced teacher’ use of computers.

Study Findings – Key Factors of Successful Technology Professional Development

  1. Time to experiment and play. “Use of computers was positively correlated (.3) with the extent to which a teacher was able to experiment with district-supported software.”
  2. Focus on student learning. “Teachers’ use of computers was positively correlated (.4) with the extent to which the content of professional development was focused on student learning.”
  3. Building social connections and learning communities. “Computer use was positively correlated (.2) with the extent to which teachers accessed other teachers’ expertise.”
  4. Localizing professional development. “Computer use was positively correlated (.2 for each) with the extent to which professional development was provided locally, either in the classroom or school lab.”

The study outlines why and how these models support each of these factors. Unfortunately, I can’t reproduce the entire chapter here, but there is a bit of it online at Amazon.com (the chapter starts at page 161). Buy the book!

Sylvia