Games and learning

I really enjoyed the talk we got to go to last Thursday, The Civic Potential of Video Games, by Dr. Joseph Kahne. When it comes to the cliché'd admonition to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, I thought he eloquently expressed the case for the baby.

I feel like I've heard so much negativity and fear whenever a new technology captures the time and attention of people, that I can't justify jumping on that boat. Yeah, sure, video games can be violent, but not all of them. To focus on their negative aspects is to negate any benefits or usefulness inherent in the technology.

The tools at our disposal continue to grow in number and quality, but seem slow to be picked up in education. Why? Well, some people will say that they need to see a track record of usefulness in order to engage the stakeholder buy-in. But if the track record is only in violent games, then those stakeholders won't see the track record of usefulness. This violent track record is, I believe, given to us by sensationalist media eyes (google the negative effects of video games for more references). Cooperation and puzzle-solving aren't newsworthy. Killing your fellow-students is an internationally newsworthy story. We see what we are given to see and ignore the benefits.

Yes. There are bad aspects to pretty much everything. We might as well protest about humans and ban ourselves if we want to take things to their logical conclusion. Just look around you. But humans span the vast spectrum of human nature, which encompasses both good and evil. Likewise, videogames (along with many technologies which humans use) span the spectrum of human nature.

What we need to focus on is not how bad they are, but on how useful they could be. We don't have to call it education, but as Shakespear said, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

To what use can we use them in a way that fosters cooperation, critical thinking, civic involvement, and a great number of other things that could be educational?

E. Wagner podcast

Listening to all the sound clips from my fellow students regarding Dr. Wagner's presentation was very interesting. Trying to put a bunch of them together to make an audiofile made it even more interesting. Ty and I tried to focus on the bright side of the future, and we therefore took some of what people said out of context and repurposed it.

Here is the link to the podcast. I hope you like my favorite photo of Mars.

Second Life, the Gartner Hype Cycle, and the Innovation Adoption Curve

In my last post, this is one of the things I said about Dr. Ellen Wagner’s presentation:

If you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve, you’ll see that they intersect in the Trough of Dissolutionment area. After that, adoption rises to become mainstream and Hype Cycle moves into the Slope of Enlightment toward the Plateau of Productivity.

Although Dr. Wagner’s slides don’t include Second Life and Sloodle, I think that we are at that intersection where the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve intersect when it comes to these two things.

She says in her slides that “[t]he path from innovation to adoption is a lengthy journey of implementations and evaluation to determine the benefit/return.”

I think we’re there when it comes to the widespread adoption of virtual worlds and MMORPGs for education. You can’t elicit stakeholder share in newfangled technologies until they’ve somehow been proven, and institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and the Exploratorium, trailblazed this.

So now’s the time, since it’s on it’s way to the Plateau of Productivity, that the technology can be utilized in a more widespread fashion.

Podcast Script Assignment

Our assignment was to write a short podcast script for an interview with Dr. Wagner. The script should pose questions and supposed answers based on her presentation and slides. I'm not clear on this because when I left class I thought it was something we were supposed to bring to class but then Ethan's email said to put it on our blogs. So... While I am feeling a certain lameness, here it is... One minute or less, right?

ALEX:
Dr. Wagner, you said that instructional designers should design using today’s technologies, rather than design using those of tomorrow. Could you please elaborate on this?

DR. WAGNER:
Yes. You want to design with the available tools because it can be sustained. It’s affordable (from the school or company’s perspective) has enough users. It's also predictable, and therefore more easily accepted. We need to focus on sustainable innovation.

If you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Innovation Adoption Curve, you’ll see that they intersect in the Trough of Dissolutionment area. After that, adoption rises to become mainstream and Hype Cycle moves into the Slope of Enlightment toward the Plateau of Productivity.

Automated responsiveness everywhere!

I really enjoyed our guest speaker's presentation in the last class session. Dr. Ellen Wagner is an engaging, dynamic, and forward-thinking woman.

Two things she brought up, haptics and ubiquitous access (and subsequently smart buildings / products), are subjects that I have thought a lot about in relation to world- and community-changing technologies. I believe that these two things combined will have a significant impact on our future lives. it will change our assumptions and the assumptions of future generations. But we don't have to feel that they are things that are coming down the pike. In fact, these concepts are not totally new or revolutionary. When I think of ubiquity of access to information, I try to remind myself of books, newspapers, and magazines -- even while out in the woods camping, I still had my book to read if I wanted to. I try to think of how televisions and telephones saturated the market to the extent that some homes even had several of these items. Or of the thermostat keeping the temperature in a building within a certain range. Even of automatically opening doors.

While the concepts may not be revolutionary, their implementation certainly is. It allows us to do magic (or what would appear to be magic if we were time travelers from the past). Hmmm...

NEWSFLASH: My favorite blog, information aesthetics, just posted about Sixth Sense. Here's a four-minute video. Imagine the implications! This is soooo cool, and it's very much what Dr. Wagner was discussing in class about Web 3.o (3D).



Oh, speaking of automatically opening doors, I have to share something that happened to me once in Las Vegas. I learned that casinos are designed to always turn the customer back to the slot machines and tables. On this particular day I was determined to see the outdoors -- to see sunlight. Somehow I couldn't find my way out of the place (but it was so easy to come in!). Finally, I found the door! In my excitement, I raced to the door and was stopped by the glass. I backed up and went toward the door. Nothing happened. Obviously it was broken. So I went to the other door and it, too, was broken. Aaaargh! I couldn't get out of the casino!

Just then, I saw some people heading into the casino. They walked up to the door and pushed it. It wasn't broken; it was manual.

Finally, I'd like to share this link with you. It's an interactive map of future forces affecting education: http://www.kwfdn.org/map/map.aspx. It's really interesting and they invite participants to add to it.

Global Community

OK. Sorry folks. I couldn't resist.

I know this sounds like a shameful plug for Amazon.com, Google (the new evil empire, to some... yes, yes, I know), and our newly elected president, but like I said: I couldn't resist.

I am reading The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama and I had to share this one excerpt from the book (p. 166). He's talking about visiting Google in 2004.

"These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now," the engineer said. "Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way" --he caused the screen to alter-- "you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internent system."

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis--most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.

Other than the fact that President Obama is IMHO obviously a great and engaging writer, this is a telling tale about connectivity and communication. The world is connected, but there are places where this connection is slow to arrive. If we use Web 2.0 technologies to reach the world, do we have a responsibility to bring those who are not connected into the fold? Do we just shout out to the existing 'netizens, or do we strive to increase the population? Does that striving come from a desire to educate, a desire to share these great tools, or what?

Video Response to C. Bonk's lecture on 2/26/09

I read an article early last week, Facebook and Bebo risk 'infantilising' the human mind. This kind of sensationalism about new technology both frustrates me and makes me laugh. I couldn’t help but think of previous sensationalist claims. For example, Is television destroying our children's minds?

Yes. I chose the same online news publication, The Guardian, from the U.K. I couldn’t help myself.

I’ve also read articles about how we've discovered specific genes (HAR genes) that give us a propensity for rapid brain development and that each new tool we use somehow acts on our brains, furthering our development – a development that supposedly makes us better than our fellow co-critters. Whether it does or doesn’t, current research indicates that we have genes that speed up brain development, and that’s what makes us different from other creatures.

Dr. C. Bonk’s lecture last week fed right into my mindset of the day, and one of the very many websites he presented was Adora’s website.

So my assignment, a 1-minute visual, tries to capture those things.