6 posts from December 2007

After reading the Foreward, Introduction, and the first couple chapters of Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher's new book Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century, I had to put it down. It was too much too fast.  Since the book itself is an application of the gaming-influenced instructional design principals published in James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, I decided to go back and read his work instead.  Apparently, this 2003 book's publication was a watershed event for education, and I missed it.

Fortunately, I couldn't find a library copy of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Instead, I read a 2005 article of Gee's from E-learning, "Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines."  Reading the article instead of the book gave me what Gee says the best video games give gamers:  a fish tank, or sandbox experience.  I was able to explore new material without risk or rules in a smaller, controlled environment.  Where I was flailing through Selfe and Hawisher's book with no shore/buoy/raft in site, in Gee's article I was relaxing in a wading pool. Gee explains, "Fish tanks are stripped-down versions of the game...When confronted with complex systems, letting the learner see some of the basic variables and how they interact can be a good way into confronting more complex versions of the system later on" (12).  And about sandboxes he writes, "...if learners are put into a situation that feels like the real thing, but with risks and dangers greatly mitigated, they can learn well and still feel a sense of authenticity and accomplishment;"  further, "You can't expect newcomers to learn if they feel too much pressure, understand too little, and feel like failures" (12).

A "serial" summary of some of Gee's principles (and what I now sort of understand from Cynthia Selfe):

Empowered Learners: 

"Good learning requires that learners feel like active agents (producers) not just passive reciepients (consumers)...In a video game, players make things happen...learners must come to understand the design of the domain they are learning, so that they can make good choices about how to affect that design...The whole curriculum should be shaped by the learner's actions and react back on the learner in meaningful ways" (7).

Are students allowed to "discover their favored learning styles without fear...Do they get to reflect on the nature of their own learning and learning in general?  Are students encouraged to try out different learning styles and problem solutions without risking a bad grade?" (7).

Learner identities...does my curriculum and practice allow/encourage students to see themselves as "the kind of person" who thinks like a practitioner of my discipline?  "...academic areas are not first and foremost bodies of facts, they are, rather, first and foremost, the activities and ways of knowing through which such facts are generated, defended, and modified.  Such activities and ways of knowing are carried out by people who adopt certain sorts of identities, that is, adopt certain ways with words, actions, and interactions, as well as certain values, attitudes, and beliefs" (8).

Smart tools...skills have meaning and are learned with they become strategies, when they are "situated" in an authentic context.  "...humans feel expanded and empowered whent hey can manipulate powerful tools in intricate ways that extend their area of effectiveness" (8).  Smart tools are "tools and technologies that allow the learner to manipulate [their] world in a fine-grained way" (9).  What are the smart tools of language arts?  Language conventions, modes of discourse? 

Distributed knowledge...in some video games, character/gamers have to collaborate because each gamer has some specific knowledge or skill to contribute to a team working toward a goal. Does collaboration in my classroom incorporate authentic distributed knowledge and therefore opportunities for integration?

Problem Solving:

"Given human creativity, if learners face problems early on that are too free-form or too complex, they often form creative hypotheses about how to solve these problems, but hypotheses that don't work well for later problems" (example:  generation 1.5 writers learning syntax from spoken language and applying those rules to written language?)..."The problems learners face early on are crucial and should be well designed to lead them to hypotheses that work well, not just on these problems, but as aspect of the solutions of later, harder problems..." (9).

"...the order in which learners confront problems in a problem space is important..." (9) "The fruitful patterns or generalizations in any domain are the ones that are best recognized by those who already know how to look at the domain, how the complex variables at play in the domain related and interrelate to each other...Problem spaces can be designed to enhance the trajectory through which the learner traverses them.  This does not mean leading the learner by the hand in a linear way.  It means designing a problem space well" (10).  What's a "problem space" in language arts?

Pleasant frustration..."Motivation for humans lies in challenges that feel challenging, but doable and in gaining continual feedback that lets them know what progress they are making" (10).

