Gaming Education

Classic ed-tech games and build-your-own methods are now joined by the "gamification" movement.

There are at least three different classes of digital games in schools. Which you prefer speaks volumes about the role you believe schools should play.

The first group, the classic edu-tech games, have danced in and out of schools for so long that many kids take them for granted. Most of these programs are cute, but they fall short on pedagogical ambitions and graphic design. That doesn't make them worthless; it just limits their effectiveness. (One person's drill-and-kill can indeed be another's guiding light. When educator and blogger extraordinaire, Scott McLeod, asked, "Do most educational games suck?" he drew fire from just about all sides.)

By contrast, a handful of educators a few years ago sought to put game controls directly into students' hands by teaching them how to build their own games. Scratch, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT's Media Lab, is the reigning champion here. (See my take on Scratch below). There are a few others, too, including Microsoft's Kudo, a programming language that kids can use to build games for the Xbox game platform.

Screen from "The Fly," a game built with Scratch.

And now comes what I would dub a third approach, something that has picked up its very own buzzword before it has even reached most school gates: gamification. The term is as elegant as a teenager jawing a mouthful of bubble gum. But it suggests adding far more sophisticated game mechanics to applications -- no matter how stuffy or serious the application has been. Gamification probably has more momentum outside of schools than in. Case in point: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat has written about how DevHub, a place for web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10 percent to 80 percent.

Most games are naturally social, which means gamification depends on that other ubiquitous web trend, social networking. Sure, go ahead and play Solitaire. But most of us take a certain pleasure in besting the competition -- whether it's the Texas Rangers or some ugly troll in World of Warcraft.

Academics are creating a skin of respectability for gamification. Byron Reeves of Stanford University has recently co-authored "Total Engagement" to outline his ideas about how gaming can turn the erstwhile plodding company man into an engaged and motivated worker. (Reeves is also putting his ideas to the test by co-founding a consulting firm, Seriousity, that will coach companies on how to do this.) The first gamification summit is slated to take place in January in San Francisco.

What does each of these approaches say about education?

The first type of games were willing to entertain kids to keep them engaged -- the "just-make-it-fun" school of thought. But any standup comedian will tell you how tough it is to keep people entertained for long. It's even harder with kids who outgrow the "fun" of a game faster than most games can evolve.

The Scratch camp is more about empowerment. Scratch appeals enormously to kids who want to control their environment and be in charge. Those who build Scratch games get feedback from others when they post their games. They say they love the comments and feel great when hundreds of others play their games.

Ultimately Scratch aficionados bring their ambitions to learn with them. I'd wager that if these kids were born a generation or two ago, they'd be building transistor radios. The Scratch kids have to be self-motivated: most use Scratch outside of school. No one makes them do it. All it took to get them going was for someone to introduce them to Scratch in the first place. That's a great argument for exposing more kids to the tools.

Gamification, by contrast, doesn't rely on internal motivation. Instead, it's using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn't especially motivated -- at least at the beginning -- and then provides barrels of incentives to ramp up that motivation.

I'm betting that gamification, in spite of its throat-clearing name, is going to be big in the commercial world -- and in schools. Gamification can help build kids' competitive spirits. As they gain confidence, they may become hungry for tools that put them in control. At the end of the day, those who know how to create the rules of the game, know how to win.

reposted from: O'Reilly Media Edu2.0

Makers versus Sponges

School tech should start with a simple question: Will students absorb others' ideas or make their own?

The rumbling debate over whether technology helps or hurts us -- and our kids -- is growing louder. The ever articulate writer, Nicholas Carr, stoked debate with his new book, "The Shallows." (Yes, he believes, Google makes you dumb.) Last Monday, the New York Times worried that technology may be reshaping our brains. Also last week, neurobiologist Steven Pinker weighed in on the New York Times op-ed pages today with a piece that waves away those concerns. (Everything rewires our brains, he notes.) If that seems like too many quick links, the New York Times' Bits blog recaps some of the debate here.
On the education side, the Washington Post took theses questions to the classroom in a piece entitled, "Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement."
I keep wondering why we lump all "technology" into the same basket. By doing so, we ignore the most important distinction of all: whether we are sponges for absorbing other people's ideas, or whether we're making our own.
O'Reilly has long been a champion of the "Maker" movement so perhaps this amounts to singing to the choir. But here's one slice through the technologies organized according to their potential relationship to kids:

