William C. Wake on NASAG 2006

 

Surfing around today I came across William C. Wake’s blog on the North American Simulations and Games Association October, 2006 conference in Vancouver. This looks like it was a fascinating conference, and Wake does a good job of summarizing the sessions he attended. Check out his first of four daily reports here.

On day 3, he had an interesting tidbit about SAGE, the Simulation and Gaming Environment for Learning, a Canadian initiative. The SAGE website is well worth a visit. Although the efforts are focused on the health profession rather than K-20 education, their work seems to include many of the same areas of interest.

Clark Aldrich’s Blog

Got an e-mail from Clark Aldrich the other day inviting me to take a look at his blog. Greg Jones at UNT introduced me to Aldrich’s books on learning in video games. Aldrich has written Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences, and Simulations and the Future of Learning and Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning.

Aldrich has been active in some of the best online discussions on educational gaming. His passion and interest in the topic of educational gaming is phenomenal. Aldrich is very interested in definitions, and he has consistently sought out opinions and discussion from industry leaders and academics that helps to nail down the sometimes ephemeral nature of this field. As such, he has done perhaps the best job of anybody in defining the terms we work with, as well as helping figure out what questions we should all be asking.

Aldrich’s blog follows the same level of excellence as his books, and is a must-read for anybody interested in educational gaming. He is approaching the endeavor through presenting one new term per entry.

Internet & Video Game “Addictions”

Came across an interesting article today about Internet addiction in China, and what authorities there are doing about it. The story, by Ariana Eunjung Cha, originally ran in the Washington Post and discussed a treatment center for young people “addicted” to the Internet. Of course video games were mentioned, thanks to the explosion in popularity of MMORPGs. One patient said he spent up to 15 hours a day in online computer games before receiving treatment at the center. Treatments were harsh, with extensive time devoted to discussions concerning why excessive computer use is wrong. Cha begins the article describing how a patient is awakened early in the morning by a soldier screaming, “This is for your own good!” Four patients escaped by taxi one time and made it to the train station before soldiers detained them and brought them back.

When I hear discussion about “Internet addiction” or “video game addiction,” I have to wonder if these are true addictions in the traditional sense. When I think of addictions, I think of chemical addictions. A video game “addiction” seems a temporary obsession with a pleasant pastime. Internet “addiction” may be more than temporary, since the Internet opens up a vast variety of pursuits. One can spend months on end doing many things online. But, is this really an addiction requiring treatment, or is it just an obsession that can be overcome by the individual without intervention? For instance, in the 1950s, concern centered on children becoming “addicted” to comic books. But was this a true addiction, or just strong childhood enjoyment that eventually trails off when children move to other pursuits or learn self-constraint on their own?

Such distinctions become important when discussing educational video games. If a naysayer paints with a broad brush, and makes aspersions toward the “addictive nature of video games,” promoting their educational benefits becomes that much more difficult.

In the meantime, the Asian approach appears to be heavy-handed. Cha writes that China, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam are taking steps to limit youth access to Internet cafes, and to limit their time in online games.

American attempts at regulating game use among youth have focused more on preventing young people from buying violent games. This approach seems off the mark, too, since there is zero control over the game once it leaves stores. Thus, children will continue to play all kinds of games across the ratings spectrum since the games will be installed in homes, not stores. Eric Bangeman over at Ars Technica today writes in an article entitled, “States Wising Up? Video Game Bills Drop Like Flies,” that Mississippi, Utah, and Indiana are ceding the fight for state legislative efforts to restrict the sale of certain titles to minors. This follows legal defeats on constitutional grounds. Also, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has been winning attorneys fees from the states when they lose in court, which quickly adds up. Put it all together, according to Bangeman, and states are quietly giving up the whole regulation idea.

We’ll see what happens, but I have an idea where this will lead. No one worries about addiction to comic books anymore.