Cycles of expertise..."Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn anew" (10).  Sort of like learning the 5 paragraph essay in junior high and having to unlearn it in high school?

Cycle = extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, a new challenge, then a new extended practice..."This is what constitutes good pacing in a game" (11).

Information on demand/ just in time...learners can't internalize verbal information unless they can use or apply it.  Gee's example is a game manual.  "The first few levels of Goblin Commander: Unleash the Hord allows the player to enact the information that would be in the manual, step by step, and then the game seamlessly moves into more challenging game play" (11).  I can do this now with writing instruction, in writing conferences, but how could a new teacher be trained to do this without more significant classroom practice?

These principles, as I understand them as a novice, reinforce the workshop models of language arts instruction and really contextualize the success I've had using visual art and a sort of "artists' workshop" model in my class.

Selfe, Mareck, and Gardiner are telling me that "At this point in history, by and large, our children are raised from infancy on the compelling images of the TV set, the video game, and the computer.  Alphabetic literacy for our children is often experienced as an add-on, a curious school-based task that seems to have little relevance outside the classroom."  I'm not really scared by this, as I was at the beginning of the semester. I'm sort of content to let it happen.  But I am overwhelmed by it, and it makes me want to retire.

I love my "semiotic domain."  I've been teaching for 13 years and have only recently really come to understand and perfect how I'm teaching reading and writing.  I've figured out how to convince my reluctant students how to see themselves as writers instead of paragraph spewers. I just really want to freeze time and hang out here. As confident as I am, I know there's more to learn about what I'm doing already.  I'm excited to build some sense of expertise here and now before I move on to the demands of the near future.  Would that be a disservice to my students?

Selfe and her colleagues also say that "...success in a world of rapid technological change may well depend on the ability to develop new literacy practices..."  and that  I am probably "steadfastly [abiding] by the mythic conventions of the postfigurative literacy yardstick by which [I myself am] measured."

I love teaching because I am at heart addicted to learning.  But I don't want to learn this fast.  Is it time already for me to step out of the classroom, get out of the way and let the digital revolution begin?

Resources

Selfe, Cynthia L. and  Gail E. Sawisher, eds. Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Selfe, Cynthia L., Mareck, Anne F. and Josh Gardiner.  "Computer Gaming as Literacy." Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, pp. 21-35.

My husband wanted to buy some kind of gaming system for our son this Christmas.  His sister talked him out of it (he never believes me:).  They got one for their five year-old son along with the Lego Star Wars game, and it's like heroin.  Little Ryan can't turn it off. He didn't even want to open presents on his birthday because he was too busy playing. I'm just not up for that battle.  I already have it with TV time and pokemonaholic.com.

Then in last Sunday's USA Weekend, I read an article about how childhood play has changed.  Jane Healey, author of Failure to Connect:  How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--and What We Can Do About It claims:

...many of the most popular and exciting video games engage and build the basic 'fight or flee' part of the brain rather than the centers of higher reasoning.  Some games...are more reflective, and...[may require] intelligent reasoning.  In many cases, children 'look like they're solving problems on a video game, but they're really just responding on a sensory level...If you watch kids on a computer, most of them, they're just hitting keys or moving the mouse as fast as they can.  It really reminds me of rats running in a maze.'

So I feel good about holding off for another year.  At home and in my classroom, I need to learn how to integrate gaming, or gaming principles in a way that isn't a collision with what I'm doing already.

As I have mentioned in a post or two, until very recently, my son refused to hold a pencil or use a crayon.  Suddenly, after preschool last year, he could write his name.  But the J is always backwards.  It's been like an unreachable itch for me, but somehow I've stopped myself from correcting him.  Finally, this fall we had our first parent conference with his kindergarten teacher.  I was able to ask, "How do I fix this?"  She told me not to.  In kindergarten, teachers ask questions like, "Well, does that J look like the one on our alphabet chart?"  And if he's ready, he'll notice it's backwards.  Brilliance.  That's how, after years in the classroom, I finally decided to teach writing--and how to facilitate useful peer response and portfolio assessment.