IT Tool:	Sponge or Maker?
Smart boards in classroom	SPONGE: Kids absorb lectures with better graphics
Electronic games	SPONGE: Kids learn to master rules of the games (and sometimes the content, too)
Scratch	MAKER: Kids create their own games
iPod Touches	SPONGE: Kids absorb & interact with presented material
iPod Touches with "homemade slides"	MAKER: Kids create their own "flashcards" to present on gadget
Powerpoint / Keynote / Prezi / Glogster, etc,	MAKER: Kids have to pull together materials to create presentations

A Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation is hardly the height of intellectual achievement. But when we think about how kids interact with ideas and media -- what promotes creativity and learning -- it seems to me we need to focus on whether the gadgets are the means for kids expressing themselves or a way of imprinting someone else's ideas onto their brains.
Of course, a kid doesn't need to make a Prezi presentation to deliver a great and inspiring report. But we live in a world that values flashing lights and cool transitions.
That struck home a few weeks ago when I saw a group of fifth grade students show off a semester's worth of work to their parents and guardians. They had done traditional, glue-and-paper reports on different U.S. states, a project that had extended over about a month as the students gathered information, wrote summaries and clipped out pictures. Then, a week or so before "open house" night, the students were asked to deliver a report on one element in the periodic table using a Keynote presentation.
On the evening the parents and guardians showed up, I saw the same act repeated over and over: students grabbed the arm of their guest and dragged them over to watch their Keynote. They stood by, beaming as the slides clicked through. They had also absorbed a surprising amount of information about their elements, where they were found and why they were located on the periodic table. The students were proud of their state reports, too =- and knew they had worked far longer on them. But at least on this evening, the Keynotes stole the show.
Back in the 1970s, kids who sat glued to the television screen didn't have a choice: we were all just sponges for the stuff broadcast over the airwaves. Today's computer technology lets us choose if we want to be a maker or a sponge. Shouldn't that be starting point when we argue about the role of technology in schools?
Postscript -- Could this be the ultimate "Maker" class? Encouraging engineering in kindergarten.

Reposted from O'Reilly Radar Edu 2.0

Venture capitalists do it. Why shouldn't philanthropists do it, too?

Pitch a new idea to venture capitalists and the first question they’ll shoot back is: “Who else is in your space?”

If you can’t answer that question, go straight back to “Go” and don’t even dream of collecting $200.

VCs, of course, needs to weigh competitive as well as potentially complementary efforts. But answering that question should help the entrepreneur, too. Entrepreneurs are most likely to help a field move forward if they build on the knowledge and the mistakes of the past rather than tripping down the well-trodden road.

Really compelling ideas draw multiple entrepreneurs (think of how the idea of social networking brought out Facebook, MySpace and a swarm of other startups). And sometimes ideas have to wait for the technology to catch up (picture phones and electronic books come to mind).

Smart startups, however, look for unique approaches even when tackling a problem that others are--or have--taken on. And the fastest way to assess whether an approach is fresh or a rerun is to know what else is going on.

So what about the educational-technology space? We want to invent new approaches and ideas that will engage students, teachers (and even the occasional parent). But do we have good maps of what’s going on—not just in the for-profit venture sector but in the philanthropic sector, too?

Dale Dougherty, who’s no slouch when it comes to staying on top of the latest technology, summed up the problem well in his recent post:

“I wished the teams themselves were a better judge of their own proposals, and that they understood how their project advanced appropriate uses of technology in education. I wished that each of the applicants had been able to consult an evolving set of best practices for developing educational technology projects. …. They might help others avoid pitfalls and learn from failures.“

Our problems in education are too intense, funding is too thin and time too precious to take on duplicative efforts. We need to apply some of the same discriminating standards in our philanthropic Edu2.0 projects that we use in for-profit ones.

So what would be the relevant features of a topographical map of the educational-technology sector? Here’s one set of categories:

Projects aimed at:
• Improving instruction
• Individualized (adaptive) instruction
• Doing assessment
• Improving teacher practices
• Promoting project-based learning
• Improving transparency
• Bridging the school-home communications gap
• Improving school infrastructure

What would you add? What elements do you think would help people designing education-technology projects get a useful picture of what else is going on?

What has technology done for you lately?

The very first movie cameras were hulking beasts: filmmakers would plop them down and the actors would act in front of them. As technology improved--lighter! cheaper!--actors started to do something different in front of the camera than they could do on stage: they let the camera follow them.

