I am a regular listener of ETS talk, a great podcast here at PSU. The most recent episode (issue?) was a live broadcast from Educause Learning Initative in Tampa, FL and starred Cole Camplese, Allan Gyorke, and Brad Kozlick. Listening to them talk about their experience there got me thinking about a couple things, but I am going to break them up into separate posts.

I am participating with a little experiment that was brought to my attention by my favorite PSU librarian, Ellysa Cahoy. You can read details at her blog, but suffice it to say that she sent me some questions to answer and I will provide answers here. In addition, if you comment that you would be interested in being interviewed by me, I will send you some questions, you post the answers with a trackback to my blog, and the cycle continues. Anyway, here goes:

Recently I had a hallway conversation about "serious games" with a man who takes games seriously.  Chris Stubbs, an affiliate of the Educational Gaming Commons here at PSU was that man.  I told him that one of the worries that I have about the use of games in educational environments is that games are designed to have (relatively) low thresholds of frustration compared to the world at large.  What I mean is that you might have to struggle with part of a game for hours to complete a task, but the game is designed for you to be able to complete the task, and is even optimized to have that task be frustration enough to keep you engaged without being so hard that you loose interest.  My point (and I don't believe it to be a new one) was that this can lead to a reduction in students threshold of persistence (this is not an empirically tested claim, just a working hypothesis).  So by motivating students with games we may actually do long term disservice to their ability to solve / struggle with real problems that are not as clean.

Being a thoughtful and intelligent fellow, Mr. Stubbs sent me an email afterwards that responded thusly:


So games lack the complexity and the difficulty of many real world tasks.  As you pointed out, education can be very difficult at times and that is not a complexity that games can easily match.  But why should they?  If you look at a video game as a tool in the educational tool box of an instructor (as opposed to a replacement to existing teaching methods) then what harm is there in its simplicity?  In fact, the lack of relative complexity or difficulty is what  could potentially open doors or spark interest from people who might otherwise have been turned off by a particular topic or field.  In this way, I suppose you could think of them like good marketing materials.  They can help get students engaged or excited about learning, but it will still be up to traditional teaching methods to take them the rest of the way.  In my opinion games can teach to a point, but I think their greater value is in the interactivity and the enthusiasm they can spark.  "Use them for what they are good at, not for everything" would probably be the simplest way of putting it.

I sent him a response, but then thought putting it all up on a blog post might open the conversation to my many readers to comment.  Or at least we can continue the conversation in a more public place in case anyone is actually interested.  So, here are my further thoughts:

I agree with your general point.  I guess the thing that worries me about games (and serious games in particular) is they are frequently seen as both "teacher-proof" and "teacher-replacements".  I don't think games are evil, but I also don't think that they teach in the absence of a pedagogical framework that can (often) only be provided by a teacher.  The history of technology in education is that every new (new) thing is taken to be the salvation of schools because it will get kids fired up about learning.  Inevitably this turns out to be wrong, but onward to the next savior technology that will gets kids jumping up and down to learn.  It is a bad cycle and makes cynics out of teachers very quick.  When you tell someone that the only way that people will be interested in what you do is if you let them play games while you do it, it is not much consolation that they will enjoy the games.

Back in your court Mr. Stubbs (or maybe we can turn this into four square if there are a couple other interested parties out there). 

So, this is a little bit of an experiment.  I have to write a rationale for a funding agency that characterizes my research in a way that helps non-educators, and specifically business people, understand why what I am doing has value.  I have to do this in one page.  I am going to post a draft of my one page here in the hopes that some folks, educators or not, out there will tell me if I am making sense.  Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Understanding Professional Pedagogical Vision in Science Teaching

Fewer students are majoring in science and students do not see science as a field of creative expression and personal initiative. The current generation see facts as a keystroke away and they are immersed in dynamically creating for and contributing to the development of their communities through tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. We must transform science teaching to engage this new generation. The field of science education, through standards documents and peer reviewed research, is clear the direction of this transformation should be toward classroom inquiry science teaching. However, what classroom science inquiry means has been a debate in the field of Science Education since there has been a field. Inquiry has been used in place of hands-on investigations, described as minds-on activities, and is represented as a continuum from guided or teacher-directed to open or student-directed. One point of agreement is that transforming science teaching will help students understand science better and it will help them experience science as a disciple that requires creativity, initiative, and in which they can make contributions to a larger community.
 
Perhaps the dominant reason inquiry is not common practice is that prospective science teachers have not experienced inquiry science teaching as students, so they can’t recreate it when they become teachers of science themselves.  We have a self perpetuating system. Many science teacher educators are attempting to address this cycle by modeling inquiry science teaching for prospective science teachers or by engaging prospective teachers in science investigations. There is evidence that these experiences improve prospective teachers’ likelyhood of developing inquiry science in their own teaching, though the effects often wash out quickly.

However, these interventions are built on a key assumption: prospective teachers see the models of inquiry science teaching the way science teacher educator do. Imagine two people in an airport watching a baseball game, one is from the US and the other from the UK.  While they are both watching the same game, they are not seeing the same thing.  The person from the US sees the center fielder make a great catch on a fly ball, hit by a switch-hitting batter, off a left-handed fastball pitcher’s out and away curveball.  While the person from the UK sees all the action, they can’t interpret what they are seeing, and in that sense they literally cannot see the game of baseball.  It is likely that a more subtle version of this phenomena happens with prospective teachers when they watch inquiry science teaching.  They cannot interpret what they see in meaningful ways. What makes this worse, is they know something about science teaching from their own schooling and thus believe they understand what they are seeing.  Charles Goodwin, an anthropologist, described this ability to see and interpret events in a particular way as professional vision.  