Over time, I began to realize that student writers didn't get much out of comments offered by their peers in feedback sessions.  The best practice I started using was a "read around."  Everybody simply read everybody else's essay and naturally asked themselves, "Is mine like this one? Why isn't mine like this one?  Is that good or bad?"  Just like the backwards J.  I would add in "professional" models of the different techniques I was trying to teach so that they had another point of reference.  I would also hold conferences with them individually and ask reader response questions.

The issue for me tonight is how I might replicate my best practice online.  One of the articles we read for this week cautioned against trying to replicate analog successes in cyberspace.  We need to approach the digital environment as its own habitat with unique potential. So in the past, I've asked students to keep "writing folders" containing every draft of any piece of writing they felt was worth my assessment.  My goal was to represent a variety of modes/audiences/purposes and teach students how to mine my 6 Traits Rubric scores to gain a sense of their most successful genres.  A student may have scored an overall 3.8 (on a 4 point scale) for personal narrative, but  only a 2.3 on  an expository or analytical essay.  This is a conversation starter.  We might note together that the highest score  on the personal narrative was for voice, while that was the lowest for the analytical writing.  That difference is a learning opportunity.  What should we practice?  What should we read?  What approach would be better for the MCA?  But if I don't want to replicate this exactly online because I need to be mindful of the new opportunities of cyberspace, what do I do?

Another of the articles we read (that came to me as a pdf so I can't offer it here--sorry), cautioned about the use of partner feedback online.  While all students in the reported study made gains in their reflection skills over a semester as they kept a blogfolio, those who participated in peer feedback made less progress.  The authors of the study sited the possibility that students may have felt constrained by the audience of their peers, were less willing to let themselves "babble," or freely reflect.  Clearly, there's an issue about trust and community building underlying any attempt at peer feedback.  But even in my tightly knit classes who have been trained, the comments from peers haven't been as worthwhile as I would want them to be.  There's the issue of "zone of proximal development"--that student writers will only really benefit from comments from peers who are at or above their skill and knowledge level.  They perform better, make more progress from my reader response.  Just a fact.  What I want to preserve in an online reflection system is exposure to peers' writing and published models, and of course externalized thinking about those texts.  So here are some possibilities.

1. A class blog that asks students to mimic some aspect of a model text in each posting.  I could select the post texts based on what I perceive that my students need to practice or on standards I need to cover. Alternately, students could collect their own exerpts to practice from.
   
2. A class wiki with pages for each writing assignment that include links to sample student essays or, if applicable, published examples.  Students could participate in discussion of "best" and "worst" features of the example writing and post their own drafts for consideration.
3. Students could keep individual blogs, either with teacher directed prompts for metacognition, or self-motivated reflection.  Blogs might also be really useful for one minute essays at the end of lessons.  I'm not a fan of posting drafts or finished works in a blog format.  I just don't think the comment templates available are adequate for useful feedback, unless the students have been trained in reader response and are capable of engaging in useful questioning.  If the eportfolio were to represent best work rather than process, I think I would use a wiki to catalogue the finished drafts, maybe with reflective introductions to each file.

My own blog for this course has pushed a few issues to the surface.  I'm not writing just for reflection, but for my colleagues and my future classrooms.  My entries have been a bit more informative and a little less reflective than those I would want to see from my students.  I'm cataloging my thinking, sure, but mostly my resources for future reference.  There's a public-private schmear on a blog.  When I'm writing for a specified audience--my colleagues or my future self--I do feel constrained in terms of what's appropriate or useful to include. I believe my blog would be entirely different in tone and somewhat different in content if I were writing only for my teacher or classmates, and remarkably different if I were writing it only for myself.  My challenge as a teacher will be to clarify the purpose of the eportfolio if I choose to use it:  reflecting, publishing, practicing--or all of these. (I do have to admit that I feel more motivated to "publish" on my blog than I do to write in my private journal.  What's that all about?)