 

References

Bangeman, E. (2007, February 23). States wising up? Video game bills drop like flies. Ars Technica. [Online.] Available:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070223-8915.html

Cha, A.E. (2007, February 22). In China, stern treatment for young internet ‘addicts’. Washington Post, A01.

Aussie Second Life Good for Education?

Earlier this week another tech director asked about using Second Life in public schools. I mentioned an article I wrote for TechEdge, the journal for the Texas Computer Educators Association, that discussed virtual classrooms in some detail. However, I pointed out that with Second Life’s active red light district, it was perhaps not a good place to hold K-12 classes (even though there are separate areas for folks under 18 and folks over 18). It seems Active Worlds has been more successfully appropriated for that purpose, with Harvard’s River City and Indiana’s Quest Atlantis both using the Active Worlds engine.

Now, Robert Scoble blogs about Outback Online, an Australian MMOG that is being designed from the ground up as a technically superior persistent world. Of interest, one of the improvements Scoble mentions beyond the technical aspects, is increased controls allowing for strict G and PG experiences.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that may see educational benefit. Online worlds are like school worlds in that they need to be policed by somebody who can prevent all the nasty things said and done by school children to one another, and encourage a wholesome, healthy, and happy environment that is conducive to education (think of the safe schools movement). In real schools, the principal or hall monitors or teachers fill that role. In a virtual environment, a technological and/or human solution will be needed so that tender eyes and ears are not exposed to coarser discourse (and intercourse).

Technorati

Since a few referrals to this brand new blog have already come in from Technorati, I’m “claiming” the blog over on their site. Always did like Technorati …

In fact, through Technorati, I discovered a well-written post by Brett Miller wherein he compares Marc Prensky’s latest book, Don’t Bother Me Mom — I’m Learning with Playstation Nation: Protect Your Child from Video Game Addiction by Olivia and Kurt Bruner.

I know Prensky and his earlier book, Digital Game-Based Learning. This book sparked something of a revolution in that it got people to realize that video games can actually be quite useful for educational purposes. I spent a couple minutes with him at last years’ TCEA convention where he was a featured speaker. At that time, he had just finished Don’t Bother Me Mom and shared with the audience several points from the book.

This is the first I’ve heard of Playstation Nation, but from what Miller says about it, it appears to be a hit piece on video games, filled with dire warnings to parents about dangerous consequences of letting their children play. That’s too bad because there are doubtless some people out there who will buy that argument. Fortunately (or not, depending on your POV), all new things that are initially railed against in popular culture eventually get so widely adopted that no one complains about them anymore. Think how many times Shakespeare’s theaters were shut down by the church. Consider how the novel was deplored in the 1700s.

In due course, children whose parents may read Playstation Nation will find ways to play video games regardless of parental wishes, at home or school or at a friend’s house. And, when they grow up and their own kids want to play a video game some day far in the future, they will likely be more tolerant than their parents. Maybe they’ll take the message from Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. The title says it all.

Wii Research Takes Easy to Measure Approach

Spong.com publicized research this week from a British academic, Tim Cable at Liverpool John Moores University. The research findings (not published yet, apparently, but announced in a press release), indicated children burn more calories playing Nintendo Wii activity games than other more traditional console games which don’t require much body movement for participation.

To the average person, such findings seem like a “duh” statement. Of course children are going to burn more calories when moving around than when simply sitting down. The importance of the research, though, is to give a glossy sheen of university-backed findings that indicate some sort of benefit in playing games on a particular console. It is perhaps understandable that console makers would want this sort of research out there, to act as a counter balance to research showing negative effects of video games.

However, in this case it seems to have backfired somewhat because Spong.com discovered shortly after their initial report that the research was funded by Nintendo. That fact probably wouldn’t have bothered the folks at Spong, but it was left out of the press release. It points to one of the issues surrounding academic research, namely that research is more likely to occur if someone offers funding. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Academics are under-funded as it is.