The research questions I will be investigating are: (1) How do expert and novice teachers see science teaching differently?; (2) How can these differences begin to define professional pedagogical vision in the context of classroom inquiry science teaching?  Put simply, my research project will attempt to understand the differences between expert teachers and novice teachers when they look at science teaching.  Through the intensive use of teaching experiments, field observations and video analysis, I will develop a framework for how expert teachers see inquiry science pedagogy. I will ask experts and novice to analyze examples of classroom science teaching and use their analysis along with discussion around their analysis to understand what they attend to and how they interpret what they see.  My hope is that by understanding how experts see classrooms, and in particular differentiate between inquiry practice and non-inquiry practice in science, I can help prospective teachers “learn the game”. 

Just a quick note, but Donna, a student in our CI597: Disruptive Technologies course just did a search about Wenger and Communities of Practice and our course Pligg site came up #2 in Google.  Pretty amazing that our students' stuff is getting out there like that.  Take a look.

Sloppy language makes me crazy. I am sure I am guilty of it, but I still want people to be clear and clean to the extent that is possible.  The reason for my deep hatred of ambiguity is the the devil is in the details (to coin a phrase), and when you say something I get to interpret it the way I like, so if you are sloppy then we can agree without really agreeing (or more commonly disagree). 

This comes up because as a result of this problem of mine I am causing students in my class to (at best) leave class with head pain, or at worst leave my class believing me to be "crazy".  [Short aside: I am hoping this is why they are saying that, because if I am acting crazy in some other way, then I am more worried]

Here is the question that began all this craziness and head pain:  In the context of Web 2.0 tools, what constitutes a boundary object (In terms of Wenger's framework of communities of practice)?  The discussion centered around whether the thing that is reified (fancy name for written down or captured in some form) is the boundary object or whether the tool was the boundary object?  So is a twitter post an object or is twitter (as an application) an object.  The reason this matters is depending on the choice you make there you get different implications for how you define community and what role technology plays in that community.  The added layer to this is how does RSS (content is king) impact this question.  If you post it to twitter and then it goes to ten other places, what is the object now and which community is it a product of?  Is that a question worth asking? Is your head hurting yet?

There is a great little application that I use to keep track of my books called Delicious Library.  If you have not seen it, I strongly suggest you check it out.  What I have been thinking about around this app is how it's usefulness could be extended.  One of the nice features is that you can use a digital video camera to scan in books via their barcode.  So, you aim the camera (the built in one will do nicely) it scans the book and downloads all the information from Amazon.  What I thought about first was that this would be great for is wine (I had just come from the wine store).  I would love to come home from the wine store, scan in all the wine I just bought, have the information on the wines downloaded from Wine Spectator or some such site.  I could rate the wines and comment on them.  Have it sync up to my iPhone so I can carry my database of great wine with me, and I would be a happy guy. 

It also reminded me that there is a tremendous amount of data that is embedded in our environment that we don't even attend to.  Everything we own these days has (or had) a barcode, and increasingly things have RFID.  Data, data everywhere - crazy.  That then got me thinking about what else might have a barcode that I could scan in and download data on to build my own little local database?  I am sure there are more things out there, any suggestions?

I am teaching a course this semester about Disruptive Technology in Teaching and Learning with Cole Camplese.  Having a bunch of smart people in a room talking about technology and education is a real treat for me.  This past week we were talking about RSS and Blogs as content management systems.  As part of this conversation we took a look at Christopher Long's page as an example of what faculty can do with the blog as a content management system. 

Here at PSU in Science Education we have been talking a lot about our graduate program, and in particular about how to give graduate students feedback on their progress through the program.  We have been talking about a portfolio that would include a research statement, a teaching statements, and papers that represent their work in courses and outside.  We were then planning annual meetings to talk with individual students and give them feedback.  Of course this all makes a lot more sense (to me) as an online eportfolio in the form of a blog with some connected static pages.  Students teaching and research statements would be static pages (though the content would change over time).  All their other work for courses and outside of course would be included in the personal content management system.  By using tags they could mark things they wanted feedback on or things they felt represented their best work.  Faculty could check in at any time with progress and students could have a (public) record of faculty comments on their work.  I realize it would be a big leap of faith, but I wonder how many faculty / departments are doing something like this out there.  Clearly Chris Long is, but I would love to know if there are more people out there researching in the open.

Next semester I get to do something that I have been trying to do for quite a while now - teach a course with my friend, Cole Camplese. Cole has been dragging me along as he cuts a swath through the teaching and learning with technology space. In the Spring semester we will be teaching a course called Disruptive Technologies (CI 597). The idea is to think about how technology, and in particular social tools, can impact teaching and learning. You can hear the podcast for the first class via iTunes U or via Cole's blog. I am really looking forward to seeing how this stuff plays in the real world of teaching and learning. One role I have in this course is focusing on the K-12 space (really in my case that means secondary). I would love to hear from folks how they are using these tools and if there are IT constraints (e.g. Google Docs is blocked) in using Web 2.0 tools . Stay tuned as well and I will be pointing to more of the work from the class.

It is amazing how technology and "the millennials" use of it is changing everything about the way the world works. I read this story in Newsweek and it gives a real life example about what it means to live in the open. It seems totally natural now to read about a murder investigation and see that mobile phones, Facebook, and YouTube are part of the crime scene.