More on Flunking Spore…

Last week I blogged (Flunking Spore – video game failed by scientists) about Science magazine’s Oct 24 review of the new video game Spore that outlined the problems of looking at the game as a way to learn biology. Not only did multiple scientists give the game poor grades for science content, but a documentary promoting the game misleadingly used interviews with scientists that implied endorsement.

Now, Eric Klopfer and Kurt Squire, co-founders of the Learning Games Network, respected researchers and proponents of games in education, respond to “Flunking Spore.” In two articles (part 1, part 2), they tackle some of the objections, and provide a their point of view. While they agree that the basic science in Spore is not appropriate as a substitute for biology curriculum, they defend the game as a breakthrough in user interface and design.

Kurt Squire argues that Spore is easily recognizable to a veteran game player for what it is, a game of design, where the player is the master of a make-believe universe.

What I think gets lost here is that players actually have relatively sophisticated ways of interpreting games like Spore. While I share the author’s concerns about games reinforcing people’s naive conceptions about science, Spore, I would argue, is so clearly a design game that most “literate” gamers quickly see that it’s a design game, and regard it as such.

OK, I agree here. But most people who aren’t veteran game players won’t see this subtle point. We know that people learn a lot from games, but we don’t quite know what to call it. It’s not learning that can be described in the traditional vocabulary of school. This is a deep problem of games&learning not being equivalent to games&schooling. Spore wasn’t going to bridge that gap even if it was as educationally significant as advertised.

The problem I have is simpler than this.

The game is being promoted, mostly by National Geographic, as a game that teaches biology. Scientists were tricked into doing interviews that were used to promote the game as a way to learn biology. Shame on National Geographic for exploiting interest in games for learning to promote their programming.

As much as I understand the inclination to find the tiny nugget of learning in any game, I hope that Eric Klopfer and Kurt Squire would use their influence in the learning game community to address the issues of the misleading and patently false promotion of this game. Part 3, perhaps?

 

Community of interest or community of practice?

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk around the edu-blogs and at conference sessions about online learning communities, or building a personal learning network as part of a educator’s professional development. Often, these are referred to as “Communities of Practice” – a term coming into common use only a few years ago. Many educators were introduced to the term in grad school through the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who wrote Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (Amazon link) in 1985.

Their book explored how natural learning that takes place in apprenticeship situations, and profiled several different Communities of Practice (CoPs) from around the world. The “practice” part of CoP is the work they do, and the learning takes place in context, or situated, in the common work. These groups of people learn to do their work not by lectures, but by everyone working together, from experts to newcomers, and most importantly, by talking about their work together.

The concept of “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” is key to the idea of communities of practice. This is when newcomers learn needed skills by doing work that is on the periphery of the community, and as they prove their competence, being invited into more important roles. The other part of legitimate peripheral participation is how newcomers move into the community through talk. The shared stories of the community, particularly war stories told by experts, are part of the experience. Newcomers learn to participate by learning the traditions and vocabulary of the group, first by listening, then by trying out their new verbal skills within the group, and if their words ring true, by moving from the periphery and becoming more central to the shared expertise of the group.

It’s obvious that this sounds similar to what happens to educators as they break down the walls of their classroom and use new technologies to find and participate in new communities.

I think, however, that we confuse different kinds of communities. Specifically, I think that educators who come together in online communities, or even temporary real life groups, are more often than not, communities of interest, not communities of practice.

I’m not just being picky about semantics here – the problem is that calling any community a “Community of Practice” presumes that it will have similar benefits and impact.

In Second Life, for example, a teacher may meet educators from around the world who are doing similar things in their classroom, have similar hopes about the future of ed tech, and share similar frustrations. They may find the interaction refreshing, educational, and maybe even inspiring. These professional collegial interactions are too often missing from teacher’s lives. And Second Life is just an example. This could be Twitter, or a social network, an online group created for a graduate school class, or even people you meet face to face at a conference.

However, just having similar work doesn’t mean that this is a community of practice. They really aren’t doing the same work. Once this interaction is over, they have to go back to their real place of practice, their classroom and school. The benefits of shared vocabulary, shared experiences, shared stories are all gone. Now these teachers have to sit in meetings where no one is on the same page, frustrated that everyone isn’t seeing the light.

In fact, these outside communities of interest may serve to pull teachers away from their local communities of practice, distancing them from the colleagues whose mindshare would be vital to real local change. It’s an all too convenient place to vent about everyone who “doesn’t get it.”

It’s hard for me to imagine any kind of educational change that doesn’t draw on the participants at the ground level, meaning the people in the school. That’s why I advocate for student participation in education technology initiatives. Changing a community means involving the stakeholders, all the stakeholders, in the process. Building a healthy community of practice in the place of the actual practice is a first step to change.