My thoughts are that at a higher level, the study indicates one of the larger problems with video game research: what to measure and how to measure it. Studies like this one focus on something that is easily measured (how many calories burned during game play). What the students learned while playing, how well they retained the knowledge, and whether the game knowledge transferred to other areas in life such as a mandated test are things that are much more difficult to measure.

I suspect this is one of the reasons violence in video games continues to be studied. Researchers can fairly easily set up an experiment where children play a violent game, then expose them to stimuli and measure their responses. A control group can engage in other activities, be exposed to the same stimuli and possibly respond differently. If researchers are careful in their definitions, they can show increased “violent” responses to the stimuli after playing “violent” video games. Many studies have been conducted along this vein, and the easiest way to look at them is to examine a meta-analysis such as Anderson & Bushman’s (2001) that I’ve cited below.

Other researchers have examined other things that are easy to measure. One paper presented by Lee, Luchini, Michael, Norris, & Soloway (2004) measured the amount of math problems second graders completed while playing a math game versus the amount completed by a control group with traditional paper worksheets. Again, this is easy to measure.

Another concern voiced by Spong.com was that the research indicated only preliminary findings, and was not a full-blown experimental endeavor. Alas, concerns such as that will have to await another day, and another blog entry.

References

Anderson C.A., & Bushman, B.J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science 12(5). 353-359.

Lee J., Luchini, K., Michael, B., Norris, C., & Soloway, E. (2004). More than just fun and games: Assessing the value of educational video games in the classroom. In Proceedings from Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1375 - 1378). Retrieved from ACM Portal.

 

Tribune Article on Educational Gaming

Danny Rose over at Dallas Baptist sent me an e-mail about a recent Chicago Tribune article by Howard Witt headlined, Skip the Textbook, Play the Video Game. The article presents a snapshot of some of the research being done in the field of educational gaming, and offers some of the dissenters a chance to express their opinions. David Williamson Shaffer at Wisconsin, author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn is mentioned prominently, as is Kurt Squire who has been highly prolific with a whole slew of articles on educational gaming.

An interesting tidbit from the article: “The prominent Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation–the people who give out those $500,000 genius grants every year–is distributing $50 million to researchers to understand how digital technologies are changing the ways young people learn, play, socialize and exercise judgment.” This should indeed spark much additional research since financial incentives sweeten the pot for professors and departments of education considerably.

In order to give naysayers their due, the author devoted the last four paragraphs to concerns about the digital divide, concerns about instilling creativity in children, and a couple of statements by Edward Miller over at the Alliance for Childhood. Miller said that video games are only good for teaching violence, and that there is no research supporting problem solving or higher order thinking skills in video games.

I found Miller’s statements particularly interesting since the Alliance for Childhood is a big advocate of playtime for children in education. What better way for children to play, explore, and engage in learning content than in an educationally-appropriate, open-ended three dimensional learning environment? And of course there is research supporting problem solving in video games. Every complex video game has tons of problems to solve built into the game; that’s a big part of the fun in playing. A blanket statement to the contrary is simply ludicrous. As for higher order thinking, I would point Mr. Miller and others to my own article, “Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games” which came out last month in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education.

Horizon Report Details Virtual Worlds

The New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE have released their 2007 Horizon Report. It is reproduce-able for non-profit purposes, BTW, so feel free to print out copies and give to stakeholders and decision makers. It offers several ideas of upcoming issues in ed tech (thus the name, as these are items “on the horizon”).

The Horizon Report mentions both virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as developing trends in educational technology. As far as virtual worlds, the authors suggest a “time to adoption horizon” of 2-3 years. According to the authors, key benefits of using virtual worlds in education include, “Settings can be created to pertain to any subject or area of study; locations and artifacts can be as realistic and detailed, or as generic and undefined as desired.” By their definitions, virtual worlds include three-dimensional products that are explored by students alone or with small groups of other people.

