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Issue: What Can Education Learn from the Video Game Industry? Mary Axelson, Monday
The issue as you have been introduced to it is
What Can Education Learn from the Video Game Industry?
When technology first entered the American living room, many well-intentioned software companies wanted to bring Hollywood production values to educational software. It was assumed that multimedia would create increased engagement, and, consequentially, increased learning. Alas, the stunning graphics work went to the most lucrative market--games. From there, the educational market divided into home learning software and the stuff for school. The stuff for school had to run on limited networks and even more limited computers. Ever since then, school software has been the ragged stepsister to mean and flashy games. It is questionable whether today's video game users experience increased interest at the classroom PC.
Can we create a Hollywood ending for the beleaguered educational software? Is there a Cinderella story waiting to be programmed? In other words, can educational software be as engaging as video games? Just what is the attraction of video games? Is it merely how well they are "dressed?" How they are organized? Is it the social situations that surround them? What can educators (and educational software developers) learn from video games? Is there yet reason for the video game industry to pay attention to schools as a market?
The First Question
I find it difficult to select one issue of focus. So, to quote Dylan Thomas, "I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find" (http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html). Out comes not Mrs. Prothero but the theme of purpose. My work with educational technology has frequently shown a trend of helping students make contributions to the world. Local environmental data fed into a larger database is one example.
I can see that sharing information about games demonstrates the desire of students to participate in and contribute to a community. Even so, does the make-believe nature of video games go against this educational trend of real contributions?
Additional queries intended as clarification and not requiring answers: Could such games benefit from embracing the trend? Would video games in the classroom require close attention to communications outside of the game? Is virtual, vicarious contributing enough? What might make the difference between play that feels like the real experience of, say, a chemist making a discovery and play that is mere practice of, say, predicting chemical reactions?
Background Thoughts to the First Question
A best-selling video game that just happens to include most of the high school standards on, say, the structure of atoms, would be a wonderful thing. And while we're at it, suppose that game could assess student knowledge and generate reports for the players, teachers, and parents? The idea is not novel, just extraordinarily difficult to realize.
I am not a "native" or an "immigrant" to the video game culture--I'm more like a member of a bus tour. I also have a confession. When it was all the rage to start Internet retail sites, I, along with three other people, started an educational software site. When the CEO decided to market video games as well, I left. He has about $12 million dollars and my stock options dissolved into legal fees. But my high-mindedness, I have recently learned from the work of Christopher Dede, James Paul Gee, and Marc Prensky, resulted in an additional loss--the chance to appreciate (and perhaps co-opt) the learning value of video games.
It is my hope that our discussion this week will introduce educators, parents, administrators, policymakers, and the other readers to your work in this area. It is also my hope that together we can hit on a new thought that just might help out.
I have asked Cory to join us so that we can always quickly touch base with the reality of video game and high school culture. Everyone is welcome to seek out opinions and thoughts from colleagues and to direct others to Web sites or other resources. Because Cory is a minor, I do ask that you don't forward a message that contains his e-mail address.
Thank you so much for your thoughts and your time this week,
Chris Dede, Monday
Certainly, sharing information about games demonstrates the desire of students to participate in and contribute to a community. Collaborative online cultures that share knowledge and enthusiasm are emerging not only for video games but also for literature. An excellent example of the latter is the kid-created Harry Potter fan sites. A student of mine, Katrina Sarson, did a recent analysis of these and wrote: "The Harry Potter 'fan-built' Web sites provide an opportunity to observe how community can develop online through a shared interest, or a common passion, in ways that are distinct from the 'corporate-built' sites. By examining the structure of three popular fan-built sites (built by and for teens) using standards for successful community building; exploring the phenomenon of fan-fiction and its role in these Web communities; and taking an overview of the interactions that take place in the forums on each site, it is possible to get a picture of the community and how participants communicate. With that, it is also possible to see a superstructure of learning and teaching overlaid on the acts of creating a Web site, generating fiction that is shared with others, and supporting each other in ways that are unique to being part of a community of shared interest. Many of the exchanges on these sites are indicative of a group of teenagers that is acting as a healthy and vibrant community of practice, consisting of 'teachers' and 'learners' who perceive each other as peers and are working together to work towards a common goal." Harry Potter fan sites that exemplify this include MuggleNet (www.MuggleNet.com), Fiction Alley (www.fictionalley.org), and The Wizard World (www.thewizardworld.com)(no longer available). The first illustrates kids developing a collective encyclopedia; the second, an online writers workshop; and the third, a technical resource center. Since these are developed largely without adult help, many "wheels are reinvented," but the commitment and creativity involved are extraordinary. The types of online communities of practice that spring up around video games are not as elaborate but demonstrate the same impulse towards collaborative sharing of ideas and interests. That said, does the make-believe nature of video games (and Harry Potter) go against the educational goal of making contributions that benefit the real world? The way this question is phrased assumes a false dichotomy between real and fantasy, a distinction that is not either/or, but instead a continuum. Well-developed literature for children, like the Harry Potter series, sparks a tremendous interest in reading and sharing in part because of appealing magic that is not real, but also in part because of metaphors, analogies, and underlying themes that mirror in fantasy very real issues that young people face. While many video games are mindless and some even pathological, well-constructed games that enable multiplayer interaction and collaborative evolution (e.g., Sid Meyer's Civilization series, http://www.civ2.com/) illustrate the evolution of similar communities of practice. Educational multiuser virtual environments, such as the NSF-funded River City project my colleagues and I are building (http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~dedech/muvees/) illustrate the power of models and simulations to help kids master real-world complexities they will face as adults. I believe that emerging interactive media offer powerful opportunities for kids (and grown-ups) to blend fantasy and reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, we have the opportunity to go "through the looking glass" into make believe and analogy that lead to eventual empowerment and maturity in real world settings. - Chris Dede
Jim Gee, Monday
When people discuss schools in relation to video games or e-learning, they often assume that schools can or will stay pretty much as they are. Games and e-learning will "supplement," but not transform, what is already there. The traditional "grammar" [structure] of schooling co-opts the new technology, taming it and using it only to reproduce traditional schooling. Think of computers being used to produce "clean" final drafts, all the earlier versions of which were produced on paper. In my opinion, schooling as it currently exists is profoundly out of date and out of touch with the contemporary world. Most students fully realize this at least by high school (and high school tends now to be the least popular level of our educational system).
So before we ask about "educational games," we have to ask about education. Any academic area of study--like biology or history--can be viewed in one of two ways. One way is to see it as a set of facts and principles, as "content." Another way is to see it as a set of activities and values, that is, as a set of characteristic ways in which to think, act, and value in regard to the world. This is to see the area as a form of being (a biologist or historian) and doing (biology or history). Our current schools often believe that content leads to being/doing, though they usually stop at content for most students and allow only privileged students to move on to being/doing. I believe that being/doing leads to a rich understanding of content, not vice versa, and that all students ought to have the opportunity to understand central areas like science, history, and literature in a being/doing way and not just as inert facts to satisfy certain "content standards."
Video games [by "video games" I mean both computer games and games on game stations] can be a good way to teach either content or being/doing, but I believe their true power is in the latter realm. Here, they have massive amounts to teach us. They have, as well, a real potential for radically transforming learning and education. However, before we deal with games in schools and workplaces--and how much it will cost to get them there--we need to understand what the real power of a video game is. Games create a level of motivation for extended engagement that is truly amazing. I believe that the sine qua non of deep learning in any complex domain is the creation of such motivation for extended engagement.
I don't think we yet fully understand the power of video games. I myself am convinced that there is a biological effect at work. Human beings tend to feel that their minds and bodies, in a sense, extend to the area over which they have lots of control. So, blind people come to feel that the tips of their canes are an extension of their hands and fingers; it's as if they are feeling with or through their canes. I feel that the computer keyboard is an extension of my fingers. All of us feel the space immediately around us is connected to us in such a way that we feel it can be "invaded" by others. Work on telerobotics has shown that when people manipulate a thing like a robot at a distance (via a keyboard and Web cam, for instance)--for example, to water a faraway garden--they feel as if their bodies and minds have extended into this faraway space.
Video games involve such "action at a distance" as we control a character in a very fine-grained way inside a virtual space. We feel that we have extended into a new space, a new world. We even feel as if we have an expanded set of capacities. But this is just the "hook," highly empowering and motivating as it is. It is what the game does with this hook that really counts. And what good games do is they tie this new expanded sense of self to a new ("fictional" or "virtual") identity, but one over which the player has real choice in its ongoing formation. This identity is not wholly fictional because it is a powerful melding of the "real" you that has expanded into the virtual world and the fictional identity that the "real" you is controlling and forming. This melding is even more thoroughgoing in massive multiplayer games where you interact simultaneously with real people often in terms of both virtual identities and real ones. I believe that it is this "identity work" that is at the core of the video game's power. People can do new things, take new risks, and discover new capacities through this identity work when it is done well. And we are only at the beginning here. The potential of open-ended games to carry this sort of identity work further and further is immense.
All this raises dilemmas for education. Some will say that the powerful hook that games have just cannot be replicated in school. But I don't believe this. For example, I believe that learning science in school in a deep way involves children being able to take on a new "virtual" identity as a scientist of a certain sort, thinking, acting, and valuing in new ways, and sensing new capacities in themselves. I think it is this identity that motivates them to master content, but in a way that leads to fruitful activities, not repetition of meaningless lists. Thus, too, I think games have a lot to teach us about how to design learning, even if we don't use a game (so there is no cost of producing a game!). At the same time, there is no reason why we cannot use games--not as stand-alone entities (textbooks are bad as stand-alone entities, so would be games) but as part of a whole curricula.
All this does raise the issue of cost. Expensive games like Deus Ex, StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Grand Theft Auto III are highly motivating not because they are "eye candy" but because they are so good at creating the sorts of worlds and identities I have just been talking about. The Army's game (America's Army) works well, too, but it also is very expensive. However, the power ultimately resides in good design, the sort of design that allows the player to coconstruct a meaningful new world through his or her own decisions and activities and, in the act, work out a new identity that contributes to an enhanced sense of self. On the other hand, a game like Animal Crossing could be used tomorrow, right out of the box, to teach literacy, problem solving, and the English language to children. So, too, could Pikmin. Indeed, large numbers of children learn decoding skills through Pokemon (as a TV show, cards, books, Web sites, and games) or English as a second language through fan fiction sites of all sorts.
Games and fan fiction sites recruit the power of informal learning--that is, learning as part and parcel of taking on a new identity and carrying out the activities associated with it. Informal learning is what all humans are good at, though they vary greatly in how they fare with formal learning in school. For me, the bottom line on games, the way in which they can truly transform schools and workplaces, is that they can allow us to recruit the power of informal learning in formal settings and, in the end, meld the two.
Marc Prensky, Monday
First, thank you, Mary. Both your forum and your questions are right on the money. I also applaud your bringing in Cory, since those for whom we are doing this are all too frequently left out of the discussion.
Let me begin by amending your "Alas. . ." as follows:
"The stunning graphics (and design) work went to the most lucrative market--games" and created a generation prepared and hungry as never before for serious, exciting, fun learning.
The only problem, as I see it, is that we haven't yet figured out how to deliver it to them in all the areas we would like.
I do think it is important to distinguish between "delivering it to them," and "delivering it to them in school." We are reasonably good at making learning happen in two settings: one-on-one (two standard deviations better than classroom), and in groups or communities set up by or used voluntarily by the learner. Combining these two is far and away the most powerful mechanism we have. This is what happens in games and game communities, as well as other online activities such as the "fan sites" mentioned by Chris Dede. Schools have many issues associated with them that often make learning more difficult. People in the UK, however, have been doing interesting work in the use of games in schools (http://www.becta.org.uk, http://www.teem.org.uk).
So let's think out of school learning for a minute. You say you are looking for:
A best-selling video game that just happens to include most of the high school standards on, say, the structure of atoms. . . . While we're at it, we'll let that game assess student knowledge and generate reports for the players, teachers, and parents.