Technology can help you cut costs. It can also permit you to do something you never dreamed possible before. So far in schools, technology has likely not cut costs (I'd guess it actually increases costs). Worse: we too seldom use it to do something different than we might have done in its absence.

Over the past decade, corporations have put extraordinary efforts into articulating the "total cost of ownership" of a piece of technology. It's a combination of the fixed capital costs and the soft (typically recurring costs) of training and support. Companies bear the brunt of both of those buckets. (And corporations have found that the second costs--the soft costs--often exceed the fixed costs by a gaping margin.)

Schools are different. The district budget bears the fixed cost of the assets. It bears a small portion of the soft costs. But teachers themselves bear most of the burden of the soft costs. That means that only the most benevolent (or well-funded) districts worry much about the scale of the soft costs. Teachers, meanwhile, are largely indifferent to the scale of the fixed costs (they get given books and supplies and don't pay for those).

Technology for schools can reduce costs if you use it to secure "free" curriculum materials and so reduce your text book costs. Done right, it should also reduce the "soft" costs -- or "hidden" costs -- or costs to teachers. It would have to quantify both of those.

Now to the positive side of the ledger: what can technology deliver that text books can't easily do?

* Technology can deliver lesson plans. (Cost reduction to overall expenditures budget).
* Technology can make it possible for kids to experience things that they would not otherwise be able to experience. (Bugscope. Writing to kids in other countries.)
* Many educators believe that kids are mostly likely to learn "21st century" skills by undertaking self directed projects. Technology SHOULD make it possible for every kid to undertake such projects.

In other words, technology should let kids become makers--of things (gismos), of content, of ideas--rather than just consumers of content.

Learning Passions. Maybe that's it. Technology should and can be connecting kids with passions. Teachers can help. Parents can help, too.

Note: Here's the Washington Post's Jay Mathew's take on "senior projects,"a more organized version of finding a passion.

Comment from a high school student:
'It's an experience that I will never forget that will help me so much in my future,' said Wendy Ramirez (a previously dubious high school student).

That's mushy and nice, but it doesn't explain something odd. The program's success at the Arlington County school shows senior projects are a good idea. So why are they so rare in area public schools?
....

"Many high school students still don't get to learn what Wendy Ramirez did: "When I set my mind to something and work hard to accomplish it," she said, "I will conquer it and complete it." We want our teenagers to get something out of high school, but we usually define that as good grades, high test scores and a few extracurricular activities, whatever the colleges want. We don't think they are capable of much else. Look how they complain when we ask them to take out the garbage! Maybe it's time to be imaginative and firm, as the Wakefield teachers are, and take the risk that our kids might actually enjoy wrestling with ideas and skills they see in their futures."

Remaking Learning

20 January 2010

Interesting piece in the NYTimes today: "If your kids are awake, they're probably online." The piece describes a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Here's the money quote:

"Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week)."

More interesting than the article itself were the almost 100 comments from folks of all generations -- parents bemoaning their kids' excessive use of media to 20-something year olds commenting about how they don't quite feel ruined for life.

Most of us are looking for rules of the road: are parents supposed to restrict how much media their kids use? Or are they supposed to provide access to everything so that the kid is "in touch" with the world? And what about schools? Should "texting" be a part of the curriculum along with reading and running a mile?

I'd argue that the debates over media usage miss a fundamental distinction: are you a consumer or a producer?

Here's what we know about consumers and producers:

If all you do is consume, you will get flabby. Flabby in body, flabby in the head, and flabby in spirit. Some consumption is essential. But to do nothing but consume all the time is deadening.

To be a producer, however, is an energizing experience. You exercise whatever abilities you have -- physical, emotional, spiritual. You may produce goods; you may produce art. It doesn't really matter very much. To produce something creates a sense of personal value. You feel that you control some tiny portion of the universe.

So to that end, when we use digital media to produce something -- whether it is a gadget or a movie -- we triumph. Our "media centers" should be digital workshops. They need to be about creating stuff. The reason we tap digital resources to supplement our teaching is to inspire kids about how to invent or create a portion of the world.

Maybe that's the connection between the classroom world and the "makers." We want to teach how to create stuff. Some of it happens inside the school. Some of it happens outside the school. The internet is a vast sea where we can fish out the resources that we need to get to build something. But it's providing resources, just like the oceans provide the starting point for a fabulous seafood dinner.