 

Games in Education – K12 Online Conference 2008

Now in its third year, the K12 Online Conference is underway. But don’t worry — you haven’t missed anything, it’s all online!

My session this year is Games in Education. The time limit was 20 minutes, so that was a challenge! To give it more depth, I also created a companion wiki page with lots more resources.

I cover topics including: Why games?; What’s wrong with edutainment?; Serious Games; Casual puzzle and logic games in the classroom; Virtual Worlds, Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) games; Overcoming Objections to using games in the classroom; and students designing and programming their own games. Yes, all in 20 min…

Beyond games, if you are interested in learning more about technology in education in general, and seeing presentations from educators all around the world, then you will find some great stuff on the K12 Online 2008 conference site. Since the conference is online and all the sessions are pre-recorded, they can be downloaded or viewed online anywhere, anytime. For first-timers, be sure to read the “how to” page here.

Check the conference blog for both recorded sessions and live chats with keynotes and presenters.

Sylvia

Flunking Spore – video game failed by scientists

 

The potential of video games for learning has been the subject of much recent curiosity and debate. How many times have you heard…“If only we could combine the engagement of video games with real (meaning school) learning…”

Spore is a new game that is being promoted as just such a hybrid. It’s the latest brainchild of Will Wright, the world-famous designer of unusual, yet popular games like The Sims and Sim City.

If anyone could design a breakout game that combines learning and fun, Will Wright is the guy.

Spore is a game where you create a single-cell organism that evolves. Keeping your creature alive and growing is the goal, and you can design and improve your creatures as generations go by and gain sophistication. Eventually they gain intelligence, and you have to deal with tribes and civilizations, deciding on war and peace, and eventually going out into outer space to explore and/or conquer whole worlds.

In an interview with National Geographic, Will Wright talks about, “…the breakthrough science that’s revealing the secret genetic machinery that shapes all life in the game Spore.” National Geographic has made a documentary, called “How to Build a Better Being” that is being sold by Spore publisher Electronic Arts in a deluxe version. (National Geographic website promoting the game.) The documentary positions Spore as solid science, complete with supporting interviews with scientists.

Now the bad news..
This month’s Science magazine (the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) decided to put this to the test. In Flunking Spore, author and “Gonzo Scientist” John Bohannon played Spore with evolutionary biologists, and concludes,

“…the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.”

Anyone interested in games and education needs to read this article. It’s a wake-up call about this game’s relevance to education, and parallels much of the wishful thinking that dominates the games and education discussion.

And worse, when Bohannon went to interview the scientists who appeared in the National Geographic video, he found that they had not been told that their interviews were going to be used to promote a video game. He quotes Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois who worries that science has been hijacked to promote a product. “I was used,” says Shubin.

After playing the game, the scientists Bohannon interviewed gave Spore failing grades across the board.

“Spore’s biology grades rolled in like a slow-motion train wreck. For organismic biology–genetics, cell biology, reproduction, and development–Gregory and Eldredge smacked Spore with a D-. The game flunked evolutionary biology outright with an F. According to Gregory and Eldredge, “Spore has very little to do with real biology.”

And it’s interesting to me that in a TED talk from March 2007, Will Wright demos Spore and makes no such claims. Who decided to push this as a game where you could learn about evolution and biology?

OK, so perhaps Spore isn’t going to change the way biology is taught in school, but does that mean that someday, someone, isn’t going to design a game that does? Trying to keep an open mind and never say never is always good policy, but when Will Wright fails, and the promotion is based on sleight-of-hand, if not blatant lies, it’s discouraging.

On Monday, my presentation for the online conference K12online 2008, Games and Education will go live and there is some discussion of the problem there. I’ll update this post with that link when it’s available.

 

Meme: Passion Quilt

It’s meme time again! Memes are the Web 2.0 version of a chain letter, an idea passed from one person to another to create variations on a central theme.

This one is called the Passion Quilt Meme and I’ve been tagged by Barbara Bray. The directions are to find an image that reflects what you are most passionate for kids to learn about. That’s a pretty tall order!

Browsing through Flickr I found an image that spoke to me and added a poster frame.

Learning: I create myself

Because in reality, there is not any one thing that I think kids should learn “about.”

To me, learning is not about things or facts or tools. It is about a child building an image of themselves that has power. If that is instilled in youth, there is no limit to what they can decide to learn about.

I just hope that every child in the world can think of themselves as learners. I hope they have the opportunity to find their passion. I want them to be welcomed as valuable participants in society. I want them to care and be cared for. I hope that they can envision a future where they are in charge of their own lives.

Directions: Find or create an image that captures what you are most passionate for kids to learn about.

  • Post a picture from a source like Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn…and give your picture a short title.
  • Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
  • Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Tagging people from my Flickr/Twitter/Facebook network: