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Humanities Matter! Conference

Wyoming Humanities Council

October 23-24

Central Wyoming College in Riverton.

Learn about the successful use of virtual,  augmented, and alternate reality environments for instruction and enhancing student engagement. I will be presenting my experience and published research on  designing instructional space for sustained engagement,  extending instructional contact and learning, increasing student motivation and academic production, and the enhancing teaching satisfaction with the seamless integration of technology and new approaches to instruction.

In this talk I will talk about my own experience in k-20 settings using virtual worlds, game environments, models, simulations, and the augmentation and creation of alternate reality learning scenarios. The presentation will offer a cultural -cognitive model of learning with focus on developing comprehension, production and knowledge acts, as well as the critical habits of mind for problem solving and student innovation through play.

On Saturday, join me for Getting Started in Second Life — Academic spelunking through possible worlds.

Look at ways that SL and other instructional environments have been used effectively — some of my own work– and how it can be replicated across content and context.

In this session, we will go through several stages of virtual world acclimation and visit spaces, pedagogies,  and tools that may serve as a springboard into new practice.

The Wyoming Humanities Council’s Humanities Matter! conference will bring together representatives of community organizations, museum and library personnel, interested community members, and humanities faculty from across Wyoming to explore how to work together to create humanities courses and public programming that will address issues relevant to their lives, communities, and world.

LINK

VIDEO GAMES, READING , AND TRANSMEDIAL COMPREHENSION.

Games represent a high interest accessible medium to build comprehension, and in using games we can continue to engage in topics that are complex, provocative and motivating, and not often found in texts designed to be simplified for the sake of decoding. Games will also help to get these students to reconnect with reading and learning, and create a basis for developing and using comprehension strategies. With this in mind, this knowledge and experience of theory can provide an opportunity for educators to bootstrap traditional print-based literacy and engage students in comprehension development.

Brock Dubbels

The University of Minnesota

The Center for Cognitive Sciences

305 Elliott Hall

Minneapolis, MN 55408

(612) 747-0346

(612) 626-7253

Dubbe003@umn.edu

Abstract: In this qualitative study, literacy practices of “struggling” seventh and eighth graders were recorded on videotape as they engaged in both traditional and new literacies practices in an after school video games club. These recordings were analyzed in the context of building comprehension skills with video games. The students struggled with reading and are characterized as unmotivated and disengaged by the school, which may be at the root of their inability to use comprehension strategies. Playing video games is viewed here as a literate practice, and was seen to be more engaging than traditional activities (such as reading school text, writing journals, etc.). The conclusion of this observation makes connections to current research in comprehension and provides a basis for teachers to use games to develop comprehension and learning.

Key Terms: situation, event indexing model, causal integration model, ludic, interaction, comprehension, knowledge act, decoding, agency, engagement, identity, self-monitoring, metacognition, transmedial, walk-through, level-up, button-mashing

This selected excerpt comes from:

Dubbels, B.R. (2008) Video games, reading, and transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.),Reference. Information ScienceHandbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education.

Why games?

Regardless of whether we are talking about comprehension in novels, articles, sculpture, or dance, comprehension comes from dialogue and interaction, where the learner gathers information and must act upon it in some way—feedback and reflection are essential.

Feedback and interaction were central to the work of Lev Vygotsky, as depicted here in Figure 1. (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, p. 35).

In this model called the Zone of Proximal Development, the external dialogue created by interaction in stage 1, eventually becomes internalized, and through this internalization individuals go through a process where they learn to self-monitor, learn to observe, learn to practice, learn to receive feedback, and ultimately they learn to refine the process of comprehension through questioning and verifying what they know in what can be called a knowledge act.

Vygotsky (1978) maintained that children imitate what they see adults do, and this gradually develops into the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. In teaching something new, we need to start with where the student is at with their ability to solve problems, and then under the guidance of a more experienced problem solver, their ability is extended—this is called the Zone of Proximal Development. The mentor’s role, according to Herb Simon is to align a problem so that the solution can become transparent, and this can then be extended and deepened.

Games can provide this interaction, provide relevant feedback, help to create and align a problem, and demand mastery in the same way a competent instructor can scaffold a learner through the Zone of Proximal Development. In a classroom situation, where a teacher has thirty or more students, and fifty-five minutes to work with them–an interactive game can be quite effective, as it is often unlikely that teacher will be able to work one-on-one with each student in a meaningful way every day. But it is possible that games can provide the kind of accessibility, interaction, and instruction to develop comprehension that young people who struggle to decode might benefit from, but more importantly, games may give incentive to reengage in developing essential reading skills.

What makes the idea of a game so compelling as a method for developing comprehension is the amount of regular feedback and the necessity of mastery of complex situations that might offer a variety of solution sets from combinations and permutations of different tools, rules, cooperation, and knowledge of the narrative goals and character arcs. This complex interaction scaffolds the player through difficulties until they are able to perform the task with knowledge through the developing awareness that failure and recovery from it (learning) are part of developing knowledge, strategy, and competence.

What Teachers Need to Know

The big idea here is that games are built upon many of the same comprehension elements that are incorporated in reading printed text. There is a tradition of consideration of video games as new narratives; Laurel (1993), Murray (1997), Aarseth (1997), Frasca (2003) and Crawford (2005) agree that there are narrative elements, but that games are also designed to be interactive in the way that they tell stories. As Frasca (2003) describes, the aspects of simulation and problem solving components of the game are also very compelling, and are what he called the ludic aspects of the game: the elements that instigate play—see also Salen & Zimmerman (2004).

These elements create the feedback and demand knowledge acts, where the player must gather information, decide what is useful, and use it to act to get through a puzzle. This process of game play demands that the player acquire and act upon the information they gather. This view of games, play, and learning presents a highly flexible and powerful form of comprehension, and it is generally instinctual, but often needs mentoring, modeling, and practice to develop.

The table above to the right shows a direct and close relation to situation model research– typical literary categories often used in reading comprehension assessments; I am familiar and have worked on the Minnesota MCA2 for four years– and state and national standards. This alignment of the dimensions of a Situation Model from the Event Indexing Model allows for close proximity and correlation between what are often considered traditional and customary literary terms and an empirically validated comprehension models such as from Walter Kintsch (1968) and participants in the Discourse Processing tradition.

Although these connections have not been made yet on the level of the state and nationwide assessments, as I believe they should, this study assumed that connecting empirical comprehension research from the Discourse Processing tradition would be useful in connecting the culturally mediated competencies of the state assessments (that are often only validated through inter-rater reliability: selected teachers sitting around a table rating and compromising about what is what) and language arts standards to an empirically validated theory of reading comprehension. This enables a more regimented look at comprehension, narrative, discourse, and connection to problem solving and decision making as made popular by Kahneman and Tversky (2001).

In addition. this connection makes the case for The Compensation Model (Stanovich, 2000), and also connects to more recent work on the Indexical Hypothesis and Embodiment Theory (Borghi 2005; Glenburg, 1997; Zwann 2003; Barsalou 1999).

Learning and Play are Inseparable

With this connection to discourse processing and comprehension, play might be seen as an evolutionary adaptation (Sutton-Smith, 1997) useful in transferring culture, knowledge, and developing proficiency in tool use, as well as the creation of knowledge, culture, and tools, (Mumford, 1945). Above all, play represents an opportunity for exploration and inquiry in a context where the cost of failure is the opportunity to learn from a mistake. In play, knowledge is gathered and acted upon, a very powerful process to develop experience and comprehension. Play is visible evidence of comprehension. It is an expression of and toward comprehension. It is a knowledge act.

Play is one of the building blocks of comprehension, and games are the way that we ground cognition and pass on cultural knowledge and skills sets through off-loading cognitive work into the environment, thus making he environment part of the cognitive system through place-holders and computational devides like toys and tools–Vygotsky (176) called these pivots.

With play, children and adults seek and explore through observation, manipulation, and imitation. When we play, we take our prior knowledge and attempt to create order and demonstrate competence. With toys, children are interacting with a representation of something that adults use.

My own son likes to play with cars. He makes engine sounds and drives them around with screeching tires. He also likes to take on roles and imitate with toys that are representations of the tools we use for productivity. Above we saw him in his own office with the same tools mom and dad use. What he was doing was building a repertoire of how things work and what they are used for in his memory.

From an evolutionary perspective, he is using his imagination to prepare for a time when he will drive and also to share, communicate, and produce culture through knowledge of cultural artifacts like cars and computers. This process of visualization, belief systems and cultural roles are important aspects of learning. Williamson Shaffer (2006) in his description of Epistemic Games provides depth and detail on how these elements work in games (and this is exemplified and contextualized later in Figure 2).

Games are a structured form of play, and what teachers need to understand is that play is learning, and by structuring play, we can create a higher degree of engagement and effort. Games allow for the kind of learning that encourages mastery, builds resilience and tenacity, innovation and creativity, as well as practice solving problems. Play creates comprehension through knowledge acts, whether the learner is performing or investigating.

Games, Play, and Learning are Inseparable.

As children develop and grow, their play becomes more complex, and we begin to see imaginative play, with language and visualization, use of complex ideas, actions, tools, and language, and interaction and shared play with others.

If you look at a game, it generally is composed of a number of elements that are structured to create the interaction and experience that children and adults enact in play (such as imagination, role playing and identities, rules, branching and choice, as well as incorporating the use of probability and chance.

Games are tools for learning, but what is important for educators to know is how to use games that structure and extend play and create reflection. Often tools are useful in helping individuals to learn complex problem solving and pass along cultural knowledge, but what we often fail to account for is that tools are not as powerful until used in an activity with intention. Kids may have grown up in a digital age, but this does not make

them digital natives. They may just be strangers in a strange land that they want to know more about—we can provide the passport.

We need to consider play as the foundation in an approach to using video games, and we need to recognize that games may represent an activity that is complex and relevant enough to engage students in learning and developing comprehension skills.

But games are not enough. In education, we often talk about the tools, because the tools are often the measure of what we take to be progress in education. Often the tools we use such as tests and software are thought to be capable of definitive assessment. And if the software helps improve test performance, it must be improving learning over all. This is not always the case, and more often than not, it is the way the tool is used that is important.

We are foolish to think we can just give out the tools and easily replicate this (Cuban, 1986),. It is important to understand that tools are only as powerful as the way they are employed. The central role of the tool may be one of the major obstacles educators will need to overcome in the classroom if schools and teachers are going to remain relevant for preparation of young people for the new global labor force. Games should not be seen as a panacea, but they may be used as powerful tools.

Play and the way that we learn to use tools should be the focus. Play changes the discourse around learning. It implies making mistakes, trying new things, and creativity, and innovation— traits necessary for knowledge workers. It also takes the pressure off children who are already under tremendous pressure to perform in school settings that regularly insist on going faster and covering more ground because we are all so far behind.

Play can bring some more humanity into our classroom teaching, and it is also a proven method for learning and developing cultural competency—and games represent more formalized and structured approaches to this cultural learning often found in informal learning environments often known as the wilds away from school.

The take home message

Play is how we share and transfer physical and intellectual tools to our young and other community members. Johann Huizinga (1938), the author of Homo Ludens, stated that play is the basis of culture. According to Lewis Mumford (1954), it was imitation, role play, the creation of miniature environments and the symbolic fields of play where every function of life was modeled as a game to develop competency and advance what was known and will be known.

Perhaps play and representation are the factory of our conceptual abilities, and if play involves the creation of abstractions and models of the world, then sharing play necessitates complex communication as well as a means for innovation and production. This makes it the perfect method for developing comprehension.

A Model for Comprehension

In terms of understanding the elements of comprehension, the tradition of Discourse Processing provides ample opportunity to look at comprehension as transmedial. Kintsch (1988, 1998) in presenting the Construction Integration Model suggested that there were three levels of representation of text.

Two additional levels of discourse processing were later added by Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, (1995), and account for literary elements often associated with genre and the author’s purpose and style that are used for top-down processing. These levels are:

• The text genre level, which accounts for the kinds of information presented, how the information is presented, and the ways in which the information is to be interpreted,
• And the communication level, which involves the reader constructing a representation of the writer of the text.

The Event Indexing Model, which includes all five boxes from Figure 3, provides insight on events, or situations as portrayed in a variety of media, which are the made up of the interrelated elements. This level can be very useful for teachers to know how to develop comprehension in their students and create transfer between different media experiences; and it is the basis for the transmedial nature of comprehension.

If students have struggled to decode, games and film can provide a more accessible entry point at the situation model level, (level 3 experiences), where they can interact with complex texts and narratives without the cognitive load of decoding text and making meaning from it (bottom up processing).

With games, much of the action, the context, and the actors are depicted ( they are shown in pictures), and also described through the action and narrative text in the print and audio of character dialog and narration. This depiction with description allows for clarification for how we should view the context and understand the situation with the directing of our attention (Kress, 2003) and may lessen demand on the propositional level from the text to make a mental image representing what is being described in the text.

This contextualization of images with printed traditional text informs and focuses the player, and offers the experience and information to embody the reading and comprehension experimentally. Thus, the learner makes a more robust model of the situation to develop and build the representation as the narrative evolves. This might allow for the student to draw from prior experience and use top-down processes to make meaning of the events and comprehend without the taxation on processing from decoding, therefore utilizing and further developing comprehension.

But how does this help decoding?

When a reader has well-developed comprehension skills, they can recruit prior knowledge to bootstrap lower level processes (Stanovich, 2000) and this is an important idea for making a case for using more accessible texts that are relevant and interesting to the learner. Once again, the reader can use higher-level process in order to support lower level process (Stanovich, 2000).

What makes teaching with games to develop comprehension meaningful are the second and the third level, called the Propositional and Situation Levels. The Propositional Level is where we decode communications into the Situation Level. The Situation level is where the reader represents many of the elements and descriptions that go into making a mental model of a situation. On this level, the learner constructs a mental representation of the situation experienced, remembered, read, perceived, or described in a real or imaginary world, (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwann & Radavansky, 1998).

When working to teach reading with this information, it is important to connect to prior knowledge and build and compare the new information to prior situation models, or prior experience. Consider a story board, or a comic strip where each scene is defined and then the next event is framed. Readers need to learn to create these frames when comprehending text. Each event in a text should then be integrated and developed as an evolution of ideas presented, as each scene builds with new information, the model is updated and expanded.

“If the event that is currently being processed overlaps with the

events in working memory on a particular dimension, then a link

between those events is established, then a link between those

events is stored in long-term memory. Overlap is determined based

on two events share an index, (i.e., a time, place, protagonist, cause,

or goal).”

(Goldman, Graesser, & van den Broek, 1999, p. 94).

Thus, we must build our understanding. The attributes of a situation model can be made much more robust and much more easily accessible when prior knowledge is recruited and connected into what we already know, and less effort will be made of finding the familiar.

Two types of prior knowledge that support this in the Event Indexing Model are:

·         General world knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about concept types, e.g.,
scripts, schemas, categories, etc.) 

·         Referent specific knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about specific entities). 

These two categories represent experience in the world and literary elements used in defining genre
and style as described from the Event Indexing Model.  The theory posits that if a reader has more
experience with the world that can be tapped into, and also knowledge and experience about the
structure of stories, they are more likely to have a deeper understanding of the passage. 

Genre Expectation

It is possible that when we are familiar with “once upon a time”, we will be familiar with the structure
and purpose of fairy tale stories. Thus we begin to expect certain events, characters, and settings that
we may be able to predict, and can therefore be surprised and entertained when the story has a twist,
or an element that was unexpected is presented.

Further, van den Broek et al (2001) reports that readers engage in a different style of reading according to genre expectations, and, that reading purpose will inform the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of the text—so when readers have familiarity, they generally have a tactic or strategy for engaging with the text. It would be expected that a reader with little or no familiarity would use a button mashing style of trial and error when playing a game just as a reader would cast about for meaning when trying to comprehend a passage in a challenging text.

To sum this up, comprehenders parse clauses of texts into events on five situational dimensions: time, space, causation, motivation, and the protagonist. There are four central assumptions this model is built upon:

1. Events are the central units of situation models ( the event-centrality assumption)

2. Events can be linked on five dimensions

3. The events are either related or not related on a particular dimension

4. All dimensions are equal.

With this in mind, the Event Indexing Model is an equal opportunity model of comprehension. It works across media to describe the transformation of sensory information and how it is processed to some extent — and it is just as applicable with pictures as it is with text–it is the study of discourse and the conveyance of information. It is transmedial — or perhaps sub-medial: it is the process that turns that pattern to meaning — working as a form of categorical organization to go from high fidelity, fine-tooth detail, to more generalized levels of organization — chunking and schema building.

We create memory based upon pattern recognition, and perhaps print-text is not the only way to develop reading comprehension. In this sense, reading is thinking queued by text, and that the key to being a successful reader is not automaticity with decoding, but the ability to match new information with prior experience. The creation of organizational categories to chunk larger patterns of information and connect to prior experience helps the individual to process faster.  So a movie buff who understands story arc and plot may be better at predicting the story and have more cognitive resource to focus on the details and connect new information to existing memory and experience a mental simulation of what is coded in the text–moving back and forth between online (attention to the symbols)  and off-line meaning making(memory simulation of dimensions of the situation model).

When, for example, a learner is presented with

Once upon a time . . .

They often expect other narrative features like

Happily ever after.

These elements of story structure and narrative are called Story Grammars,

and these exist based upon our prior experience with text and our ability in
pattern recognition.If you think about a narrative as a labyrinth or maze

you may want to consider the view from the top to accelerate the journey

This is what Daedalus did for Icarus, in helping him to escape the labyrinth– and this use of to-sight may be useful through improving the knowledge of novice narrative comprehenders through teaching with more accessible and high-interest media which offers feedback, interaction, and multi-modal sensory input, as well as inference making, resource management, and strategy generation. In addition, games can provide the social capital that will reinforce engagement and quality time on task. In addition, games provide a much more complex narrative.

Just consider as a branching example a game as simple as Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders to UK folks):

The game movement can influence the narrative attributes and remove the barriers of decoding to the generation and development of literary elements and pattern recognition for cognitive chunking and schema building reflected in the categories listed in the Event Indexing Model. It was this exploration of theory that led to the study of struggling readers using video games as methods for observing upper levels in student comprehension and the ideal of using high motivation narratives such as video games like Metroid Prime to examine the comprehension abilities of students who had been removed from traditional classroom instruction for reading comprehension issues,who were self-reported gaming enthusiasts to see how they did with a complex game. In this sense, if a novel is a linear experience where the choices of context lead from one scene to the next based upon the author’s order of choice, a game can be offered based upon player choices, and may offer multiple possible arcs of experience, thus:

More to come . . .

Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage

—Lessons learned about the importance of play in sustaining engagement from a high school “girl gamer” based upon socio- and cultural-cognitive analysis for designing instructional environments to elicit and sustain engagement through identity construction.

Brock Dubbels

The Center for Cognitive Sciences, Reading Education

The University of Minnesota, Department of Curriculum & Instruction,

Abstract

The experience of a successful adolescent learner will be described from the student’s perspective about learning the video game Dance Dance Revolution through selected passages from a phenomenological interview van Manen (1997). The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?” The importance of this question came out of the need for background on how to create an afterschool program that was to use Dance Dance Revolution as an after school activity that might engage adolescents and tweens to become more physically active and reduce the risk of adult obesity, and to increase bone density for these developing young people through playing the game over time. The difficulty of creating this program was the risk that the students would not sustain engagement in the activity, and thus we would not have a viable sample for the bone density adolescent obesity study. Although the phenomenological interview is generally considered a critical social science approach, the interview transcript was also analyzed using methods from critical discourse (Gee, 1992, 1996, 1999; Fairclough, 2007) with a framework developed from Chapman’s (2006) review of engagement, and from: elements of Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1996), Affinity Groups (Gee, 2001), Positive Interdependence (Deutsch 1960; Johnson and Johnson, 1989), and Self-Determination (Ryan and Deci, 2008). These social learning theories are used to explore issues of sustaining engagement through socially distributed reinforcement and to operationalize the ambiguity of identity as a construct into something that might be replicated for designing instruction. Implications of this study include understanding the potential construction of learning environments that motivate and sustain engagement in learning and the importance of identity construction (Buckingham, 2007) for teachers to motivate and engage their students.  In addition to the analysis of sustained engagement through the four socio- and cultural-cognitive theories, four major principals were extracted from the operationalized themes into a framework for instructional design techniques and theory for engaging learners for game design, training, and in classroom learning.

Key terms: Dance Dance Revolution, Exergaming, Phenomenology, Identity Construction, Self-Determination Theory, Affinity Groups, Positive Interdependence, Cooperative Learning, Motivation, Engagement, Social Learning, Instructional Design, Rites of Passage, Play, Games, Initiation, Semiotic Domains, Apprenticeship, Transformation.

Introduction

This article seeks to understand what engages young people in learning, and what sustains their interest to continue. It was intended to explore the elements that inform the lived experience of a chosen play activity and the possible social learning theories that might inform it. Four theories were chosen and operationalized for coding the transcript of the phenomenological interview because of their focus on motivation, social learning, and identity construction: Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), Affinity Groups (Gee, 2001), Social Interdependence (Deustch, 1962; Johnson and Johnson, 1989) and Self-Determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2002).

All of these theories seek to explain the motivation behind learning as socially constructed and distributed phenomena; all seek to describe the process of identity construction as an impetus for situated learning. The assumption in this study was that it is through the process of identity construction that engagement is sustained and supported through the process of group affiliation and is distributed through apprenticeship, modeling, group interaction, interdependence, and situated in space.

Identity construction rituals and rites of passage

Traditionally, communities gather to provide ceremony for initiation and status transition for such things as the celebration of status change, where a child becomes an adult, and initiation, where single people become married couple. Although there may be many more transitions and rituals in today’s society because of the great variety of cultural subgroups, i.e., churches, car clubs, self-help groups like Alcoholic Anonymous, and hobby groups like The Peoples’ Revolutionary Knitting Circle, etc.; many of these groups traditionally necessitated face-to-face interaction, but with the internet and today’s computing power, these relations can be mediated digitally through portals such as Facebook, Xbox Live, Second Life, and other social networking tools – as well as expert systems that provide feedback based upon performance, such as a video games like Dance Dance Revolution.

The Dance Dance Revolution game club might be represented as a ritual rite of passage to understand how and why people build identities around their play, and sustain engagement to ultimately develop expertise. Central to the rite of passage is the initiation ritual (Van Gennep, 1960), where new roles and status are conferred through public performance where play (Geertz, 1975), the subjunctive mood (Turner, 1969), situates the activity, so that rules, roles, and consequences are suspended and participants can explore new identities, associated activities, and their semiotic domains and thus develop new status.

With this in mind, well-designed video games and their fan bases may represent and express new forms of the rite of passage and initiation ritual. Like a rite of passage, games are structured activities that are valued by certain cultural sub-groups, depend upon play as a subjunctive mood, represent expert systems that resemble apprenticeship activities, and involve performance initiation. The subjunctive mood observed in games and ritual are said to decontextualize the action and provide a suspension of rules, roles, and consequences found in ordinary life to allow for the exploration of new identities, rules, roles, actions, and social affiliations and status in a safe space. Games can do this well.

The ritual and process of identity construction may be an organizing principle in understanding motivation and engagement. The four social learning theories presented for discourse analysis seek to provide the impetus for motivation and engagement and how to structure it, and rely upon aspects of identity construction; but these theories do not present themselves as descriptions of the identity construction process. Each theory has a different focus and seeks to describe aspects of identity and focus on an element that informs identity construction: Community (Wenger, 1998), Activity (Gee, 2001), how individuals interact with each other (Deustch, 1962; Johnson and Johnson, 1989), and needs of the individual (Deci and Ryan, 2002). For the purposes of this study, these theories were operationalized to provide insight for designing instructional environments that will motivate and sustain the engagement of the learner.

Purpose of study

This interview was to inform design features to develop a program for pre-adolescent exercise with Dance Dance Revolutionfor the study of obesity reduction and increasing bone density. The study was also intended to get a sense of why a young woman sustained engagement with Dance Dance Revolution over three years to develop expertise, and how educators might replicate that kind of commitment to learning and practice. This study may be especially pertinent to designing instructional contexts, exergaming, and structuring interaction and professional development.

Background of the study

Health care professionals have observed an increase in levels of childhood obesity. This increase has been attributed in large part to physical inactivity. Physical inactivity can lead to obesity and poor cardiovascular health, and it can also have negative effects on bone health. Bones function to support a mechanical load (a force exerted by body weight, muscle, growth, or activity). Bone is constantly formed and reabsorbed throughout life in a generally balanced way. However, in a three- to four-year window during puberty, bone formation is accelerated. In that period, as much bone material is deposited as will be lost during a person’s entire adult life. During these pivotal years of bone development, physical activity is important for optimizing bone health, as it has been shown to reduce the incidence of fractures later in life.

Because it is difficult to motivate children to participate in the type of cardiovascular activities that adults engage in (running, cycling, aerobics), new strategies must be developed, and these may demand elements that motivate the learner to sustain engagement over a longer period of time in order to promote and sustain life habits for physical conditioning.

Dance Dance Revolution is not your typical video game.

Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is a game that you set up with mats, a TV, a game console and a game disk, and up to four people can play simultaneously (figure 1). To play DDR, a participant responds to a series of directional arrows, (see figure 2) displayed on a video or TV screen to perform choreographed dance steps or hops synchronized to music. Song tempo and degree of difficulty increase as the player successfully progresses in the game. Because of the game’s popularity and its cardiovascular exercise and jumping (bone-building) components, it could represent an appealing model for reducing physical inactivity in children.

The video dance game Dance Dance Revolution may be a possible solution to increasing activity and mechanical load because of the amount of jumping activity, but the young person must be motivated to start, and engagement must be sustained for the activity to produce valid and reliable measures of obesity and bone density. The issue under investigation was how to help young people start an activity and sustain it; and the simple answer to this was, seemingly, to make it fun; to make it a high-interest activity; but many toys, games, and activities are often tried once and then put aside. What came out of the interview was:

· the importance of aligning the outcomes with a desirable activity,

· autonomy-supporting environments,

· the importance of group and environment to the construction of status and identity that makes belonging to a group desirable along with the sustenance of a common activity;

· the importance of status and relation for reinforcement;

· the centrality of group performance,

· the role of play as a subjunctive mood and portal to engagement,

· and again, the importance of identity construction for transformation to instantiate sustained engagement conveyed through affiliation, apprenticeship, positive interdependence, and expertise. The big idea here is that perception leads to transformation.

Interview-ee/ informant

To explore this, we recruited Ellen as a DDR expert and possible employee to lead an after-school program at one of our sites at the Minneapolis Public Schools. We posted a hiring description for DDR experts and had a number of responses. One respondent, Charles, shared that he had a lot of friends who were really good at DDR, and Ellen was listed as one of those people. Ellen came into the lab to show us her DDR play, and we were impressed with her expertise.

What was interesting about Ellen was that she was not from a subversive or reactionary sub-culture. Ellen is part of one of the least studied cultural sub-group in schools (Buckingham, 2007)—an urban, middle-class teen that is successful in school, is respectful to teachers, has a part-time job, plays varsity soccer, in traveling band, is part of the International Baccalaureate Program, and, has a satisfying home life. These elements of her identity were surprising. We usually assume that video game players are a disenfranchised fringe group at school who do not engage with the typical academic fare. Ellen was able to balance not only her academics and music instruction, work a part-time job, but also play sports and have friendships. These elements of balance were enticing and we wanted to know how she was doing it so that we might try and replicate not only the physical health benefits in our bone density study, but also some of the psycho-social and affective elements necessary for sustaining engagement (Chapman 2003). She seemed like a great role model for creating a curriculum that would rely heavily on identity development and she was an intriguing informant to help us understand how play identities might lead to work habits that help form healthy minds and bodies.

Methodology and review of literature

The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?” According to Chapman (2006), engagement is more than behavioral time on task. When looking to measure growth or change, or even to understand whether a learner has truly engaged, an educator should also look for evidence of commitment and positive attitudes related to the activity and subject matter.

• Engagement is not just doing the work, it is a connection and an affinity to an activity supported from the affective domains (Chapman, 2003).

• Skinner & Belmont (1993, p.572) report that engaged learners show sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone, select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration.

• Pintrich and & De Groot (1990, in Chapman) see engagement as having observable cognitive components that can be seen or elicited through exploring the learner’s use of strategy, metacognition, and self-regulatory behavior to monitor and guide the learning processes.

These attributes do not appear in an activity because a student is told that it is good for them, and that they should commit to their betterment. Least likely is that they do an activity because we threaten, or just because we want them to.  A student must make a choice to commit to an activity and have that commitment reaffirmed over time to sustain engagement. True engagement in an activity is in some sense transformative and resembles identity construction, in that it changes who one is through cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements. It seems likely that without positive reinforcement (Skinner, 1938) the behavior may result in extinction and the game becomes another resident on the island of misfit toys. We look at social learning theories to explore issues of sustaining engagement through socially distributed reinforcement.

Dance Dance Revolution is considered a high interest activity for many young people, and it does have a reward system that gives real-time feedback on performance with rewards for successfulplay. But, without aligning those rewards and achievement with social capital, they lack meaning and status, and the reinforcement system remains a token economy (Ferster and Skinner, 1957) whose tokens are unredeemable except as social capital. The work of Buckingham on identity development may provide some insight for connecting identity with purpose, motivation, and sustained engagement. Buckingham (2008, p. 3) states that

Identity is developed by the individual, but it has to be recognized and

confirmed by others. Adolescence is also a period in which young people

negotiate their separation from their family, and develop independent

social competence (for example, through participation in “cliques” and

larger “crowds” of peers, who exert different kinds of influence).

Identity and status were traditionally conferred through rites of passage, and there may have been many culturally-specific instances of these rites for different groups and related activities. Video games may represent a new wrinkle in the way that we enact and view rites of passage. They may offer a form of guided, ritualized behavior for identity construction and group affiliation as an autonomy-supporting environment (Ryan & Deci, 1999), Affinity Group (Gee, 2001), Social Interdependence (Deutsch 1960; Johnsons and Johnson 1989) or Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998).

A rite of passage does not need to resemble the tribal practices that led to vision quests, ritual markings, or exodus. A rite of passage may be organized in three forms: the process of separation, transition, and integration, (Van Gennep, 1960), but all three of these rites may also be presented as single rite (Barnard and Spencer, 1996). What was important for Van Gennep was the idea of Liminality, or the threshold. The threshold in an initiation represents a portal – a representative movement from the status of one social space to another, where ritualistically, the individual or group makes a transition by passing through a metaphorical or literal portal to represent a change in social status and position.

In the context of Liminality, the activity space may be far removed from reality, and roles, rules, tools, values, and status may be situated in the flux of play as if a hybrid or interstitial space (Turner, 1969). This concept of the threshold and liminality seems to validate Geertz (1972) and his description of the “Center Bet” in describing the ritual of Balinese Cockfighting and Benthams’ concept of Deep Play. According to Turner (1969), there may be many rites of passage in a person’s life through sub-cultural affiliation (Cock Fighting, DDR, First Job) where identity and entitlement are inculcated through desire to become a respected and acknowledged group member, where the individual can share in and contribute to group activity, participate in group spaces, and publicly renew and further their status.

For Wenger, (1998) identity is central to human learning; identity construction and learning are distributed through community and relations; learning is socially constructed; and motivation is based on a desire for sharing and participatory culture. The work of Wenger shares many attributes with Gee’s work, but the focus for Wenger was on socially distributed cognition and learning as social participation. Earlier work (Lave & Wenger, 1991) explored the role of learning in apprenticeship, where newcomers would enter into a space where learning was situated and contextualized, and goals and purpose were evident due to entering the space. One entered the space to gain apprenticeship and attempt to acquire and learn the sociocultural practices of the community. Thus, the individual is drawn to the group and begins to engage and learn by finding their role in a distributed, networked, cultural-cognitive process with the purpose of the individual as an active participant in the practices of a social community and become an acknowledged member with skills, knowledge, and the requisite values. This participation leads to the construction of his/her identity through these communities. From this understanding develops the concept of the Community of Practice: a group of individuals participating in communal activity– creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities.

The difficulty with this theory is that group membership is hard to define. A person may want to be part of group and claim group membership, but not have the identifiable characteristics that define the membership. Since identity is conferred from others, there are factors that can identify a person as a group member and as having identity markings. For Gee (2001), the activity is primary and provides the motivation and engagement, the source of group membership and the identity markings; for Gee the community and relations are ancillary and stem from the interaction related to the activity. He states that these communities and spaces are hard to identify without knowing exactly why people are there. Whether a person actually claims group membership or is acknowledged can be difficult.

For Gee, whether group membership is acknowledged — claimed or not — attributes can still be observed. The role of Gee’s work is central to operationalizing identity and group membership through offering observable sociocultural markers that come from semiotic domains central to the activity as evidence of group membership.

A semiotic domain recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language,

images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, and so forth) to

communicate distinctive types of messages.  By the word “fluent” I mean that the

learner achieves some degree of mastery, not just rote knowledge. . . Semiotic

domains are, of course, human creations.  As such, each and every one of them is

associated with a group of people who have differentially mastered the domain, but

who share norms, values, and knowledge about what constitutes degrees of mastery

in the domain and what sorts of people are, more or less, “insiders” or “outsiders”.

Such a group of people share a set of practices, a set of common goals or endeavors,

and a set of values and norms, however much each of the individuals in the group may

also have their own individual styles and goals, as well as other affiliations.

Gee (2001, pg. 2).

This work allows for certain attributes of group membership to be observable rather than subjective. A young person may have grown up participating in an activity with parents and young friends, but during the puberty years, may reject that affiliation based upon new goals for group membership and status. A new group may be more desirable than a current group, and the young person may cast off markings that identify them with the old group such as a hat from a uniform, ways of speaking, values, etc. This does not mean that markings of prior group membership with parents, family, and childhood affiliations are not still observable—an accent or mannerism may indicate origins or influence. For Gee (2001) it is the activities and the group practices that provide evidence of social learning and group membership from semiotic domains, and it is activity that is central to identity construction.

For Deci and Ryan (2002) the focus comes from work on motivation with a focus on Autonomy — possibly built from early work by White (1959), where organisms have an innate need to experience competence and agency, and experience joy and pleasure with the new behaviors when they assert competence over the environment . . . what White called effectance motivation. For Deci and Ryan motivation is based on the degree that an activity or value has been internalized, and this is based upon the degree to which the behavior has meaning within the context of the arena of performance.

In order to sustain engagement for Deci and Ryan, motivation must be internalized . . . the external contingency must be “swallowed whole.” The learner identifies the value of the new behavior with other values that are part of the self. This process of engagement is the transformation of an extrinsic motive, one that is reinforced from outside the learner’s values, into an activity that is assimilated and internalized by the learner as an intrinsic value that becomes part of their personal identity. This process involves constructing values aligned with the group and environment, and thus assimilates behavioral norms that were originally external as part of a new identity. Based on the degree of control exerted by external factors, levels of extrinsic motivation can be aligned along a continuum.

Be sure to look for the article when it comes out.

Other sections include:

• • • • • Themes for coding

        • Play as Subjunctive Mood, Activity Space, Desirable Social Grouping, and Desirable Activity

        • Data collection

        • Data Analysis

        • Interview

        • The performance/ initiation

        • Conclusion
        • Relevance of analysis
        • Implications / lessons for designing instructional environments
        • Principle 1 — Play as a Subjunctive Mode
        • Principle 2 — Desirable Activities

        • Principle 3 — Spaces

        • Principal 4 – Desirable Groups

        • Appendices
        • Works Cited

        To read the entire article, it is available here

Think of toys as pivots– as Vygotsky did, as well as prior posts on this site regarding play. Toys are representation,. where a child may imagine that they are participating in something imagined and fantastic that might otherwise be too dangerous to participate in or initially too difficult to do. However, with the toy, the child might come closer to realizing the fantasy. What the experts in the article seem to ignore is that more complex toys can make the act closer to the real act — MIMESIS — imitation of the thing to be learned and played to gain competence and gain respect enough to engage in the real act through showing aptitude, knowledge, and competence.

Toys are computational devices that provide gratification–in many ways they are computational extensions of our minds, storing knowledge of how to do things — where a toy stethoscope allows kids to play as a doctor, a gun a soldier, a car a race car driver. These pivots, or toys allow the child to assimilate and build knowledge of the content domain, or as Williamson Shaffer calls it, Epistemic Frames (2006). Thus toys help to align tasks so that a solution can become transparent–this is Herb Simon said good teachers do with critical thinking science, math, and pattern recognition like comprehension;  and this is what maps did for the maritime industry along with other tools like the sextant, compass, and global positioning (machines/ computers doing mental work) Hutchins, (1994). There were many mental calculations involved in sailing, these tools allowed fewer to do more.

A toy helps scaffold a child into roles, rules, tools, values, and language through building competence recognized by their community –which at some point awards them the right to take on the role they were playing.

Although this article from NPR is provocative, there really is no evidence presented here. The statement that play with simple toys makes for more imaginative kids seems to put the onus on the toys rather than teh reality that simple toys may remind parents of their own childhood, and remind them how they played so that they can lead play with their own children. The key is spending time sharing imaginative play between children and trusted adults.

Although I tend to want to subscribe to the “golden age” of childhood, where kids played with sticks “and we liked it”,   we also need to realize that these more complicated contemporary toys lead to more complicated actions and acts–if we dig beneath the surface of the toys and play, and go deeper rather than jump from surface activity to surface activity, pretending that with simple toys, rocks and sticks, the kids will somehow become  the next George Lucas.

Sophisticated toys can lead to sophisticated play. Any act that inspires  unsophisticated gratification leads to other similar acts as is implied in the article regarding Self-Regulation and Motivation. I think we we may be finding at home, school, and on the playground is Platte River Syndrome — a mile wide and an inch deep. Although there is value in having a wide range of experience, depth of experience may lead to greater cognitive organization, recall, and interconnection — thus transfer.

So can we go deep with new toys? High tech toys?

That seems to be the correct question.

Blake said we might see the universe in a grain of sand; some have seen the savior in a pancake; I think complex toys could lead to complex thought with the right guidance. And guidance is the key. Toys, whether they are hand-carved blocks, Legos, or Leapsters, are not parent-substitute. The key is interaction and feedback. Games can do that, but there is really nothing like conversation with an interested, intelligent human. We can adjust to, extend, and even feel what is being shared. I am not so sure Montessori certified toys can do this ( I worked at a Montessori as a teacher) — what they beg for is explanation of what happened — a teaching and performance for someone listening and responding: present and in attendance with the child.

The fallacy — a call to fear?

In the article it is stated that children have experienced generational reduction in cognitive or social function– and I do not believe this was even supported, just stated with anecdote ( as here– but you can look it up)  — however, IQ tests have actually shown children getting smarter, and interestingly violent crimes have gone down since the invention of the video game console — oddly they are playing cooperative games rather than running a muck between 3 and 5 pm – the time between school letting out and parents getting home. Kids are now home with an XBox, and perhaps playing against someone live on the other side of the world — and if it is a bad person, they unplug the connection, terminate the game, report . . . not like having to run from some creep at the Mall or in the woods.

This idealization and the fallacy of the golden age of play seems to set aside the idea that free and unrestricted play has always been haunted by fears of urban dangers, adult predators, and mother nature — letting kids run unsupervised seems reasonable to some extent, but isn’t this article calling for some childhood fantasy that does not exist, did not exist, and should lead us to question how we design our lives for children?

When I go to the playground with my kids, I see way too many smart phones, and not enough pirates.

It is unfortunate to see parents unable to play, especially in playgrounds; the children wanting to have fun, imaginative, and silly,  and sadly, the parents are so far removed from this kind of activity they defer to teh familiar alien landscapes of their media, sadly contrived.

Maybe the smart phone is an adult toy, however, one should not blame the toy, but the player.

Lets not blame the toys, lets look this in the eye — the one staring back at you from the from the screen.

Freefalling sales. Skyrocketing unemployment. Studios tanking left and right. Tune in for the first of a special two-part series as we ask: Is it ‘game over’ for thousands of developers and publishers – and millions of fans – worldwide?

This video segment came form Digital Trends and I thought it interesting and perhaps worthy of dialog.

What do you think?
Need to read more?

Ask any family who’s ever dealt with addiction: When a friend is ailing, collapsing under the weight of their own dependencies, only two courses of action exist. Either you sit down, shut up and let nature take its terrifying course, or pause, take a deep breath and do what duty demands… step in and stage an intervention. And speaking as a player, parent, professional, fan and longtime ardent admirer of this medium so many cherish and adore, let’s not kid ourselves. To put it bluntly – the time has come to take the game industry aside and show it some tough love.

Go to original post

The Jekyll and Hyde Effect calls into question approaches to accountability and implementation of mandated approaches to research-validated techniques and assessment in classroom instruction. Dissonance between teachers core beliefs about student learning and these new mandates, as presented to them, may be creating two different identities, two different classrooms, and two different sets of books  to satisfy mandates and continue doing what they know works. This study utilized discourse analysis, coding teacher artifacts as outcomes of genre chains with themes from mandates, policy, and law for classroom changes in curriculum and instructional assessment tools, materials, and professional development. The informants from the studies and findings from analysis of the artifacts reveal that many teachers do not feel that what is good for the spreadsheet is good for kids. This tension in core beliefs about learning and instruction need not lead to conflict– integration of assessment and appropriate implementation could enhance teacher and student experience. The transformation of policy to implementation was seen as problematic and led to misunderstanding and conflict, often based upon an inability to see standards, benchmarks, and assessments integrated into engaging, play-like activities such as games rather than the controlled, direct instruction that might cause resistance and disinterest by students and instructors, but easy to identify by administrators. The presentation makes a case for the importance of play in engagement and comprehension through review of literature on intelligence measures and new research on embodiment theory and the indexical hypothesis. Then it give examples of implementation.

New models of comprehension and memory validate the value of active and playful learning for cognitive enhancement and generative transfer. Data on academic performance and engagement measures from five years of games, play, and virtual space learning in K-20 classrooms will be presented in the context of assessment measures using a model for assessing cognitive growth. This is contrasted with educator beliefs, the efficacy of play, and the limitations of models of teacher professionalism creating a Jekyll and Hyde Effect. Though interviews, artifacts, and surveys, K-20 educators have expressed a willingness to embrace games, but have been reluctant to do so publicly for fear of professional reputation, as well as the ability to implement such pedagogical change.

In this presentation, on overview of research, methodology, outcomes, and descriptions of implementation will be presented on how video games and virtual worlds were used to raise standardized reading scores. This evidence, methodology, and experience is presented with outcomes of surveys, interviews, and discourse analysis of teacher artifacts, and presents the institutional experiences of educators balancing the tension of using games and play, and the fear of being stigmatized as unprofessional at their teaching sites. The result begins to create a picture of creating two different sets of books, and two different teaching identities — Jeckyll and Hyde.

In this post, Ross Smith, Director of Test, Windows Security, at Microsoft, and one of the authors of The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Microsoft Press, 2007), describes the groundwork on their approach to using games as a tool for productivity and defect prevention through Portfolio Selection, Game Theory and “crowdsourcing”.  He makes a case for a diverse portfolio of defect detection techniques and a means for utilizing crowds for human computation  for developing these techniques.  Smith asks:

“So, if the problem set for defect detection lies in our ability to balance our portfolio of discovery techniques, how can we involve the “crowd” to balance our portfolio on a grander scale?”

He states that:

The answer lies in the use of “Productivity Games.” Productivity Games, as a sub-category of Serious Games, attract players to perform “real work,” tasks that humans are good at but computers currently are not. Although computers offer tremendous opportunities for automation and calculation, some tasks, such as analyzing images, have proven to be difficult and error-prone and, therefore, using computers can often lower the quality and usefulness of the results. For tasks such as this, human computation can be much more effective. Additionally, by framing the work task in the form of a game, we are able to quickly and effectively communicate the objective and achieve higher engagement from a community of employees as players of the game.

Here is an excerpt and link to the original post:

Modern portfolio theory (MPT), based on Markowitz’s work, suggests that the return of an investment portfolio is maximized for any given level of risk by using asset classes with low correlations to one other. In other words, a diverse set of investments reduces risk and maximizes return. In a portfolio with two diverse assets, when the value of asset #1 is falling, asset #2 is rising at the same rate. MPT also assumes an efficient market—that is, all known information is reflected in the price of an investment. These factors contribute to an investor’s ability to create an “optimal portfolio” for his level of risk.

How does this apply to testing software? The effort we put forth in testing (or quality improvement) is our investment. Our return or investment yield is the number of defects discovered. Each of our techniques will yield a return of a certain number or percentage of defects. This is easily seen in the distribution of the “How Found” field of our defect-tracking database. In addition to the return of discovered defects, there is the risk of escaped defects: missed bugs that are found in the field. This is akin to investor loss.

The evaluation of our testing strategy based on the MPT principles exposes a set of deficiencies and enables us to improve the return on our testing investment while minimizing the risk of escapes, the same way investors maximize the return on their portfolios while minimizing the risk of loss of principle. The range of optimal portfolio selection, according to Markowitz, is called the “efficient frontier” and is derived by evaluating each asset’s correlation with every other asset’s correlation to determine the optimal allocation of all the asset classes. Once the efficient frontier has been determined for the asset classes being evaluated, the decision of which optimal portfolio to choose becomes a question of the level of risk tolerance.

In other words, once the efficient frontier has been determined for our defect discovery techniques (“how found” in the tracking database), we can use our tolerance for risk (how many bugs found in the field are we willing to accept as a reasonable level of risk) to estimate which test strategies to invest in, and how much/frequently we should invest. A diversified approach minimizes our risk and maximizes our return. When the defect yield of “how found = test case development” starts to wane, it’s time for “how found = customer” or “how found = ad hoc testing.” We are governed by the principle that the second bug is harder (and more costly) to find than the first. Yield curves through a project cycle illustrate this effectively. This is common sense to any seasoned tester, but the numbers give us a formula to predict and dictate the timing of behavior change.

The most important aspect of the diversified approach is to stay with the portfolio once it has been established, regardless of return. This takes a level of trust that we’re not used to at Microsoft and a belief that our techniques are good investments. Just as an investor might panic when a given investment fails miserably, we tend to over-react when we miss a certain type of bug. Just as a fund manager massages her investments to provide consistency, there are great defect prevention tools and techniques to improve our test strategies.

Game Theory and Human Computation

The relationship here is interesting. The year before winning the Nobel Prize, Harry Markowitz won the John von Neumann Theory Prize. From the Nobel Prize site:

“In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language.” John von Neumman was one of the leading mathematicians in his day, and instrumental in the development of game theory.

John von Neumann’s 1944 book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, helped set the stage for the use of math and game theory for Cold War predictions, stock market behavior, and TV advertising. He was the first to expand early mathematical analysis of probability and chance into game theory in the 1920s. His work was used by the military during World War II, and then later by the RAND Corporation to explore nuclear strategy. In the 1950s, John Nash, popularized in the film A Beautiful Mind, was an early contributor to game theory. His “Nash Equilibrium,” helps to evaluate player strategies in non-cooperative games. Game theory helps us to understand how and why people play games.

So, other than Markowitz winning the von Neumann award in 1989, how does MPT relate to defect prevention? The answer lies, seductively, in the use of crowd-sourcing and human computation: attracting the effort of “the crowd” to assist.

Wikipedia describes “crowdsourcing” as

“a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).”

and “human computation” as

“Human-based computation is a computer science technique in which a computational process performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans. This approach leverages differences in abilities and alternative costs between humans and computer agents to achieve symbiotic human-computer interaction.”

So, if the problem set for defect detection lies in our ability to balance our portfolio of discovery techniques, how can we involve the “crowd” to balance our portfolio on a grander scale?

The answer lies in the use of “Productivity Games.” Productivity Games, as a sub-category of Serious Games, attract players to perform “real work,” tasks that humans are good at but computers currently are not. Although computers offer tremendous opportunities for automation and calculation, some tasks, such as analyzing images, have proven to be difficult and error-prone and, therefore, using computers can often lower the quality and usefulness of the results. For tasks such as this, human computation can be much more effective. Additionally, by framing the work task in the form of a game, we are able to quickly and effectively communicate the objective and achieve higher engagement from a community of employees as players of the game.

One of the all-time greatest examples of a Productivity Game is the ESP Game, developed by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie-Mellon University (also well known for inventing the Captcha), in which players help label images. In the ESP Game, two players work together to match text descriptions of images to earn points. The artifacts of game play are text-based (searchable) descriptions of images (not searchable). More at http://www.gwap.com.

Following is a series of quotes and examples related to the importance, usefulness, and appeal of games.

As University of Minnesota researcher Brock Dubbels suggests, “Games provide the opportunity to experience something grand—flight simulators do not have the excitement that games do—games exaggerate and elevate action beyond normal experience to make them motivating and exciting. In World War 2, the likelihood of being in a dogfight was slim, but in the game ‘1942,’ you can find one around every corner. Games raise our level of expectation to the fantastic and our biochemical reward system pays out when we build expectation towards reward. Sometimes the reward leading up to the payout is greater than the reward at payout! A game structures interaction in ways that may not be available by default for special circumstances and projects. A game can also create bonds that hold people together through creating opportunities for relationships that one might not experience every day.”

Read the article in entirety

For two days in August we will be examining the state of the art in educational uses of new and emerging technologies in education. Come to the campus of Inver Hills Community College in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota (southeast suburb of St. Paul) for a focused conference that will provide practical teaching tips and great ideas to prepare you for the start of school in the fall.

Enjoy engaging, informative, and entertaining talks that will not harsh your mellow.

vgAlt will be there for a keynote and a hands-on seminar on integrating games into traditional classroom instruction, as well as next generation hybrid courses that build upon notions of online and extend them with new interactive media into augmented reality.

Title: 

Professionalism

and the Jekyll and Hyde Effect

Subtitle:

Games facilitate learning acceleration, no one will dis your MOJO now professor.

Brock Dubbels
12:45 – 1:45

New models of comprehension and memory validate the value of active playful learning for generative transfer:  five years of data collection on standardized reading assessments are shared from a curriculum of games, play, and virtual spaces in k-20 classrooms will be presented on the value of virtual worlds and interactive games used with developmental students and instructors.

In this presentation, on overview of research, methodology, outcomes, and descriptions of implementation will be presented on how video games and virtual worlds were used to raise standardized reading scores and improve reading performance with developmental reading exit examinations. This evidence provides some corollary to educators’ hesitation in using games as methodology for data collection and curriculum.

This hesitation was documented through genre chain analysis in the form of surveys, interviews, and discourse analysis of teacher artifacts, and the institutional experiences of educators balancing the tension of using games and play, and the fear of being stigmatized as unprofessional at their teaching sites.

The outcome of the genre chain analysis begins to create picture of educators creating two different sets of books, and two different teaching identities — Jekyll and Hyde. Where we may have a feeling games can be powerful learning tools, but dare we get caught using them?

Jekyll — standards, benchmarks, traditional curriculum to not be singled out — proper, professional, dignified

Hyde — Dude,  I know what works for my students — the role of  interpretation and translation of policy, climate, standards, content and expectation as genre chains– INTASC, Standards of Effective Instruction, Personal Development Plans, learning walks, oversight accountability, parent letters, and report cards–and offering coursework that is engaging and developmentally appropriate, and fits the teachers MOJO.

In this presentation evidence from classroom success and data collected from standardized assessments and cognitive neuroscience is presented. You can come out and relieve your fears of being caught using games in the classroom. Games are effective in learning acceleration. You no longer need to Hyde it.

You can have your fun and EAT IT too.

Come to the Break out session 2:00 – 3:00

Track 2: Brock Dubbels –

Video Games as Learning Tools

In this session, participants will be exposed to experiential learning and access to next generation game systems and an example of curriculum as games relate to content and can be used for developmental reading, technical writing, and technology.

Other content areas will be discussed, along with an approach called 9 ways to use video games for learning acceleration.

Make sure that you come to Games in Education

New York August 5th and 6th!

This event is well worth the trip just for the networking.

This is my third year participating in this conference, and every year the bar is raised with excellent speakers, useful and illuminating workshops, and excellent hosts.

Check out the program for yourself! http://www.gamesineducation.org/

Earn 5 clock hours by taking conference notes and summarizing what you have experienced.

Tell us what you are learning during the two day conference and get clockhours!

Come and connect, reflect, and carry this into your classroom.

Sign up for 49.95 at Professional Learning Board

Facilitated by vgAlt instructor Brock Dubbels

Link to sign up