As far as massively multiplayer educational games (MMEGs?), the authors project a 4-5 year adoption horizon. Indiana’s Synthetic Worlds Initiative was given a prominent mention, as were WorldForge and Multiverse (which are both MMORPG authoring products). Benefits of MMEGs cited by the authors include immersion in foreign cultures and languages, leadership and management development, and skills competition.

Finally, ThinkingWorlds.com was listed in the external links. A British outfit, ThinkingWorlds provides authoring software specifically for three-dimensional educational gaming. Several offerings are available for download at around £29. I suspect at some point somebody will offer an easy to manipulate gaming environment for teachers that will really catch on. Right now, of course, teachers can create their own worlds using modifiable products like The Sims, Dungeon Siege, and Neverwinter Nights. But, such modification usually takes considerable time and effort, and educational pursuits created by individuals don’t seem to be widely shared.

I’ll take a stab at putting the report in APA format for citation purposes. Although not full of research per se, the report might provide some background discussion researchers may wish to use in their own articles.

New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. (2007).
The Horizon Report - 2007 Edition. (Online). Available:
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf

Instructional Design: Leveling

 

Charles Reiguluth, in his book Instructional-Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, Vol. II, discusses four major characteristics of design theories. First, they are design-oriented, offering guidance on achieving stated goals. Second, they offer good feedback and strong motivating factors. Third, overriding methods can be broken down into simpler component parts, and fourth, the methods are what he terms “probalistic,” meaning that adhering to the methods will probably help the learning goals to be realized, as opposed to certainly seeing the goals realized.

Good instructional design is certainly a key element in good educational video games. Commercial games hold good instructional design, as well. One of the key design elements in many commercial video games identified by James Paul Gee in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, was the notion of level mastery. Players can’t progress to the next level in a game until they’ve mastered their current level.

An old college buddy of mine owns a tae kwon do academy in Ft. Worth. While watching him put my kids through the paces one afternoon, I noticed the same instructional design element of level mastery in martial arts that Gee pointed out exists in video games. My kids were practicing jump kicks, where they ran, jumped, and split practice boards with their feet. Once they had achieved mastery, the instructor raised the bar by making them jump higher, break thicker boards, etc. Likewise, the whole belt system in martial arts is based on level mastery as well.

It does seem a promising notion in educational video games: if designers can meld level mastery with their desired academic objectives, then pure academic learning may be realized within a good video game.

Learning in World of Warcraft

When Chris Dede came to University of North Texas as a keynote speaker in a conference my department held, he spoke about how he and other researchers at Harvard are learning about educational games through their efforts with River City.

One thing Dr. Dede said in his lecture stood out to me. He said that of course students are learning things in commercial video games. James Paul Gee had recently published his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy to widespread acclaim. However, Dr. Dede said, what kids are learning in commercial products is mostly junk.

The week before last, I presented at the Texas Computer Education Association annual conference, the biggest state ed tech convention. At the Technology Coordinators Special Interest Group (TEC-SIG) luncheon, with tech directors and superintendents from across the state, our guest speaker was David Warlick. Mr. Warlick spoke on millennial learners, and touched upon the many-faceted ways technology impacts the lives of young people in and out of classrooms. He made essentially the same comment, that we have known for some time kids are learning in commercial video games, but what they are learning is junk.

It boils down to, I suppose, what our definition of junk is: I presume Dede & Warlick define the learning derived in commercial games as junk because it is usually not academic learning, or learning that is needed for standardized tests taken in schools. This truly gets at the larger question of, not whether games can be used for learning (they can), but whether we can use them somehow for academic pursuits.

Or, perhaps, they are best suited for learning about life? I’ve notice a couple of “what I learned while playing World of Warcraft” posts, lately. These fall along the lines of the book, Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Of the two, the more prominent one is by noted screenwriter and director John August. His post, Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft is an honest effort to tie life lessons through playing the largest online game.

Regardless of the questions raised, these comments and posts, papers and research serve to illustrate how intriguing is the field of educational video games. Trying to figure out what questions to ask, how to ask them, and then seeking the answers will occupy many people for years to come.