First, I would emphasize that this "curricular" (aka "content") demand is a very narrow definition of the learning we can and should be expecting from games. Suppose that a kid could learn from games visual selective attention, multiple-task processing, rule understanding, strategy, morality, ethics, identity, flow, traditional literacy, digital literacy, new media literacy, concentration, social skills, stress relief, scientific thinking, intellectual development, affective development, social development, transfer, comprehension skills, academic skills, strategies and procedures, use of symbols, problem solving, sequence learning, and deductive reasoning, but NOT the high school standards on the structure of atoms? Shouldn't we welcome that? These are all claimed (and to varying degrees researched) benefits of video game playing for entertainment (sources at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp).
And we now also see more curricular content in games in many areas. Recent visits to my local Game Stop and Circuit City revealed the following titles on their shelves: The Rise of Nations, The New World, Civilization III, Pharaoh, Medieval Total War, Viking Invasion, Rampage Across Britain, Stronghold Crusader, Caesar III, The Age of Kings, The Age of Empires, The Age of Mythology, Physicus, Airport Tycoon, Cruise Ship Tycoon, Big Biz Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Mall Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, Restaurant Empire, Emergency Room, Emergency EMT, and Vet Emergency. This, in addition to the curricular-focused work of the Microsoft grant recipients (e.g., MIT's game that illustrates Coulomb's law) and other academics (see http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59855,00.html).
The reason why we don't yet see a High School Chemistry game that is as good as Vice City has to do, I think, with our still primitive game design skills in the curricular areas. I don't mean graphic design here but "gameplay." Video games succeed or fail based not on how they look but on their gameplay--i.e., the decisions the players need to make, the pacing, the richness of the possibilities, and so on. Vice City, currently one of the best games in terms of sales and reviews, is not the best-looking game but rather the most fun to play. We can think of the curriculum as a "book" of knowledge and skills that needs to be embedded in hours of first-rate gameplay. But best-selling games are typically not designed around "books" of things or skills. They are designed around "keeping the player wanting to play for as long as possible." Everything is secondary to that principle: if something doesn't increase the player's desire to keep going, they change it or throw it out. So how do we combine the "book" with gameplay that keeps people in their seats playing for tens or hundreds of hours?
In my opinion, the only thing that really works here is a combination of pure creativity and high passion. Both must come from two directions--creativity and passion about the subject matter, and creativity and passion about the medium. I think "true" subject matter experts (i.e., expert practitioners) who want to create a game about their subject need to think along the following lines: "How could what I do so well be thought of as a game that only I, or someone with my experience and know-how, could win? And how could I structure this game so that by playing it a lot one could eventually become as good as me?" Once that has been worked out conceptually, it needs to be meshed with the many gameplay techniques available--what works, what is doable, hard, easy, and what new things have to be invented.
Do we have any models for this blend of creativity, deep passion for the subject, and willingness to think of it as a game? Perhaps the most successful to date have been in the area of war fighting. When Tom Clancy's knowledge and passion, for example, came together with folks who deeply understand the games medium, the combination produced some awfully good teaching tools about combat, which rose quickly to the top of the bestseller lists. Others have done interesting things in this area as well.
Finding such pure passion and creativity is not easy--it exists in the world in only very small quantities. This is why we see mostly "me too" ideas in both entertainment and learning games. But we do have creative, passionate people in all our fields of endeavor, and the games industry has an unusually high proportion of such folk. It is only when these people get together that we will see the games that climb to the top of both the entertainment and learning bestseller lists. No other combination works. The problem is too hard to be hacked at with mediocrity.
Still, we nongeniuses don't have to just sit on our hands waiting for our Leonardo or J. K. Rowling to show up. There is another possible source for this creativity and passion: the combined thinking of millions of creative gamers, game designers, teachers and students--the so-called "Hive Mind." I strongly believe that if someone were to set up and maintain a Web site around any curricular topic--say high school chemistry and physics--and invite every student, grad student, and teacher in the world to invent and design possible interactions, "levels," and gameplay for a game to teach that subject, we would get something extraordinary. We could start completely conceptually, with only a system for entering ideas and having others vote on them. Along the way, people can suggest possible overarching concepts, settings, and characters, none of which would be "the answer" but several of which might be good alternatives. Eventually, with some outside funding, we can proceed to prototypes and let players evaluate and improve them online, as they did with the original first-person shooters. This is the power that the Web gives us, and it is more powerful, I think, than any dollars we currently invest in individual projects. Imagine if we did this for every, subject, with particular schools and universities being the "keeper" of each particular area. We could even offer challenges and prizes. What is the ability to have kids scrambling on their own to learn high school math worth to a government that can offer $55 million for Saddam & Sons? Our individual "geniuses," of course, will likely find funding by themselves.
When subject experts (or hive minds) with real passion and creativity--e.g., the equivalent of a Steven Hawking, Alan Derschowitz, or Bill Clinton in their respective fields--assemble crack teams of game designers and programmers to tackle the learning problem, out will come what we are looking for. Will it look and feel like any school curriculum we have now? I doubt it. Will it be able to be "taught" in schools? Very possibly not. But will our kids learn from it in a demonstrable way? Absolutely. Can assessment be built in? Sure, but we may not have to--finishing the game may be demonstration enough that the learning we are looking for has taken place.
Cory, Monday
One of the things my friends and I like to do the best is to select a video game that can be played by multiple players that has constant interaction. A perfect example of this is when we get a bunch of high school and college kids together to play a huge game of Halo. The reason this is so fun is because it is highly competitive, and we are playing with a big group (a community of players with a common goal). With multiplayers, the objective is not to beat the game but to compete with each other (i.e., kill the other team). My friends get together and talk about what games are good and what games are bad. We share information on how to get to the next level of a video game, and we go out on Web sites and read reviews that other players have posted to find out if a game is worth renting and/or buying. I believe that my friends and I are a part of a community that shares thoughts and opinions about games we have played.
Even though video games and PC games are not real, the skills and lessons that can be learned from playing video games can really make a contribution to the real world of learning. I totally agree with what Mr. Prensky said that there is way more to learn than just the content. Things like strategy, multitask processing, problem solving, symbols and map reading, and media literacy are skills that I will use no matter what profession I elect.
When thinking about creating educational games for kids in high school, the most important things to remember are multiplayer, creative, collaborative, challenging, and competitive. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is so popular because it's full of things that you can't do in real life. Just as Professor Dede said, educational video games have an opportunity to put fantasy and reality together to create good learning opportunities.
Cory
Mary Axelson, Tuesday
Ah, the tension of the continuum between working within the system vs. radical change. The possibilities of new technologies often seem to highlight shortcomings of the basic structure of school. For today, please describe your vision somewhere along the spectrum.
On the revolutionary end, let's say you can reinvent school backed by your knowledge of video games. What does the experience of school look and feel like?
At the other end, let's say there is no way to win that battle, but you can work from within the system for improvement. You comply with federal legislation to have the educational efficacy of your game scientifically proven: It will improve scores on today's less-than-perfect state assessments. It covers all content standards. It will not incite parents to complain to the principal or frequently have the National Coalition Against Censorship rally in its support. It functions as a supplement and can be played in 20-minute increments. What other challenges do you face? Do you somehow sneak deep learning in there to keep students engaged?
For both, let's keep Cory's advice in mind: "multiplayer, creative, collaborative, challenging, and competitive."
And always know that you are welcome to diverge from or add to my proposed path if you want to follow up on ideas with each other.
Again, thank you so much,
Chris Dede, Tuesday
My thoughts on the reinvention of teaching, learning, and schooling are best expressed indirectly, through vignettes sketching possible futures. Below is an excerpt from a longer article I wrote for a federal publication (Dede, C. [2002]). Vignettes about the Future of Learning Technologies. 2020 VISIONS: Transforming Education and Training through Advanced Technologies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. http://www.ta.doc.gov/reports/TechPolicy/2020Visions.pdf)
In a decade or two, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn:
The vignettes below are images of plausible futures that depict how applying these interfaces might reshape teaching, learning, and the organization of educational institutions. The objective of these vignettes is not to detail blueprints of an unalterable future, but instead to show the range of possibilities enabled by emerging interactive media and the consequences--desirable and undesirable--that may flow from their application in pre-college and higher education settings. Such visions suggest decisions that researchers should make today to explore the potential of these technologies while minimizing unintended and negative outcomes of their use.
First are two vignettes that illustrate the types of learning technologies young learners might routinely experience before they attend high school and college.
First Vignette: "Take a deep breath," Maria told her mother, "then blow it out into the balloon." Deftly, as soon as her mother had finished, Maria used a plastic clamp to pinch the neck of the special balloon, then measured its circumference. "All done, Mama!" she said, writing down the number in her notebook. Her mother sneezed, then sank back on the couch with a smile of approval. Even though her sinuses ached--and that deep breath had not helped--she enjoyed helping Maria with her daily homework. After all, participating in the allergy study project not only involved her child more deeply in school, but also subsidized the Web-TV box that provided the family access to sports and entertainment Web sites. Maria was navigating to the appropriate site, then logging her mother's lung-capacity figure into the national database. Her little brother watched, fascinated by the colored visualizations displaying the complex ecological, meteorological, and pollution factors that predicted today's likely allergic responses in Maria's region of the city.
Maria's teacher, Ms. Grosvenor, was also sighing out a deep breath at that moment, but not into a balloon. While eating a Ho-Ho for breakfast, she was using her home computer to access a different part of the allergy study Web site, a section with guidance for teachers about how to cover today's classroom lesson on regional flora. Her preservice education a decade ago had provided some background in ecology, but--now that fifth-grade students were mastering material she had not learned until the end of high school--Ms. Grosvenor frequently used the Web site to update her knowledge about allergenic plants. Sometimes the sophisticated multilevel model scientists and doctors were developing, made possible by micro-regional data supplied by learners all across the country, made her head ache for reasons other than sinuses! On the other hand, at least the students were quite involved in this set of science activities. Discussions in the Teachers Forum of the Web site reaffirmed her own feeling that most teachers would rather have the small hassle of keeping up with new ideas than the constant struggle of trying to motivate students to learn boring lessons.
At the same time, in her elementary school's computer Lab, Consuela was threading her way through a complex maze. Of course, the maze was not in the Lab, but in the Narnia MUVE (a Multi-User Virtual Environment developed around the stories by C. S. Lewis). Her classmates and fellow adventurers, Joe and Fernando, were "with" her, utilizing their Web-TV connections at their homes, as was her mentor, a small bear named Oliver (in reality, a high school senior interested in mythology who assumed a Pooh-like "avatar" in the virtual world of the MUVE). Mr. Curtis, the school principal, watched bemused from the doorway. How different things were in 2009, he thought, with students scattered across grade levels and dispersed across the city, yet all together in a shared, fantasy-based learning environment a full hour before school even starts! (The school building opened at the crack of dawn to enable lab-based Web use by learners like Consuela, whose family had no access at home.)
"The extra effort is worth it," thought Mr. Curtis. Seven years into the technology initiative, student motivation was high (increased attendance, learners involved outside of school hours), and parents were impressed by the complex material and sophisticated skills their children were mastering. Even standardized test scores--which measured only a fraction of what was really happening--were rising. Most important, young girls such as Consuela were more involved with school. Because of their culture, Hispanic girls had been very reluctant to approach adult authority figures, like teachers--but the MUVE had altered that by providing a "costume party" environment in which, wearing the "mask" of technology, children's and teachers' avatars could mingle without cultural constraints. "I wonder what this generation will be like in high school--or college!" mused Mr. Curtis. (Dede, 2000)
Second Vignette: Alec and Arielle strolled through Harvard Yard on their way to the museum, to collect data for their class assignment. Each carried a handheld device (HD) that softly pulsed every time they walked past a building in the Yard. The vibration signaled that the building would share information about its architecture, history, purpose, and inhabitants, using interactive wireless data transfer. Sometimes Alec would stop and use his HD to ask questions about an interesting looking location. Today, he was in a hurry and ignored the pulses.
Inside the museum, Alec and Arielle split up to work on their individual assignments. When Alec typed his research topic into the museum computer, it loaded a building map into his HD, with flashing icons showing exhibits on that subject. At each exhibit, Alec could capture a digital image on his HD, download data about the artifacts and links to related Web sites, and access alternative interpretations about the exhibit. His HD automatically supplied information about Alec's age and background to ensure that the material he received was appropriate in native language, reading level, and learning style.
While the museum-supplied information was interesting, Alec always enjoyed the comments posted about each exhibit by other kids. Sometimes, he added a few remarks of his own to the ongoing discussion. Seeing a cool artifact related to Arielle's topic, Alec paused to link to her HD, sending a digital image of the exhibit and information on its location.
Alec's favorite exhibits were those augmented by virtual environments. For example, at a panorama showing the bones found at a tar pit, Alec's HD depicted a virtual reconstruction of the dinosaurs that were trapped at that prehistoric location. In the virtual environment, he could assume the perspective of each species and walk or fly or swim through its typical habitat. Other types of exhibit-linked virtual environments enabled "time travel" to show how a particular spot on the earth's surface had changed over the eons. For each epoch, Alec used virtual probes on his HD to collect data about temperature, air pressure, elevation, and pollutants.
Walking back from the museum, Arielle and Alec shared what they had found. Both wondered what learning was like before augmented reality and ubiquitous computing, when objects and locations were mute and inert. How lifeless the world must have been! (Dede, 2002)
The underlying themes about the evolution of teaching, learning, and schooling implied in this vision (and extended further in the article excerpted above and in my other writings) is to use interactive media--including gaming--as powerful vehicles for motivation, information, and experience outside of school settings. Classroom interactions can then focus on interpretation, guided by a skilled teacher: the rich exchange of perspectives that helps convert motivation, information, and experience into individual and collective knowledge.
- Chris
Marc Prensky, Tuesday
In my opinion, the key educational theme of the future is "disintermediation" [wink here to JPG]. By this I mean eliminating the middleman (do I have to say middleperson?) between what people need to or want to learn and the learners.
In the simplest terms, it means our need for teachers is going away.
It makes me sad to read in Chris Dede's vignette about dear Mrs. Grosvenor (bless her heart) boning up "just in time" on the latest allergy stuff, because my sense is that her students will have already been there, done that, and have no need--thank you--of her services.
We need to remind ourselves why we have school. It's so parents can go to work and know their kids are safe. (That's one reason why there is so little support for financing schools from non-parents--why should they pay for child care?) Most figure that since the kids are there, learning would be a good thing for them to do.
But anyone who really wants their kids to learn well (and can afford it) will not send them to anything like most of our schools. They will either get them a tutor who will (among other things) guide them to sites on the computer where they can learn fast and on their own (though not necessarily by themselves.) Or, if they have the time and ability, they will homeschool them. Or, most frequently, they will send their kids to an exceptional, small, usually private school that is essentially a place for doing the above.
But, of course, we still have many parents who can't afford this for their kids. So how can I argue that our need for teachers (but not necessarily one-on-one tutors) is going away?
Here is a list of some of the things kids are doing today, on their own, with no teacher present: (From "The Online Life of the Digital Native" to be posted online at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp)
Almost all of these are skills that in former generations, kids typically would learn from their teachers and practice in school. But today, they learn and practice them on their own, online.
The reason we will not need teachers is that more and more, through these types of activities, our kids are learning to teach themselves.
Please don't get me wrong--I'm not claiming that kids can or will arrive totally on their own (or easily) at complex thinking and evaluation patterns and skills--they need a process to help them. But this process does not have to be a "teacher" in the traditional school or human sense. In this forum we are discussing how some of this process, for example, is embedded into video games. In video games "you have to choose wisely," Jim Gee cautions several times in his book. Games teach kids to choose wisely by making the consequences meaningfully bad to them if they don't, and giving them a chance to try again and again until they "get it" and do. In my view, this is a lot better for both kids' learning and psyches than the system of the human teacher who, at the end of the term, puts down a grade on a final or report card and moves on.
If we look at Cory's preference for things "multiplayer, creative, collaborative, challenging, and competitive," we can ask why he and his friends prefer these kinds of activities. I would argue that, in part, it is because with these elements present, he and his friends arrive at profound understandings of What to do, How to do it, Why to do it, and When and Whether to do it in given situations, without the need for anyone outside their own group to "teach" it to them (see "What Kids Learn That's POSITIVE from Playing Video Games" at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp).
And while video games are rich in terms of both skills to be learned and (increasingly) curricular content, the very best part is that those things come to kids in a much more "learner-friendly" way than they do in school. In games there is no teacher (except for the game itself and your peers). There is no textbook (although there may be practical, helpful guides, kind of like Cliff Notes). There are no lectures. There is no required homework. There are no tests, except for those of surviving, cooperating, and winning.
But, as Cory points out, there is much discussion and feedback, not only during play but especially after. The military refers to this as the "After Action Review," and it is one of the best ways to create learning-inducing loops of action/reflection.
When they want to get something done, our online kids are becoming quite expert at unsupervised organization and action, including learning whatever it takes to get there. They have tools and methods at their disposal that even those of us who think about this (and certainly most of their teachers) don't know about. Try going into a room full of adults--not just of teachers but of almost any adults--and inquiring about wiki, avatars, mods, or blogs (see "The Digital Immigrant Remedial Vocabulary" at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp). Few will have heard of them, much less be able to create them. But the chances are excellent that their kids can.
So here is my first radical idea: Let's keep our schools open (for the reasons above) but eliminate (i.e., fire) all the teachers. (This will at least let us see if they actually can get "doing" jobs somewhere else.) The remaining administrators can do the following: Give the kids objectives and goals and require them to self-organize to reach them. Make sure the groups they form are "multiplayer, creative, collaborative, challenging, and competitive." Measure the students' progress by letting them evaluate each other through tasks they have to do in public (say, in co-op programs), projects and games they complete, and by how much they help their peers. Put in empathetic counselors with no academic training in subject matter but with great skills at understanding and helping kids. Control outrageous behavior though peer pressure and, when necessary, "attitude adjustment centers."
I maintain that under such conditions, even with only the tools that are available today, our kids can educate themselves well, at pretty much all levels. Give them permission to buy and play video games of their choice and the content-filled games that I suggested yesterday that are already on the store shelves. (Without teacher salaries to pay we'll have tons of money!) Tell them Harry Potter and games magazines can be their reading texts. Put that kind of material and other things kids want into the reading-learning software that IBM and others have developed. Let them play Google "search" games and guide each other through the pitfalls. Help them take the wonderful, free online tools that Alan Kay and his colleagues have created (www.squeakland.org) and turn them into a series of game levels. Let them turn the "teachers guides" that Lucas Learning has developed for using its games (www.lucaslearning.com/edu/lesson.htm) into a series of challenges for themselves. Help them get student-organized team competitions going schoolwide, gradewide, areawide, and worldwide at all levels.
Based on my observations of the new things the kids are doing online, which I'm sure is only part of the picture, I conclude that we are in the midst of a huge period of invention--not so much by us, the "Digital Immigrants," but by and for the "Digital Natives" (see "Digital Immigrants Digital Natives" at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp). Our kids have discovered, in the digital technology, a new, incredibly powerful tool, and they are making the most of it, using it in ways we can't even imagine.
So, why not let them reinvent school? Already many of today's kids who want to learn something for their own purpose (i.e., to convince their parents to buy them something) are putting together huge research reports from material all over the Internet. Others are signing up for environmental experiments and data collection projects, setting up their own Web cams and sensors. Others are keeping current about rapidly changing fields that interest them by reading the cutting-edge blogs devoted to those subjects. Still others are purchasing supplies they need (even clothes) on e-Bay where they can get better stuff cheaper. And still others are programming new features or levels into their favorite games and creating new systems of information sharing.
Of course, the things I have suggested here are not necessarily the answer (and certainly not the complete answer) to what Digital Native-created schools should, would, or could look like--these are just my thoughts. But I truly think our kids are capable of reinventing school for themselves; not all of them, of course, but certainly a great many, and all will benefit, since they are growing up into the world of their peers, not their parents. In this period of radical new technology and invention, the kids have to figure out the best designs for learning and school for themselves, not us for them.
In fact, we "Immigrants" are so behind we will NEVER catch up. If we really want to help, what we should do is assist the "Natives" in "getting on with it" and guide them in directions we'd like them to go, with as little annoying direct intervention as possible. (I love the part in Jim's book where his son charges him a dollar every time he meddles.)
One more radical idea--let's amend the child labor laws. They were enacted for manual labor. Why shouldn't our kids be able to use all their digital knowledge skills to earn--especially with the price of college?
And I haven't even gotten to cell phones! More later.
Best,
P.S. Did everyone see the Pew study that reported that 32 percent (!) of over 1,000 college students interviewed reported playing games during classes (yes, games that were not part of the instructional activities)? (See "Let the Games Begin" at www.pewinternet.org.)
Jim Gee, Tuesday
People play video games for very different reasons and they draw quite different pleasures from them. For some people, the leading pleasure is in playing competitively against others. Sometimes this is purely social, but in other cases, it is akin to professional sports. In fact, games are becoming a new sport with professionals, media coverage, and sponsorships. Some people love the social collaboration and team play of massive multiplayer games--both those with hacking and slashing (like Lineage) and those without (like The Sims). Others like opened-ended games like The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, or the nonstop but fairly linear action of a shooter like Unreal II, or the thinking and stealth of Metal Gear Solid, or the tongue-in-cheek humor of No One Lives Forever, or a story-driven game like Final Fantasy X. Others revel in the god-perspective and powers of RTS games like Rise of Nations. And this covers only the tiniest bit of the territory.
Furthermore, different types of games lend themselves to quite different interests, desires, forms of learning, and pleasure. RTS games like Civilization or Age of Empires involve a great deal of micromanagement, attention to detail, and planning. Simulation games like The Sims or Black and White involve as much detail, but it works out quite differently, almost like carrying out a set of scientific experiments. Role-playing games like Arcanum involve detail in yet a different way, immersing the player deeply inside a character and stressing the psychology and morality of decision making. Shooters like Max Payne involve far less detail but keep deep immersion within a character, adding a heightened sense of risk, action, and "walking on the wild side."
Games and gaming are social in quite different ways. Some people play with their friends or in small LAN parties, others play with thousands in massive multiplayer games. Still others use the vast amount of resources and advice available on the Net, on disks, and in print, socializing at a distance through such shared and distributed knowledge. Many do all these but distribute them in different ways. People relate games to their lives and social relations (families, friends, etc.) in different ways as well.
All of this is to start by saying, as we think about the connection between games and schools, we probably need to think of games as not just a general category but as an array of specifically different things with different affordances taken up by different people in different ways. Games as a whole landscape speak powerfully to different economies of pleasure, different interests, different talents, and different kinds of people as individuals and as social beings. The landscape allows those adept at Counter Strike, The Sims, Arcanum, Zone of the Enders, and Madden NFL to coexist as gamers, each finding their own social niche and level of expertise.
The game landscape is, in all the respects I have touched on above, quite different from today's schools. Today's schools offer a much narrower range of "games," speak to a much narrower range of pleasures, and reward a much narrower range of talents, desires, and styles. Games are a much better model for living, working, and learning in the modern world than are today's schools. Games represent a landscape of vast resources that speak to different kinds of people in different ways and offer lots of different types of help and guidance. In the end, the landscape of games and gaming has the potential to allow people to create and recreate themselves to fill different but complimentary niches in the ecology of our complex, global world.
As to the issue of whether to compromise or not with today's standards-and-testing regime and the silly definitions of science put forward by Bush's academic fellow travelers, this seems to me pointless. On the Bush-driven view, controlled experiments on classrooms are the litmus test of what counts as science in education. However, in modern hard science, it is widely believed that if something is, in the technical sense, a complex system (that is, a system with so many interacting variables that even small changes in initial conditions will give rise to different outcomes when you rerun the system, whether this be the weather, chemicals inside a cell, the environment, or what have you), then it can't be studied by controlled experiments of the classic sort. It can, however, be studied by simulations and post-hoc explanations of their outcomes, leading to rerunning the simulations to test and refine hypotheses. Of course, classrooms are complex systems, and this sort of cutting-edge science is more akin to playing a game like SimCity than carrying out an experiment in a psych lab.
In my view, the Bush agenda is an attempt to get public schools to produce compliant service workers with good "basic skills" (and, of course, the new economy produces a huge number of service jobs). This leaves well-off families the option of obtaining more advanced schooling by paying for it, either by buying an expensive house in a suburb where every kid passes the test, or paying tuition at a private school.
As to a vision of transformed schooling, I agree with Prof. Dede and have little to add. Randy Hinrichs at Microsoft has mapped out a similar and quite futuristic vision (http://www.microsoft.com/education/DOWNLOADS/Vision/VisionlifeLongLearning.doc). I will only add that we need to guard against (1) the danger that the technology, rather than what people want and need to learn, drives such visions and (2) the danger that corporations will use such visions to sell products, rather than for real human transformation.
I want to turn now to issues of social justice in the new world that computers and games are creating. We have followed a group of seven-year-olds playing Age of Mythology. At first, I didn't believe a seven-year-old could play a game as complicated as Age of Mythology. But they have no problems with the game, and my own now eight-year-old son plays it better than I do. These children play the game alone and together--not against each other but all working to play against the computer. They regularly search Web sites for information about the game and about mythology. They have all taken books out of the library and bought books about mythology that are often "over their heads" as far as their reading levels go. On one occasion, when one child was answering questions about what sort of god in the game he would be, the text that described his god was clearly written at a college level. He read it. The children use their artistic skills to draw figures and scenes from the game and from mythology more generally. They relate what they are learning to TV shows, including their favorite super heroes, and they discuss the game and mythology with each other. They move across settings, modalities, and tasks effortlessly, reading at a high level because of their deep pleasures and motivation drawn from the game.
Of course, this is only one such multifaceted activity in which these children engage. They have many others. In the act, they are developing strong reading skills, but more importantly, in my view, strong "meta" skills--that is, skills to do with thinking about thinking, language, problem solving, design, types of texts, and activities. One crucial feature, too, is the kids see themselves as producers and not just consumers. They use the editors that come with the game to make up their own scenarios. They use the cheats in entirely interesting and novel ways as elements of game play. They freely relate AoM to a great many other things. Indeed, I think the fact that games allow and encourage people to be producers and agents, and not just consumers, is part of their most powerful potential to change the world. All that these children do is supported, to a greater or lesser extent, by their parents, who see it as good for their cognitive growth.
Unfortunately, well-off families today know very well how to use a full array of recourses, including games, DVDs, books, other media, and various sorts of activities to accelerate their children. They know how to equip them for the modern world--with the sorts of skills and talents in Mr. Prensky's list--in ways that schools don't begin to. We have interviewed 12-year-olds who have made mods, only to go to school to learn how to keyboard or program tick-tack-toe. But it is not just skills these kids are gaining. It's also ways of thinking, using language, and thinking about themselves as certain types of people.
The real action for many kids, the action that prepares them for the modern world, is less and less in school and more and more in families, communities, and with groups of people organized around interests and desires, not race, gender, or ethnicity. The kids we have interviewed do well in school, and they know they need the credentials that school offers, but they also tell us that what they learn outside school is of equal or more importance.
When you look at AoM not as just a game, but as a whole landscape made up of the game, extensions, one's friends who are into the ga
Mary Axelson, Wednesday
Thank you all for your insight and well-considered responses. There are many themes I'd like to follow up on: "students as producers and not just consumers," Marc's proposal to establish a Web site around a curricular topic, the distinction between the popular educational concept of a digital tutor and the video game model of just-in-time information for independent learning, the role of teachers, issues of equity, and the significance of collective knowledge, to name a few.
I also, however, want to be sure to include a look forward to a topic you all have introduced--handhelds, cell phones, or even "augmented reality." What do you think gamers will do (are doing?) with these mobile technologies? Do you see anything especially promising for learning? I was intrigued with what I learned about texting games played in Tokyo from reading Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs.
P.S. I can't resist noting that Alice in Wonderland is a favorite source of high-tech analogies. Alice follows the rabbit down the hole, after all, because she had no interest in her sister's book: "It had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"
Her fall down is also a wonderful analogy to encountering all the information and misinformation that is on the Web: "Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves, here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labeled 'ORANGE MARMALADE,' but to her great disappointment it was empty."
Chris Dede, Wednesday
I have a grant from Harvard's provost to explore the spectrum of uses for handheld, wireless devices in our Graduate School of Education's courses. We plan to use the handhelds in at least 10 different ways across that many courses. These will include
This illustrates the truly extraordinary range of "affordances" for learning that are provided by ubiquitous computing and potentially useful in the design of educational games.
Eric Klopfer and Kurt Squire at MIT, as part of their Microsoft-funded Games to Teach initiative, have developed a variety of personal-digital-assistant-based learning tools (http://education.mit.edu/pda). These include an augmented reality game based on wireless handhelds with embedded GPS devices. This simulation involves detecting and controlling an environmental spill. My research group is now working with them to design related games that could be implemented across Boston's historical sites, such as the Freedom Trail linking many places crucial in the Revolutionary War.
Handhelds provide great leverage for equity because they are much less costly than workstations or notebook computers. The cost factor for educators will go down even further when kids' entertainment devices (e.g., GameBoys) have all the power needed for learning applications and can be repurposed for this.
- Chris
Jim Gee, Wednesday
I know nothing interesting about handheld and other mobile devices. I don't even own a cell phone. Thus, I will not speak directly to this question but only around it.
I have argued elsewhere, like a good many others, that one of the troubles with schools is that in school, we try to give people lots of verbal information outside of any context of application and long before such information can be put to any use. Humans deal very poorly with such information. Indeed, research has shown that even students who ace tests on such out-of-context verbal information often don't really understand it at any very deep level and can't put it to any use.
For example, one study showed that well over half of a group of college students who had just finished a course on physics and could readily write down the Laws of Motion could not apply these laws to even so simple a question as How many forces are operating on a coin that has been tossed into the air and is at the top of its trajectory? The question was presented with a picture and was multiple choice! So, these students "knew" the Laws of Motion and many had an A in physics, but they knew physics only as an inert set of facts, not as a lived reality through which they could see and operate on the world in new ways (and the world in which the laws operate is, of course, something like a virtual world--what is sometimes called an idealized world, since, for example, the Laws of Motion abstract away from things like friction that actually operate in people's real world here on earth, but not always in idealizations in physics).
The reason why humans are so bad with lots of out-of-context verbal information is connected to how their minds and their language work. In human languages, words really don't have general meanings of the sort that can be written down in dictionaries (dictionary definitions lead to silly sentences when people try to use them as their sole source of what a word means). Each word takes on specific meanings in actual contexts of use. For example, consider what "coffee" means in "Quick, get a mop, the coffee spilled" versus "Quick, get a broom, the coffee spilled." The word work means many different things in different contexts (e.g., consider "I work 10-hour days" versus "Relationships take work to work"). Further, the word work means something quite different in physics than it does in everyday applications (e.g., if you pushed and pushed a car that won't budge, in everyday language, you can say, "I have worked hard, but nothing happened," but this is not true in physics).
The bottom line here is that humans really only understand the meanings of words and other symbols when they see how they apply in actual contexts of use. (Wittgenstein developed this idea brilliantly in his concept of "language games.") Their understandings improve when they see applications in multiple contexts, so that they can appreciate the range of possible meanings/applications a word or symbol can have. And there are often new meanings as new contexts arise in our fast-changing society. We humans are built so that our mind/brains want to marry symbols and worlds (even just imaginative worlds) before we begin to generalize the meanings of these symbols too far. Further, such generalization comes only through living with meanings (concepts) for a while and seeing them work out in a number of different contexts. Schools want to move in the opposite direction from very general meanings (the Laws of Motion) to actual contexts of application. But humans prefer to go the other way around. Of course, some students learn to put up with memorizing generalities they don't really understand; they get an A, but they don't necessarily know anything that could make a difference to them or others, save, perhaps, at a cocktail party. I strongly recommend Andy diSessa's wonderful book Changing Minds, if you want to see how all this applies to teaching science in school.
Games realize this and offer information "on demand" and "just in time." Furthermore, games create vivid worlds that meld image and an action, the perfect context for learning language and concepts. Meaning is put in the context of what we can see and do. Mobile devices readily lend themselves to activities that contextualize meaning, putting meaning back inside actual contexts of application. They also allow people to move across contexts and see how things work out--how meaning grows more general but always stays ultimately rooted in applications. After all, words and symbols are tools that allow humans to accomplish certain types of work (tasks, activities).
None of this is, I think, very interesting to game people, this claim that game designers have good theories of language and learning. But it is one reason many prefer games to school. However, it does bring up a major issue for the application of games to school sorts of learning, keeping in mind, of course, that we hope schools will look very different in the future, with much more porous boundaries and "disintermediated" teachers and teaching (to coin a morphological variant of Mr. Prensky's apt word). It is fairly easy to program shooting and killing in games; it is much, much harder to program anything like real conversation. Yet we learn what words and phrases mean, in part, by hearing others, especially people who know more than us, use them in vivid contexts (contexts where we can make good guesses about what they might mean). It has also been shown that people learn to think about moral issues by engaging in conversation about such issues with peers, not authority figures.
Some businesses that are producing games for schools are offering games where what you get when you click on something is lots and lots of text, outside of any very rich context of application--just the errors schools make. Commercial games often have conversational trees with different choices the player can make, some of which can make you think pretty hard about what you want to say. Of course, multiplayer games allow for real conversation, but this conversation is not guided by a teacher/designer trying to resource and enhance certain sorts of learning. Guided conversations, the sort that children have with their parents early in life, are a major source of human learning (though, as I said, conversations with peers, where different moral perspectives are at stake, are better for enhancing change in regard to moral/value thinking). Of course, I need to caution that these conversations, too, happen in real contexts and in situations where each party to the conversation has an identity that greatly impacts on the shape of the conversation. These are not verbal games. They, too, take place in vivid worlds.
It may be impossible to ever program real conversation into a game. It is clear that a good many digital devices, of the sort Prof. Dede discusses, can lend themselves to enhancing conversations, even creating new types of conversations that cross space and time but are still rooted in embodied experiences people are sharing. However, I do think that the day will come where conversations, though not necessarily fully realistic, will play a much bigger role in games. Last night, while playing StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic, I had a shocking conversation midway through the game with Dark Lord Malak. The conversation is well scripted, offering some good choices the player can make. The conversation also gets one to think about massive moral issues about identity and responsibility. I was happy enough with my conversation with the Dark Lord, but when I rejoined my crew, boy, would I have loved to have been able to really talk over what happened. We did talk, and, again, the script is great (the talk with HK-47 is precious), but it is a moment where more needed to be said. It is a moment where a human wants to really have a talk, a moment where we humans will put up with lots of language because it has now been triggered by a very powerful emotional experience and will be related back to that experience. It is a moment where we glimpse a new future for games but one that won't come at the speed of Moore's Law.
Marc Prensky, Wednesday
Ah yes, cell phones.
In his first post, Chris very nicely laid out, I think, the "single," "double," and "triple" of future educational computing. Now, let me make the case for why I think the cell phone (or, more precisely, what it will morph into) is the "home run."
In my mind, the future is all about portability and miniaturization. Big stuff is out, little stuff in. When Cory says, "How cool that would be to take a research topic in my geography class and immediately be able to look up Internet sites for additional information, download maps, review books, enter chat rooms, and request help from any student in the world that has previously studied that topic," he is talking about the "PD." He can, of course, do this today--but he wants it in his pocket!
Here are some numbers: PDAs in the world--under 25 million, many old and not used. Sales are falling. Cell phones in the world: over one billion currently in use. Sales are rising. Of course, Chris uses the term "PD" and not PDA--I'm sure deliberately trying to be more generic. The handheld device of the future can and will be many things, and already many combinations are starting to appear.
But what I am talking about here is less a matter of technology than perspective. It is the perspective of the cell phone that makes it interesting to me as an educational device. What is that perspective? I would say it is (1) voice communication with others as the primary function, (2) as small as possible, (3) packed with interchangeable features, (4) radio-based, and (5) cheap and designed to be upgraded every year.
These are, I think, the same features that give the cell phone the advantage of almost 50 times the number of devices sold than PDAs, and probably 100 times the number of devices in use. Let me discuss them each in turn.
VOICE COMMUNICATION
For most other types of computing, voice is an afterthought; for cell phones, it is the raison d'être. This is pretty much like life, which is clearly about voice first and written communication second. The cell phone brings the learning primacy away from reading and writing, where it has been positioned in schools for a few hundred years, to speaking and thinking about how you speak. Some may think this is a bad thing. But communication, which is arguably the most important skill we can have for success in life, is, in humans, primarily verbal. And verbal communication is probably the most undertaught, undertrained skill in the world. A device that is communication based can only be an improvement. (Yes, Dorothy, it depends on what we do with it.)
Not only that, but the primary means of text input in the not-too-distant future will almost certainly be voice. And the better you are at organizing in your head, the less you'll need to edit.
Plus, this lovely machine can read to you, play you music, record and playback what you say, and even create sounds to affect and alter your mood. These inherently voice-based devices will, I think, let us learn everything from reading to drama to foreign languages more naturally and easily. Text-to-voice and voice-to-text applications will thrive.
Personally, I'd love to see homework delivered verbally in terms of well-thought-out arguments, rather than the stacks of papers to mark that, as a teacher, I came to dread.
Such miniature voice-enabled devices can do everything from "Legacy Education" (i.e., reading to you and by you, writing, and arithmetic) to "Future Education" (i.e., global collaboration, scientific experimentation, accessing the world's literature and research, and world exploration) and let you become articulate in talking about it to boot. Remember, a big part of earning your Ph.D. is the "orals."
AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE
One of the interesting things about a cell phone is that once you get one, you never leave home without it. It's your lifeline--to your friends, your family, your work. To a large extent, this is because of its size. For students, size is even more important--yes, they abuse their bodies today with heavy backpacks, but if it's heavy, you're bound to put it down somewhere.
Many Digital Immigrants complain about the size of the screens in cell phones. A great many of these people already have presbyopia (i.e., they can't see small things.) It isn't the same for the kids. Nintendo has sold over 150 million Gameboys. This has created a generation used to thinking of that small screen as a window to a very large world and manipulating accordingly.
On the other hand, when size is really needed (and sometimes it is), any number of small add-on devices providing larger screens are, or will soon be, available, especially ones that project a big screen in front of your face from your glasses or eyebrow.
Small implies always with you, always on, always ready. My sense is that in a school and Digital Native environment, size trumps just about anything else, especially if the device is extensible.
PACKED WITH INTERCHANGEABLE FEATURES
Extensibility is a very key part of the device's value. Take the camera. Once you have one in your portable phone, you discover all sorts of uses for it in terms of sharing information. Kids with phones are sending pictures of breaking news to news organizations and creating their own photo blogs. "Hi, I'm Sarah from South Africa. For my science experiment, would you take a picture of your pond every day at 12 and send it to me?" And think of the connections possible to camera-based medical devices, for example.
Other phone features can (and do) include input and analysis devices such as sensors, and other scientific tools. (How cool would it be to be collecting body temperatures regularly from people all over the world?) Oh, yes, phones know where they are, no extra GPS stuff is required. They also read to you and play movies.
And key among the add-ons are fast processors and the ability to run programs. All the applications Chris talks about are just that: programs, designed to work in a particular context and to support a particular subject matter or behavior. In the future, all this software will be device-independent--either we will have a dominant operating system, (whose do you think it might be?) or we will be able to "port" from one to the other.
And, of course, another huge "feature" is their ability, as networked devices, to support the "multiplayer, creative, collaborative, challenging, and competitive" games we have been talking about. Some of the most interesting work in the games area in recent years has been for cell phones. The constraints of the limited technology of the older phones--combined with the freedom from the constraints of needing millions of dollars worth of eye-candy to succeed--have inspired inventive game programmers to produce the same kind of innovation that happened at the dawn of computing. About a year ago, I revisited the database of cell phone games at http://www.wgamer.com/gamedir/. The list had grown from under 200 to over 600 in less than a year. It is now at 1,760. Among the types of games that I found were:
Adventure Games, Board Games, "Boss" Games, Building Games, Challenge Games, Character Games, Collecting Games, Communications Games, Comparison Games, Connection Games, Cooperative/Assisting Games, Estimation Games, Exploration Games, Flirting Games, Geo-Location Games, Growing and Fighting Games, Guessing Games, Humor Games, Imitation Games, Linking Games, Management Games, Martial Arts Games, Massively Multiplayer Games, Memory Games, Multiplayer Strategy Games, Mystery Games, Numbers Games, Personality Games, Positioning Games, Psychological Games, Puzzles, Recall Games, Resource Management Games, Role-Playing Games, Simulations, Soap Opera Games, Speed Games, Spy Games, Story Games, Strategy Games, Team Games, Timed Games, Treasure Hunts, Trivia Games, Truth or Dare Games, Turf Battle Games, Wealth Building Games, and Word Games.
There is certainly opportunity here for education, and I predict that once the tools to build these games more easily are in place, as they are already starting to be, a new era of Digital Native-created educational technology invention for cell phones will begin. Because the devices run software that is downloadable and upgradeable "OTA" (over-the-air), students and teachers can use any programs, developed by anyone anywhere, and they can change each semester, as improvements emerge. And since most educational software will become, I hope, free open source, no huge software investment will be required.
[Mary--the open source vs. proprietary model for educational games and software would be, I think, a good topic for us to discuss.]
Still, what has yet to evolve--and this is the most fruitful area, in my opinion, for funding or development--are the tools that make it easy for any teacher or student to program his or her game or ideas, and for teachers to assign students to do the same. Once we have these tools, building learning tools for your own phone and using them, sharing them, comparing them, and translating them will then become part of every learning process, from science to literature to philosophy.
To do this, most K-12 computing will not require more processing than what the device comes with, or at most a plug-in version of the latest Pentium. For the most complex simulations and the really immersive 3-D stuff, the upcoming PS3 and XBox2, with their multiple processors and wideband connectivity for under $200, will do just fine. Unfortunately, these platforms will likely remain hugely complex and expensive to develop for, and Sony and Microsoft are likely to continue to resist most educational "titles" as anathema to their games business. However, were they to create programming "hooks" to cell-phone-based devices, much could be done.
RADIO BASED
"Wireless" is great, but it is only one feature we need in our learning devices. We also need all sorts of control and options--to be able to talk one-to-one instantly (walkie-talkie), one to many, on conference calls, and so on. We also want the ability in many situations to take control of all the devices (remember that 32 percent playing games in the back?) and make them do coordinated things. Radio broadcasting affords all these options in ways that the Internet or LANs don't. (Of course these devices have those capabilities as well.)
A simple radio transmitter in a teacher's pocket can let the entire class be in synch for things like answering questions and seeing the results (answers to individual problems or the histograms of the class's responses) displayed on their screens, with no other options possible to them while this is going on.
Plus, the cell phone infrastructure is now ubiquitous worldwide, especially in less developed countries and areas that the wired Internet doesn't reach.
(Note: There is one very important caution here. Until other fixes are in place, these devices should not be held up to the ear but used with an earbud or headphones. I thought this was bunk--and acted accordingly--until I met George Carlo, the scientist who was hired by the phone industry to clear them and who found, to his surprise and dismay, that the evidence clearly shows that cell phones used near the head break down the brain/blood barrier and appear to lead to higher cancer rates. (See http://www.emraa.org.au/telecoms/carlo.htm)
CHEAP AND UPGRADEABLE YEARLY
The trump card for the cell phone is its price. This cost can, in extreme cases, using the new technologies of printing circuits on cardboard, approach very close to under one dollar, allowing, for example, free cell phones packed with learning to be dropped from planes into the middle of education-starved countries. What about the connection charges? (One reason the devices are cheap is that they are subsidized by the usage fees.) I would ask that if the learning works, what phone company could politically refuse to give educational subsidies, and what politician could oppose the government's giving them?
In addition, if the educational device we use costs less than a pair of sneakers, several of the current problems with educational computing go away.
Digital divide? Can't afford one? The devices can be given out by the school for use for the year, just like a textbook (although most kids will already have their own). This business model--with Sony PS1's--has been used successfully by Lightspan.
Maintenance? This is the biggest hidden cost in school computing--computing devices break down, especially with student (ab)use. With cell phones, no maintenance by the school is required. Break it? Just throw it away and get a new, better one, probably at a lower price.
Obsolescence? Currently another huge problem. Developers want to do the latest things in their software, but the devices schools have are often too old to support many features, since they have to be kept for many years to amortize their cost. With the cell phone, students buy or are given a new one each year (or each term, or upgrade for a particular course) so that the latest features are always available to all.
To ensure the specific features needed for education, there could be a constantly rolling minimum standard feature for education phones that manufacturers agree to adhere to. But this is unlikely to be a problem because the manufacturers roll out new models every six months, and all will certainly offer models that widely surpass the minimum specs at increasingly lower price points.
Of course, the devices will all be personalized, require the owner's thumbprint to operate, and will be useless if stolen or lost, except that a finder can locate the rightful owner at the push of a button.
To a large, and ever increasing extent, these devices are already in place in our students' pockets.
SO WHAT'S MISSING?
What's currently most needed is exactly what Chris is working on--the ability to create learning via these devices that works reliably. Based on the projects he describes, he--along with many others--is looking at ways to use devices in conjunction with and in support of current teachers and classrooms.
I am personally more interested in how to use these devices without any classroom or instructor at all, so that we can just hand them out and get results. Obviously, this depends a lot on what the devices do, how engaging they are, and whether they reliably produce the effects we want. As I argued yesterday, the Digital Natives have a huge design role to play in figuring out how to do this.
There is a consortium in Europe called Mobilearn (www.mobilearn.org), funded in large part by the European Commission, which is researching many of these issues. I have recently formed a not-for-profit organization called The Digital Multiplier ("Digital technology should multiply, not divide") to promote the idea of eliminating the digital divide in education worldwide (www.digitalmultiplier.org). Other organizations (www.digitaldivide.org) are doing similar things.
One other thing we are desperately in need of to make this work is a new business model, one that lets developers, makers, and connectors all cover their costs and make a reasonable return but that still encourages innovation and use. I expect this will involve some agreement on open source.
Today, I would argue that with a $100 cell phone that can do Google and display text and video, plus the phone numbers of a few experts, I can learn pretty much anything. Now, let's make it happen for the world's kids.
- Marc
ON A SEPARATE TOPIC
Re: another of Mary's questions--students as producers and not just consumers--I'll pass on a comment from Tim Berners-Lee that has always stuck with me and shaped what I do, along with some thoughts of my own. At a lecture of his I once attended, Tim said:
"What people put into the Internet is a lot more important to them than what they take out of it."
I interpret this to mean that consuming, no matter how affective or interactive someone makes the material, is less meaningful to people than asking their own questions, adding their own experiences, making their own contributions. This may help explain why eBay, Amazon, and Google have grown so fast. In all of these, the fun is really in inputting--posting things for sale, reviewing and making your lists, saying what information you want. Games are the same way. People often have more fun in The Sims when they create and post their own creations and stories, and more fun in shooters when they create their own rules or levels.
As we have moved in so many fields from producers to consumers (once upon a time, if you wanted music you actually had to make it yourself!) a lot of individuality has been lost. "Producing" is a great way to get it back, and the computer, because it can hide so many complex processes behind simple interfaces, is a perfect tool to help make this happen.
As a musician (a former professional lute and classical guitar player), I know that many of us carry around ideas in our heads that we can't execute because we lack the "chops," (i.e., the years of practice to master the techniques.) This has always been my problem with jazz--I could hear in my head what I wanted to improvise, but just couldn't get it out on the guitar.
The computer, bless its little heart, can give us many of these chops with much less effort on our parts, allowing previously unexpressable creativity to rise to the surface in many areas. There is, I think, extreme pleasure in this for everyone, not to mention increased communication and learning.
Cory, Wednesday
Regarding the question of "producers vs.
Mary Axelson, Thursday
Thank you so much to everybody. You are wonderful.
An opportunity comes to mind to build a multiplayer game in which players encounter wise and powerful figures. Picture the grumpy botanist who will only release the name of the curative plant if she is convinced that the seeker understands the delicate balance of the forest foliage. This character, of course, is an avatar for a person genuinely knowledgeable of botany. Or picture, if you will, the Yoda-like wizard who is really an avatar for an ethicist or philosopher--and who similarly only releases key information after a lengthy exchange satisfies him of the seeker's worth.
I would like to use this scenario as a case study for discussing business models that might bring more innovation to educational games--or educational markets to existing game developers.
Marc, this, of course, gives us an opportunity to discuss an open source vs. proprietary model. What is (are) the platform(s)? Do we employ the best of the disintermediated teachers? Can the cost of the mentors/gurus/masters/dare we say teachers be supported by schools? Can it come from the textbook budget, or are there only extracurricular funds? Will this first be a bonus for the wealthy, to be used at home when the parents pay? Is it necessarily pricey enough to require a business model? Can components be bought and sold by individuals or schools? Could a distance learning grant fund the early stages of a company? Does this game even require technology or just costumes?
(Again, the questions are designed to help define the issue. There is no expectation of a response to those specific inquiries.)
Chris Dede, Thursday
Many vendors have tried to make money by selling innovative learning environments to schools--and failed. Formal education is a very, very tough sell for new ideas, for a variety of reasons: cautious decision making, long buying cycles, disaggregated market, deeply entrenched competitors. In the foreseeable future, I find it hard to imagine a company sustaining its educational MUVEs through school purchasing.
The home market for educational toys, materials, and services--while tough--is less daunting. Companies such as LeapFrog have achieved substantial commercial success based on new devices and edutainment (although not based on highly innovative methods for learning). I can imagine parents subscribing to an interactive educational MUVE via their local digital cable television provider and using this as an alternative to pure entertainment ("You cannot play more Nintendo today but can spend time in the MUVE if you want to have fun."). The subscription rate would be bolstered if the local school indicated it would build on that learning in some way--probably not a class (because some kids would not have access to the MUVE), but perhaps an after-school club or activity.
Or possibly the cost of edutainment is borne by a vendor. Companies such as Nintendo may shift more towards services than products ("Buy a supercharged iGameBoy and, for $XX a month, you get unlimited access to multiplayer online gaming. And yes, Mom and Dad, some of these games are edutainment. . . .") Such MUVEs would be seen as financially losing propositions by their sponsors, but good for public relations and possibly for marketing.
Until a business model emerges, I suspect content experts playing avatars in the MUVE would be volunteers. Many adults with knowledge and skills are willing to help kids, especially if they can do so for short bursts of time without leaving their home or office. Unlike face-to-face encounters, costumes are not needed and acting ability is not crucial. The big design challenge is not playing avatar roles, which can be scripted, but evolving a complex immersive environment with rich content and a compelling storyline. The big technical difficulty is finding ways to author computer-based agents who can act out intriguing minor roles and can reduce the need for human involvement. Those two requirements do take expensive talent and time which in education tends to come from research grants--an unsustainable model.
- Chris
Jim Gee, Thursday
Once again I have to go around the question. I am not a business person and not competent to talk about business models. Business will go where there is market. A market already exists in terms of parents wanting to accelerate their young children through computers; thus, we get good games like the Living Books series, Pajama Sam, and
I suspect there will be two markets, probably already are: a cost-sensitive, largely school-based market, at which skill-and-drill games will be directed, and a much less cost-sensitive market of accelerating parents and elite schools, at which transformative products will be directed. As to cost, Ethnic Cleansing, a game where the player kills minorities, was made by the National Alliance (a leading Neo-Nazi) organization. It is a sophisticated 3-D game meant to teach the National Alliance's ideology and made for not all that much money. Evidently they can't keep the game on their shelves. What a world we live in when the Neo-Nazis can make a sophisticated game, but our schools--with infinitely more money--can't. The Army managed to make a good game on taxpayer money (America's Army). They gave it away free, but had they sold it, they would have made a massive profit.
Some of the elements that could and should go into a "content" learning game, that is, a game "about" science or history, say, are already available, but not inside the game industry [more about "about" later].
Expert systems have been around for a while. These are AI systems that have organized the information and thinking of experts in accessible ways. NPCs in games could be expert systems with which the player could interact, as part of a plot and the player's own goals within the game. This would allow players to have conversation-like interactions with experts.
Intelligent tutoring systems also exist, and research has shown they are often more successful that human teachers. These, too, could be built into NPCs in games, as well as into other aspects of the environment. Players could seek out these tutors when and if they needed them, moving on to the expert system NPCs each time to have deeper and deeper conversations.
Finally, we know something about how knowledge can be built into tools, technologies, and the environment in user-friendly and useful ways (think of Donald Norman's work here). Much of the knowledge we use in our daily lives is not in our heads but in the intelligent tools we use or well-set-up environments that can facilitate our goals. Game environments could also be built to store a good deal of knowledge and make it accessible "on demand" in user-friendly and effective ways (e.g., a game could have a built-in search engine to search its own expert database, but the engine could be spread out in the environment so that information is "on demand," "just in time," and readily visually realizable at the point in the game where it is needed). Many games, like System Shock 2, are already pretty good at this at a simple level. So, first, let's talk about a virtual world in a game being made smart and knowledge laden.
The use of real experts as characters in games has also been done. Michael Cole at the University of California-San Diego has run a game-like system in after-school programs for years. In his system, adult experts play the role of a wizard who guides the kids and interacts with them within the game worlds. Ann Brown's organization Classroom Learning Communities has regularly recruited local experts to interact with kids doing their own research via e-mail. Of course, one real person who can always be a character in the game is the teacher, who does not even need to be in the classroom. Another is a peer in the classroom who has made him or herself into an expert on a relevant topic by choosing to "major" in it (to use Ann Brown's term).
But the border between games and the "real" world should not stop at human experts and peers. Kids multitask when they engage with games, and they relate the game to other activities, as I mentioned when I was discussing Age of Mythology in an earlier post. Games should be integrated with texts, DVDs, and activities. One good function for a text is to use it as a "cheat." Real-world texts should compare and contrast with information the player is gaining by playing the game. At times, the player should be able to use such texts to get ahead in the game; at other times, the player should be able to use what he or she is learning in the game to contest and rewrite real-world texts.
Finally, the game should allow players to produce their own extensions and modifications. They should be able to produce knowledge through the design of worlds, worlds with which other people will interact. Both when producing and when simply consuming, learners, in my view, should always be thinking about three things simultaneously: design, interaction, and content (and how they relate to each other). How do content, human interaction, and the design of worlds for interaction with that content interact?
But back to "about," that is, what it means to say a game is "about" something like biology or history. Textbooks are about content, and they are, research shows, the least liked, and often the least used, part of school classes. A game about content in the way textbooks are about content would be deadly. In my view, it would be a gross misuse of game technologies, sure to turn students off the way textbooks do. Good games--and this will be truer in the future as we get games like Deus Ex 2--are not about content first; rather, they are about YOU, the player, or you and your friends first and content later. They offer you a world that you can help shape and in which you can realize goals and desires within a new identity that allows you to take risks and do things you might not do or be able to do in the real world. We should design knowledge-laden games--rich with guidance and help, and clear, too, about what other people, even the designers, believe, value, and think--but then, we should turn the player free. If the freedom is gone, if the game is not open ended, it will just be school again.
Schools fear what people don't know--more and more now with all the tests--rather than celebrate what people do know. Werner Von Heisenberg was one of the top physicists in the world even as a graduate student; he had already made significant contributions to research by then on complex systems. Nonetheless, he failed his doctoral orals because he didn't know how a battery works. School and educators ridicule people who don't know how a battery works. They say our schools are failures because people don't know such things. But Von Heisenberg chose to ignore the batteries (or, rather, just use them) in his world, while he reshaped that world by paying attention to the quantum particles. Schools would have taken the choice away, forced him to do batteries first, particles later, only when he'd earned it.
Freedom and choice in new worlds--remove that and the game is gone. Offer that and there is no doubt the money will flow. Educators don't really trust that things like history are interesting enough to be games. However, the kids I talked about who were playing Age of Mythology couldn't get enough ancient history. No one had told them yet it was boring. They never need know.
Marc Prensky, Thursday
New business models--it's not just the academics who can't figure them out. In this age of the never-ending conference, this would probably be the most fruitful one we could organize. Any takers?
The business model--that is, the way to get the excellent tools we will (hopefully) build into the hands of users, with everyone satisfied that they are sufficiently compensated, is certainly one of the most difficult pieces of the equation. Because no one has the answer, with all due respect to my fellow writers, it makes no sense, I think, for anyone smart and concerned to bow out of this discussion claiming nonexpertise or ignorance--this is the plight, I think, of our education system in general. Fortunately, we don't just leave our government to the experts without submitting our opinions, ideas, and suggestions. Neither should we suppress our opinions (or not form any) about how things should work in all parts of education. Otherwise, it might just be "The Terminator" who decides!
Despite my MBA, I, too, have no definitive answers (or even claimed expertise) on this, but I will try to offer here some observations, thoughts, and ideas.
Let me say up front that the work I have read that has been the most influential on my thinking is The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig of Stanford (see http://lessig.org/blog/). If you haven't read it, I'd bring it to the top of your list. Although his ideas are not specifically aimed at education but rather at all intellectual property, his thesis is an important one for us. It is that innovation is fostered by openness and sharing within an "innovation commons," not by privately held intellectual property, and that creators and owners of intellectual property can benefit more from deciding how much to share for free--with certain conditions--than they can from keeping it all to themselves.
When we say "business model," what are we really talking about? My friend the investment banker says it's "a way to make money." From a recent investment report: "We believe the company offers investors an extraordinary business model that drives visibility, scalability and flexibility, and the X company's strong Q1:04 results support our investment thesis."
But some business models are better than others in terms of the value they offer the customer. Despite my business school training, it is hard for me not to wonder whether "extraordinary business model" means "how long until the customer understands exactly what you are doing?" Even where you set the standard, if you charge a lot, you will eventually draw competitors who charge less, as Microsoft is finding out with Linux.
My view of a useful business model in education is not "a way to make money." It is rather a way for all the people in the supply chain to be motivated to continuously innovate and produce results that help improve the education of our kids.
The investment banker argues that education is like pharmaceuticals--you need high profits to fund continued investment in research, most of which doesn't pan out. I think this is a false analogy, and that there are other ways we can get our R&D paid for.
Relatively few, if any, of the companies selling educational software are making money on a fully-coasted basis (i.e., when all the investment that went into them is considered). The U.S. education system is an extremely fragmented market in almost every one of its segments. This, and other reasons cited by Chris such as long buying cycles, means selling anything is quite difficult. In K-12, there are 15,000 school districts (http://nces.ed.gov). We have 4,100 colleges and junior colleges with an average of perhaps 30 departments each. There are 1,000 corporations in the Fortune 500 (they segment out financial separately), but each of these has hundreds of divisions and departments buying independently.
This gives us two things, neither of which is good. On one hand it gives us an either/or system, as in textbooks. Either a state buys X's textbook or it buys Y's, not both. On the other hand, as often happens in software, we get a hodgepodge of systems bought by individuals for their own purposes, none of which works together.
Both of these models for educational software are disastrous. In the first case, since we are still in a huge state of creation and innovation, we shouldn't be boxing ourselves in. In the second case, our software does need to work together.
I would argue that none of the educational software we really need has been built yet. But what we have built are many good pieces, scattered about in hundreds of different software offerings. Every product probably has a few good or great ideas among a lot of so-so or terrible stuff. This includes the edutainment listed by Jim, corporate and military applications, and even the games world. Each product has solved some small piece of the education puzzle extraordinarily well. If we could just combine all the very best features of every vendor's products right now, we would probably have something relatively decent to start out from. But as soon as we have companies and products, we have proprietary IP, so we can't do this. The latest issue of the newsletter I mentioned has the following entry:
SkillSoft settles lawsuit with NETg: The companies have agreed to end their five-year-long litigation in which NETg alleged that SkillSoft and certain of SkillSoft's executives who were former employees of NETg had taken alleged NETg trade secrets. Under the terms of the agreement, SkillSoft will pay NETg $22 million in July 2003 and $22 million in July 2004. SkillSoft emphasized that the company continues to deny any wrongdoing. SkillSoft has also agreed not to make certain specific modifications to its IT courses for a limited period of time. In exchange, SkillSoft and the employees named in the suit have received a complete release from any liability related to NETg's intellectual property.
This is really no way to innovate.
But what about free markets, competition, supply-and-demand, the American way? I just don't think these are going to cut it in education. Oh, maybe in the long run they might, if we want to wait a few generations until we really know what's best and then let people compete to produce it most cheaply.
But I agree with Lessig that if we want innovation now, what we need is an "innovation commons." You know how, in your browser, if you see something you like on a Web page you can click on "Source," copy the code and immediately stick it into your own page? We need the equivalent of that. If Chris has a feature in his MUVES that is useful to someone else, it should be available to them. And anyone should be able to come to his site and "improve" it (this is known as wiki). If I love the way Richard Barkey of Imparta does coaching in their software, I should be able to take that and use it--maybe not down to the same animated character and cute voice he uses, but almost. If Jim loves the way Rise of Nations introduces you to their game, he should be able to copy this.
But if we do this, how do the creators make a living? And, more importantly, will Chris and Richard and Brian Reynolds of Big Huge Games continue to innovate? Lessig's solution to this is the following: let the creators specify when their creation can be used for free, and what else, if anything, must be given in exchange. He defines a spectrum, from giving the property totally to the public domain, to requiring attribution for its use, to requiring an identical "open" license for any work that uses it, to restricting some of the uses to which it can be put, such as derivative works. So, instead of automatically controlling everything, the creator of the property looks along the spectrum for where the greatest benefit is to him--for example, giving it away with attribution (if he wants to get it known), giving it away noncommercially only, giving it away with no changes allowed, and so on--and chooses a license accordingly (see http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/). There are special variants of these types of "open source" licenses, like GNU (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html) and copyleft (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/) for software.
Lessig's argument is that these kinds of models will keep the innovation going and let the creators be compensated. For educational software to succeed, this is something I think we very much need. How might it work? People making any type of software, for example, including games, edutainment, productivity, or system software, could decide to make their code or graphic assets available for free for the educational world, while retaining the rights in other worlds.
Jim makes some excellent points in his posting about many of the elements that should be in our educational software. Wouldn't it be great if we could just take them? Getting back to the pharmaceutical analogy, it's like selling the drugs for higher prices here and giving them away in Africa. Another way to look at it is that our R&D is being supported by the commercial game players and software purchasers.
This presumes, of course, that there continues to be a distinction between "educational" software and "commercial" software. Do we really need this? The reason Electronic Arts does not make "educational" titles, as succinctly explained to me by one of their senior executives, is that "We expect a title to sell a minimum of 1 million copies at $50. Edutainment titles at best sell 300,000 copies at $30." Since they don't make the games anyway, what will they lose if they give their code away for free to the educational world (OK, maybe last year's code)? Do we have enough millionaire programmers who could stitch it together for our use? Probably.
One business model is to hope that the games companies build exciting, best-selling games that are, as Jim requests, laden with knowledge yet still open-ended and fun. I certainly hope that someday this happens, and that there is only one best-seller list. It is already happening for learning many aspects of war fighting; sports; driving and flying; and, recently, even business (Anything Tycoon) and first response (Emergency Whatever). Interestingly, in all these games, it is more the cerebral aspects than the physical aspects that the games actually teach. Many of them begin to fulfill Jim's vision.
But I'm afraid that even if Electronic Arts, or Sony, or Nintendo decided today that they were going to produce titles that both taught material and entertained, for much of the curriculum-based stuff we want kids to learn, it still wouldn't happen. That's because we don't yet know how to design the games and software when we're not teaching war fighting or sports, but rather things that involve more thinking than doing. Some theorists would say, "No matter what it is, base it on doing rather than thinking." OK, but playing "pyramid builder" to learn geometry and trig may or may not fly as entertainment, or at least not until we get much more creative. And especially share our ideas.
This is why I think that while we wait for the "great products," the "hive mind" is really our best bet for getting good stuff quickly. Make sharing the norm; set up a single, very open, low constraint infrastructure (a World Wide Web specifically equipped with hooks needed for education); and let everyone--companies, students, and teachers, contribute ideas and modules voluntarily, with no expectation of financial gain from the educational arena. They must earn their money somewhere else. Their reward will come from seeing education grow and flourish, and from getting their work and skills known.
The Internet, and especially its much faster successor, the Internet2, will, I think, more than support this. And, to a large extent, it is the model that is emerging in the games world. An organization or company supports the infrastructure, and its cost is spread among the users at an affordable amount each. But much of the work, and especially much of the innovative work, gets contributed by the "players." In this case the players are our students and teachers worldwide.
When I mentioned this model to my investment banker friend, she protested that game players were a bunch of crazy geeks who were nutso (my words) over their games, and that such creativity would never happen in education. Well, if it doesn't, I don't think we'll ever get the software we need. If we don't have the passion to create it ourselves, even if someone were to give it to us full blown, it won't work, as, sadly, even George Lucas recently found out. (LucasArts, I understand, has folded its learning unit, Lucas Learning, back into the parent company.)
But I maintain that educators do have the passion, given the right infrastructure and opportunities. Certainly many of our students and younger teachers do, and there are a bunch of us "Digital Immigrants" who do too! (Hopefully not all of whom are on this panel :-)
The money needed for the infrastructure and for particular problem solving can come from government and foundations (are you listening, bill g?). Another model would be to get commercial sponsorship, although many educators dislike this. Still, you do what you need to--we already have the Ford and American Airlines theaters here in NYC. I'm sure there are other models as well, such as to have a business consortium or the military fund it.
My point is not that any of these are the answer, but rather that we all really do have to think about this "business model" thing, rather than waiting for it to just "emerge." We need to begin taking the initiative and collectively designing and setting up a system that works. Previously I suggested that universities take responsibility for different subject matters. Maybe there's a better way and other partnerships that can be formed. But I really think that "leaving it to the marketplace" to do the innovation for education won't work.
Yes, LeapFrog has done OK (it makes physical products), but none of Milken's other investments in educational software have. And while the University of Phoenix has done well, in markets where people really want something--in this case technical skills and degrees--you don't necessarily need to be the most innovative to succeed.
But we do. To educate today's and the tomorrow's kids, we need something higher, something that crosses new boundaries, something that represents the best of what we all, collectively, can do. And this, I think, requires a commons.
- Marc
Cory, Thursday
I really don't even know where to begin or what to say with these sets of questions. I don't know what business models would work, but once someone comes up with a good idea and uses the latest and greatest technology, it seems to catch on fast. Just like Prof. Dede said, I can get quite a few educational toys that are starting to use some type of device. My four-year-old niece just had her birthday, and she was very excited when we gave her a LeapFrog and all the accompanying lessons. We ended up spending over $100 on what she considered a "fun toy." The idea of subscribing to a MUVE would not work if it was anything like "going to school."
Prof. Gee has it right when he says "good games are not about content first; they are about YOU, the player, or you and your friends first and content later." As I said in an earlier post and as Prof. Gee states again in his post today, the good games let us do things that we can't do in the real world. We can be new characters that have charisma, action, power, and control. We have control of our world and can navigate to where we want. We can make our own decisions, study facts and graphs, and talk to avatars to get to a level or a particular place in a make-believe world where we want to end up.
Let's take the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game as a good example. This is one of my favorite games. The creator of this game will introduce the game by telling the player that the goal is simple: "The game will let you do what you want and make sure you have fun doing it. Huge, detailed, and open ended are words that frequently come to mind. We don't believe a good role-playing game should restrict you from making choices, even if they are bad ones. Go ahead and play a wizard that wears heavy armor. You can do it, but remember that it's another skill to learn and might take time away from your magical studies."
I love this game because at the beginning of the game, you choose which race you want to be (10 different choices). You then choose which class your character comes from (combat specialized, magic specialized, stealth specialized), and within the class you can choose the type of person you want to be (i.e., magic specialized includes mages, sorcerers, healers, witch hunters, etc.). Each of these classes has specific personal attributes (to name a few: strength, intelligence, willpower, agility, speed, endurance, luck). If you don't like any of the classes listed, you can create your own character by adding what attributes you want. Within each of these classes (classes govern specific character attributes) you have nine different types of skill sets that you can continue to improve upon by practicing the art. When you succeed, you build up your governing attribute. For example, if I am a thief in the Stealth Class, I will work on mastering the skill of speechcraft. (This allows you to influence others by admiring, intimidating, and taunting them. Listeners are more willing to divulge information or to entrust important tasks to the skilled speaker.) When I master this skill, I get a better mark on the attribute of personality. Other characters will like me better and it will help me move forward in the game. All of the choices you make at the beginning of the game reflect on how much the characters like you and how much they are willing to help you. The choices I make can completely change the outcome of the game. I can talk to every character that I meet in this game. I can compliment, insult, or intimidate each character and receive different responses.
All this to say educational games need to allow for all of the above. We need educational games that are open ended, allow us to choose what we want to learn and experience, teach us when we make bad choices, and allows us to play again and again until we get it right. As Prof. Gee states, "These games need to have knowledge-content with much guidance and help. But, the keys to designing an educational game that would match the video game world is freedom, an open ended design, and the ability to have fun."
For not having much to say, I went on for quite a while.
Tomorrow, Cory
Mary Axelson, Friday
You have all been so gracious with the time and thought you have given to this panel. Thank you.
For our final day--gender. It had to come up eventually. Cory, do you find that girls enjoy video games as much as boys do? Marc, do your corporate training games take gender into account? Jim, have you found differences in the ways boys and girls experience video games? Chris, is this an issue in designing game play in River City?
I know that Chris has other obligations and will not be able to respond until the weekend. That same schedule is available to everyone.
I will write a summary of this discussion, edit the transcript for spelling and errors you clearly did not intend, send it through the approval rounds, and let you know when it is posted. At that point, it would be wonderful if you could encourage your friends and colleagues to add their thoughts to the discussion area. I will also make inquiries on possibilities for setting up a site for people to build a game together.
Thanks again,
Jim Gee, Friday
I have little to say about gender. In my book I avoided the topics of gender and violence on purpose. In academic circles, at least, almost everything written about games is devoted to gender or violence. There are so many other important things to talk about in regard to games that I have gladly chosen to leave gender and violence to others, at least as primary topics (I should mention that race and class, though rarely discussed along with gender in regard to games, are equally important).
Here is my guess about what would bring yet more girls and women into gaming: games that stress exploration and conversation, with and without other people, that incorporate pieces of and links to the real world, and that allow lots of personal customization. But each woman is different and many will play any game a male will as long as they can play it their way.
I teach a class on video games for graduate students. Each person taking the class must play 50 hours of a game and try seriously to finish the game. Because most grad students in the School of Education are female, my class is usually all women. Several have played hack-and-slash games like Diablo and Dungeon Siege (none wanted to play The Sims). They all came to like killing in these games, and they were excited that they liked something that they weren't stereotypically supposed to like. They also loved shopping for and equipping their characters and spent a lot of time doing this. One even chose what armor the characters wore in battle, based not on the armor's ratings but on how it looked and went together with other character's armor in Dungeon Siege. Finally, they loved "cheating" in Diablo. Putting in cheats made them feel very powerful and gave them a delicious sense of breaking the rules, since they had so long been taught that cheating was evil. Killing, cheating, and shopping (Does life get any better?): As I have said before, you can play games the way you want. They are about YOU, and this turns out to be a great recipe.