So my 6 year-old kindergartener son is obsessed with Pokemon.  I remember reading articles and hearing news reports while I was in teacher school 15 years ago that Pokemon mania was melting kids' brains or something (translation: annoying the heck out of recess supervisors).  Turns out my son is learning to read because of Pokemon.

To be clear, we are a reading family.  A minute after he was born, I tried to nurse him.  Two minutes after, I read a book to him.  Still, he hasn't shown much interest in reading by himself.  Reading has always been a bonding thing.  By age 4, he did learn how to sight read "loading," "yes," "no," "play," and "back" so that he could play Sesame Street online. But then last year, older cousin Gunnar introduced him to Pokemon.  Suddenly we were emptying his piggy bank so that we could go to the book store to buy a Pokemon handbook.  He will sit alone in his room for long stretches of time studying, reading to himself from his handbook, his Pokemon cards, and a Pokemon magazine that I bought for him.  Last week, he surprised himself by reading a level one reader about a snowman to me.  He didn't know he could do it.

He's converted me, too.  Initially, I was suspicious, but Pokemon is fabulous!  Josh has learned to count by tens and do double digit addition and subtraction through calculating battle damage.  He can't yet do the multiplication, but he understands what it is.  He knows how to think strategically in terms of selecting his bench and prize cards.  He taught himself how to use context clues to read the cards themselves and understand each Pokemon's attack, weakness, resistance, and retreat cost.  Also, he's discovered pokemonaholic.com.  He can read and navigate the entire site.  The boy I couldn't convince to hold a crayon until last year now selects, prints, colors (or sometimes directs me to color) Pokemon and then creates puppets about which he has changed what he doesn't like--colors and attacks mostly--and classified each in a sort of family group that he has created and named.  He can name the type, element, attacks, and evolution of at least 50 Pokemon. He whines and fusses about doing his homework worksheets, but will spend a focused half hour practicing writing the names of pokemon, then renaming them and categorizing them again.  The thinking this kid is doing is spectacular, but he maybe appreciates more his newfound confidence and competence, being able to hold a conversation with the third grader at his bus stop.

I have never seen any student in my class, even the most dedicated poet/reader/suck up/professor's kid, attack my content with such fervor.  Why haven't I noticed what's been lacking?  Because I've never observed a gamer so closely before.  When I was 10, I watched my sister kick butt on Ms. Pacman at the Woodshed pizza parlor, but games have changed since Santa brought us Atari.

I've started doing a little reading about gaming and literacy, which I will discuss in more depth in later postings.  But here are a few principles I've culled that are applicable to instructional design.

1. Point of view:  is the gamer/learner immersed in the game/curriculum world as a first person participant? Or does he have a "God's-eye" view?
2. Narrative:  is the storyline/curricular sequence compelling?  Is it linear, multilinear?  Can it be manipulated?  Do the gamer/learner's choices affect outcomes or have observable consequences for self and others?
   
3. Goals, challenges, obstacles:  is the goal of the game/curriculum clear and compelling? Are challenges exciting?  Do they demarcate status and achievement?
4. Cut scenes and backstory:  does the game/curriculum offer imaginative spaces?  exposition? nonplaying characters/ peers who contribute information and collaborate with the gamer/learner?

Resources

Dickey, Michele D. "Engaging by Design:  How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design." Educational Technology Research & Development 53:2 2005, pp.67-83.

Norton-Meier, Lori. "Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club:  a Reluctant Mother Tries to Join the 'Flow'." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48:5 February 2005.

This week,  I decided to sign up for an online feedback session with a writing consultant at the U of M's Center for Writing.  I didn't have a draft lying around, so I sent her one of my blog postings about writing centers. I came away with a powerful impression of just how much can be accomplished online--and with a transcript of our session so that I won't forget or misinterpret my reader's comments.