Cracking An Educating Impasse

By Elizabeth Corcoran 10.28.09, 12:01 AM EDT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--In 2005, Bronx middle school IS 339 was a wreck. A slim 9% of the students could do math at their grade level. Classes were regularly locked down to dampen conflicts. Ambulances and police cars frequently vied for parking spots with school buses.

Four years later, IS 339 is a very different school from the one principal Jason Levy inherited several years earlier: 62% of the students are at grade level in math now. Teachers share lesson plans with one another and are inspiring students to take on complex challenges, including interviewing city planners about what it would take to create something like Times Square in the Bronx.

What did Levy do?

Turning around IS 339 took tremendous--and in some instances, radical--efforts that included changing more than half the teaching staff. From Levy's vantage, however, he couldn't have done it without an infusion of technology--including giving laptops to every student and training teachers to use Google docs to share lesson plans, put out assignments and stay in touch with their students. ''We don't see laptops as toys or tools but as megaphones,'' Levy said. ''The internet is just another language that we need to speak.''

Levy shared his story at a day-and-half conference, ''Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age,'' hosted at Google's headquarters and sponsored by a trio of organizations long involved in education: the MacArthur Foundation, Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the San Francisco-based Common Sense Media organization. Questions were also moderated online. ''We have the leaders of industry, education and philanthropy in the room. This is our moment,'' declared James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media.

The undercurrent of the meeting: The Internet has changed most of the business world and lives--but for the most part, it hasn't touched public education. That means the chasm between what students experience in and outside the classroom is widening--so much so that 1.2 million teenagers quit school every year, a rate that translates to one kid dropping out every 26 seconds.

Apart from agreeing that education is fraught with problems, educators have long argued about where to start: Improve teacher pay? Get rid of tenure? Get rid of school boards? Add more standards or set schools and teachers free to experiment with novel teaching techniques? Add computers? Get the parents more involved?

Even as policymakers, educators and philanthropists debated the different approaches, a handful of speakers shared inspiring stories about individual projects that are working, much like Levy's school in the Bronx. A number are bubbling up in New York City: Geoff Canada, who runs the Harlem Children's Zone, described how his project offers educational, social and medical services to thousands of children--and has turned out nationally ranked teams of chess champions. There are plans to try to build similar projects elsewhere around the U.S. Last summer, New York also sponsored a unique experiment called School of One (see "Tools For Learning") that used computers to create personalized learning programs for individual students. Test scores jumped; New York hopes to expand that program too.

In Chicago, Nichole Pinkart, who founded the Digital Youth Network, described how her team has created a space where urban kids can experiment with digital media tools as well as become experts in constructing multimedia projects that tie into school curriculum.

And in Maine, Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, discussed how all middle school students in her state are given laptops. The students ''are networking and doing research all over the world,'' Gendron said. ''The ways they're presenting what they learn is much like how people present information in companies every day.''

There were also hints of projects to come: Slated for released in 2010 is Waiting For Superman, a movie that lays out the heartbreaking frustration of bright, economically disadvantaged kids struggling to get a good education. The film is produced by Internet executive Jeff Skoll's movie production company, which also sponsored An Inconvenient Truth. Former chief of Lotus Development Corp., Mitch Kapor, who now runs the Level Playing Field Institute in San Francisco, suggested that he's seen prototypes of a new class of low-cost, handheld devices like netbook computers that will debut in 2010.
Yet as educators and teachers shared their stories, one thread ran through many of the comments: In spite of the spread of Internet technology, few teachers, administrators or even parents have found easy ways to share the technologies and best teaching practices that have worked in classrooms. ''I'm a little unhappy because we're not addressing the issue of how you scale what kids need,'' said Mike S. Smith, a senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.

Twenty years ago, when the National Writing Project began offering teachers workshops on how to teach writing, ''we'd see innovations in teaching practices that would spread,'' noted Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, who directs national programs and site development for the NWP. ''I'd say in the last 10 years, it has been harder to do that.''

Exactly how to get the best ideas to spread hasn't been worked out yet. But the need has never been stronger. ''In every other sector, technology has been an essential part of how to do more with less,'' noted James H. Shelton III, an assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. ''Pressure, relentlessly applied, causes change.''

Elizabeth Corcoran was an editor and writer for Forbes for 10 years. She left recently to create a start-up devoted to sharing best practices for technology in education.

See the original at: http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/27/google-computers-internet-technology-personal-education.html