One thing that has struck me in my class is that when several people play the same game, they play it in radically different ways that really tease out their individual personalities, desires, fears, and issues. Games are a great Rorschach test and, for many of us, are therapeutic. Two young women were playing The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (which, as Cory says, is an absolutely great game). One woman, a very social person, spent hours and hours in the beginning having every conversation she could have (and there are a great many), avoiding quests and fights. It also turned out that she avoided fights because of her fear of failure, a fear so many of us pick up from schools that teach us that failure is bad; in reality, it is a key to learning. She got on many Web sites to get tips, changed her character several times, started over, and eventually fought and fought well. At that point she got very quest oriented and moved to finish the game with the best equipped and most powerful character she could make. However, through reading and Web sites, she sought to do these quests "just right."
The other young woman is a purist. She made an animal-like character and distained fighting in armor, developing her hand-to-hand combat skills to a fine level. She avoided all quests and re-made the whole world on her own terms, infusing it with her own moral values. She didn't care at all whether she finished the game on the designer's terms, and she sought no guidance from sites or guides. She lived in the world, making up her own quests.
Both women loved the game and I bet Cory played it yet differently. I know I did. Games like Morrowind are one edge of a phenomenon that will attract more and more women as they learn more about the range of games available and take the controller back from the brothers who (as we have found in interviews) took it from them just before they became teenagers. If game companies want more customers, including women, they should watch people play--people who are not already adept as most beta-testers are, and allow the game to dovetail with multiple personalities (sometimes in one and the same person!). I'll say it to game companies again: if you want more customers, watch a variety of different women play. Watch balding 55-year-old males like me play--and many other types of people. Watch like an anthropologist and like a psychologist.
Then there is the older special education teacher who took my class because she wanted to connect to her turned-off-to-school, "at-risk," none-too-well-behaved, teenaged emotionally-disabled, special needs kids (she got assigned the hardest bunch). She chose to play Grand Theft Auto III because that was the game her kids were playing. She was just terrible. She loved walking all over the world but could not drive well. It took her days to figure out how to save the game. Another woman in the class was a good player but had great trouble getting over the bridge to the next town. The older teacher got over easily, not by getting a helicopter, but by a massive leap in her car--a leap the younger woman couldn't make. How? Her kids came over to her house and did it for her. She had another world to explore. Her kids were amazed she cared about what they cared about and loved talking to her and helping her. After years of being rejected by schools and schooling, the link was made. The teacher had jumped that gap, too. Of course, educators and politicians--who have deserted these kids--will decry that they are playing Grand Theft Auto. But in their case, if anything is helping to turn them into criminals, it is school, not that game. (How long and often can you personally take being distained before you get mad?)
One remark about violence: Cory hits it on the head when he stresses the importance of choices and allowing people to make "bad choices." A game like Grand Theft Auto III is great because it allows a wide range of choices to be made, all based around the basic premise that you have just gotten out of jail and have to earn a living, one way or another, through crime. If we remove the choices that moralists and politicians don't like, we remove the very moral basis of the game. Games allow you to test who you are (or who you want to imagine being for a while) by what you actually choose in specific situations, rather than what you think and say outside any real situations. If you don't like Grand Theft Auto, then make your own game based on a different assumption.
I want to close with one last remark, a remark that I suppose will scandalize educators interested in games. Educators think of content first, game engine/interface/playability/world second. My advice, for what it is worth: At the current time and with the current state of our knowledge (where we know more about content than engine/interface/playability/world--i.e., delivery system--for games "to teach"), put content second and put all your money on engine/interface/playability/world. If you get the latter right, upscaling the content will be easy. The first physics game with great game play and only so-so physics will own the field. Call me, I know where you can get better content for a few shares in the company.
Chris Dede, Friday
My colleagues and I, in coordination with a couple other research groups working with MUVEs, have submitted a symposium proposal to the 2004 American Educational Research Association national conference on how issues of race, gender, class, and culture manifest themselves in these worlds. Below is some of the wording on gender we put into the proposal:
"Given the importance of early lifetime experiences in shaping identity (Erickson, 1968), the marketing of video games primarily to boys and subsequent gendering of games as boys' playspaces concerns many educators who believe that girls are losing early technological literacy opportunities, being systematically excluded from technology-rich activities, and entering adolescence and adulthood with less technological skills and lower self-using technology. (American Association of University Women, 2000; Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Jones, Howe, & Rua, 2000). As Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (2000), a recent report by the AAUW concludes, 'Girls find programming classes tedious and dull; computer games too boring, redundant, and violent; and computer career options uninspiring. Girls have clear and strong ideas about what kinds of games they would design: games that feature simulation, strategy, and interaction. These games, in fact, would appeal to a broad range of learners--boys and girls alike.' Although an increasing number of girls play video games as children and later on as adults, many give up their game controllers during their adolescent years, years that are critical in terms of both identity formation and attitudes toward technology and career (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998).
MUVEs designed for informal science learning outside of marketplace pressures might attract girls to science, mathematics, engineering and technology activities. Studies by the Entertainment Software Association and others are finding that an increasing number of girls and women are playing games online, suggesting that building on more traditional forms of girls' play, which frequently involve every day (as opposed to fantasy) situations, explore human relationships, and revolve around social networks, might lead to new opportunities for engaging girls in science (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Jenkins, 2001; Laurel, 2001; Yee, 2001). Indeed, Bruckman and colleagues (Bruckman, Jensen, & DeBronte, 2002) found that teaching computer programming within a collaborative discussion system increased students' programming skills and was particularly beneficial to women. . . .
"In our 'River City' MUVE design, we have created female role models as computer agents to help alleviate male gender bias. We also have worked to select themes and activities equally attractive to boys and girls. In analyzing both our observational and quantitative data, we have found evidence that our world appeals to both genders (Dede & Ketelhut, 2003)."
I think the fundamental issue in potential gender bias for MUVES is not the medium itself but the types of content/process its designers infuse.
- Chris
References
American Association for University Women. Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age. Washington, DC: Author, 2000.
Bruckman, Amy. Community support for constructionist learning. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 7: 47-86 (1998). (www.cs.gatech.edu/~asb/papers/cscw.html).
Bruckman, Amy, Carlos Jensen, and Austina DeBonte. "Gender and Programming Achievement in a CSCL Environment." Long talk, paper presented at the Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) 2002 conference, Boulder, CO, January 2002.
Cassell, Justine & Henry Jenkins (eds.). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Dede, Chris & Diane Ketelhut. "Motivation, Usability, and Learning Outcomes in a Prototype Museum-based Multi-User Virtual Environment." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, April 2003.
Erickson, Erik H. "Identity Confusion in Life History, Case History." In Adolescent Behavior: Readings and Interpretations edited by Elizabeth Aries. Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.
Jones, M. Gail, Ann Howe, & Melissa J. Rua. "Gender Differences in Students' Experiences, Interests and Attitudes toward Science and Scientists." Science Education, 84(2), 180-192 (2000).
Laurel, Brenda. Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Yee, Nicholas. (2001). The Norrathian Scrolls: A study of EverQuest". Retrieved August 1, 2003, from www.nickyee.com/eqt/report.html
Marc Prensky
Sadly, we are a panel without women! (Oh, where have the Entwives gone?) I have found that often women are not pleased with men telling them what they think and why they act the way they do. So I hope, Mary, you will add your own comments and recruit one or more friends of Cory's to comment as well.
But having had an extra day to reflect, it occurs to me to ask, "Why are we asking this question?" Not that we shouldn't, but what's our motivation? Is this a marketing thing, a social thing, a bias thing, an expectations thing, or a conflict between those things?
For example, the game industry's only concern is to sell more games. If half of what they consider their prime age audience isn't buying them, they would like to encourage them to. They could care less whether they are the same games or different ones. But clearly, there are areas, such as clothing, where difference is accepted as the norm, sameness is considered strange, and half the world is excluded. Is Victoria's Secret asking the question How do we reach the other 50 percent? (They may well be--watch out.)
The people who study personality seem to have reached mixed conclusions about whether and how men and women differ, and the last word on this has certainly yet to be written. Yet, most would say that they differ in a number of areas--they differ more areas than others. Some of these differences have nature as their basis, some have nurture, but most have a combination of the two.
Yet, in a number of social areas--and especially in education--the general assumption is that the sexes don't differ at all and should be treated in exactly the same way. And so we look for bias. Are we excluding someone or some group that should be (or wants to be) included? We attribute the fact that more women don't go into science and math to bias, for example, rather than any inherent differences.
Isn't there a conflict here?
Isn't there a conflict if we are asking, "Which games (or game elements) appeal to girls and which to boys?" but are not asking, "Which education (or educational elements or even 'learning') appeals to girls and which to boys?"
For both of these, is the answer to build separate worlds or to build one world that accommodates all? If the sexes differ in their skills (as opposed to interests, which are perhaps more cultural), to what extent do we need to take this into account in both areas? In education, although it is not the current trend, some still maintain that separate works better. Do we assume that the sexes are equal in all fields and that it is just the "entry paths" (as Chris says) that need to be different? Or do we segment some other way, say, by subject matter or thinking skill? Or do we just mix all people together, try to remove as many of the biasing elements as possible, and let them self-segment by themselves?
For all the ink spilled about games and gender, school and gender, thinking and gender, and (to a lesser extent, I think) learning and gender, I'm not sure we have solved or even fully addressed these questions. Please feel free to comment and correct me if I am mistaken.
What little I do know firsthand about learning games and gender comes from designing games for mixed gender populations in the corporate setting; from watching my wife, who is an avid player of computer games and who also plays computer games with two young girls, ages 8 and 11, whom she works with professionally; from having some avid female video game players working in my company; and from having a game-playing 13-year-old niece with whom I share games and observations. I also occasionally go into online games as my wife J.
No conclusions, just data. Another data point: The Entertainment Software Association reports that the gender of the most frequent computer gamer is 42 percent female (www.theesa.com/pressroom.html). I have heard that there is a large contingent of women playing "casual" games online, such as Jeopardy! and card games, but I don't know if they are counted in that 42 percent.
However, I do know that along with lacking females on this panel, we are lacking in the world many female game designers. I would suspect that as we get more of those, we may get more games that girls will enjoy and play in large numbers. (Although, do female educators design education that appeals more to girls?)
One possible way to make this happen, in both instances, is for the designers to build the games and education mainly from their intuition and experience, and not based too much on research. My friend Brenda Laurel, despite all her research, did not solve the problem of attracting enough teenage girls to games with her Purple Moon products, which stressed realistic teen behavior. This is one of my big complaints with instructional design--too much research, not enough intuition. I close with two of my favorite quotes from Einstein: "A theory can be proved by experiment, but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory," (Sunday Times London, July 18, 1976) and "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking" (Out of My Later Years, 1950).
- Marc
Some final comments:
I have really enjoyed this forum. Although it has certainly taken a good deal of my time this week, it has stimulated me to think about a number of areas in new ways. I would certainly be interested in helping explore how the format can be expanded for use in other places, particularly in schools and online education. I could think of some very interesting people I'd like to hear from in this forum and/or format. A big thank you to Mary for organizing it, to all who had a hand in supporting it, and to all my fellow participants.
To Jim's excellent last comment, I would add this: I agree and have long argued that the overemphasis on content over learner-centered presentation and motivation by teachers ("No games now--I've gotta get through the material."), whether in schools or corporations, is counterproductive, and leads to the unwanted result of people not learning but rather "playing school" in the way Cory described. And I also agree that with the directions and speed that commercial games are moving, this certainly is a good time for us to focus on things like gameplay, engines, interfaces, playability, and worlds because in the learning world they are as yet way underdeveloped.
But my sense is also that with whatever games or other learner friendly forms we eventually evolve to help kids learn math, physics or any other subject, after mastering those games a kid ought to be able to do well (and hopefully get 100) on the NY State Regents or any standard exam. I say this because these exams, however you come to them, are not really all that difficult and should not be barriers to anyone who has truly learned the material. Teaching our kids in a learner friendly way that not only gives them contextual and other understanding but allows them to succeed in the world as it is seems to me to be our real challenge.
(See, now I've gone and scandalized the other side!)
Best to all,
Cory, Friday
When I play video games with groups and online, I do not seem to notice as many girls as boys. But that is most likely because I play games like Half-life and Halo. When we have "Halo parties" sometimes girls will play with us, but they are always in last place and don't know what they're doing.
Other than the two to three girls that come and play Halo with us, I have no idea whether girls fancy video games as much as boys do.
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