Notes for last April class

Barry Fishman- TIE professor, based in Michigan
Coming to talk about video games.

What's good about games
Is it a new medium on par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies?" The Economist
All mediums are questioned, including the book

What's so great about JK Rowling?
Book Rhetoric: Understimulate the senses
Tragically isolating
forces you to follow a fixed linear path
Encourages passivity
Teaches "plot following" instead of "learning to lead"

Play is one of the oldest forms of learning
- Digital natives
-Kids spend 50min a day playing games
80% have games
50% have handheld
New workplace skill requirements: teacm building, rapid info acquisition, problem identification, etc...
These are all in games

Games=
Clear (learning) goals
Continuous progress monitoriing and "just right' challenge scaffolding
Lots of practice and reinforcement
Encourage exploration and inquiry
Highly motivating and goal oriented
Personlization
Infinite patience

Is learning better when it is fun?
better?
learning?
how do we measure?

Are games good for learning.

What do people learn? Shooting space aliens does not translate to good skills

Wired magazine does a Warcraft article titled "You play world of Warcraft? You're hired!"
-says that it turns into leadership skills

How do games teach people how to play them?
Why are they so motivating?
Can we create games that teach cor K-12 content? (Should we?)
What can we learn from games (and game design) that can help us think about the design of learning experiences in school?

School through the lens of Games:
Definition: A voluntary attempt to overcome unnecassary obstables, in whih the outcome is uncertain, is a game.
- "ditto" for which there is a solution or a best solution is a puzzle
-Games usually have high replay value.
Puzzles usually do not.

A voluntary attempt to overcome necassary obstacles is either activism or entrepreneurship (a "project with a purpose"

And involuntary attempt to overcom a uneccassary obstacle is abuse

For most students, school is a punishment. Involunttary, and the obstablces appear unnecassary

When traditional classroom education more or less works=School is often a puzzle. Guess what the teacher knows, and figure out the role of a student.

Puzzles can have substantial ed value. Lacking replay value though.

Solution: Redisign school to be more game like

3 ideas:
Learning from games in general
Because good games leverage great learning theory
2. Playing games in school
-But what makes a game educational
3. Making school mor game like
- Or mor accurately, improving the "game of school"

What are "educational: games?
Games are like desert for kids
School is like spinach
Kids see edutainment of a spinach sunday
not very tasty, and not very good for you either.

Carmen San diego is no good
The logical journey of the zoombeenies is good

Morivation, and what it has to do with games and learning:
Games are "hard fun"
Expectancy value theory
Choices are determined by the percieved value and how hard you have to work to get it
Values:
Intrinsic:
Insturmental: Future oreinted
Attaminmetn: Finishing a task

Attribution theory:
:Attributions are inferences about the causes of success or failur

Ability or effort?
Entity learners: Intelligence is fixed, and too hard is too hard
mastery oriented: Seek learning or, not concered about looks

Learned helplessness is a motivational problem

Who is responsible?
Ability? Luck?
Effort? Task difficulty?

Role of knowledge
The relationship of knowledge to interest is an inverted U shaped curve. Proximal zone

Competence
Students feelings of efficacy regarding their ability to succeed
Is positively related to effort, persistence, use of higher learnign strategies,

Should we teach kids how to play games?
Games teach you how to play them

Showed Incredibles games that tells you buttons

Fantasy
Exogenous:
-the fantasy depends on the skill being learned ex: math blasters
Endogenous: the fantasy and the skill depend on one another
Ex: guitar hero, rock band

Showed rock band trailer and sample

Relatedness:
The need to feel like part of a group (rock band)
Enhanced by positive interactions with peers or teachers
Enhances interest participation

Second skin trailer played:

Autonomy: No agency in schools

Vividness: Includes imager, concreteness, unexpectedness, and suspense
Graphics and music

Collaboration vs. Competition
collab:
increase feeling of relatedness
generate explanation create opporutnities for feedback
Competition
enhance learner involvment

Seductive details:
Attraction may or may not help learn more
might attract interest, but distract from content

Context matters:
Assign different perspectives

Can we use commercial video gtames to teach real content?

It's not about games, it's about learning envoronments
Why is school at best like a spinach sundae?
Why did we move away from learning through play?
How can we get back there?

Bart:
Science-
How big a mirror do you need to see your body head to toe?
The misconception is that is has to do with how far away you stand. It actually has to do with the angle.

Bart played hit the dot game: He found 16 dots. The score is submited and stats are given (it was 1 point per hit, minus 1 point per miss)

What did he learn about that? We don't know, because the website doesn't tell us what the point is.

Concord Consortium. Dr. Rose is on the Board.
They work with pda's, use censure data.
3 topics are:
Basic principles of hydraulics
Domonstration of Osmosis at different temperatures
Demonstration of how friction produces heat.

Library of Models, is the followed link
then "a microspic denonstration of friction and heat"

It runs a friction demontrator that gives a very detailed and thorough visual of why and how two surfaces rubbing together cause heat

Next is Hydrolics:
It's another simulator.

Next is Osmosis. It drives water up from the roots to the leaves.

David: Assessment
How do we assess? Games are continuous assessment instruments. One of the reasons that games are so motivating is that your constintly getting feedback on what your doing. School is traditionally summative evaluation.
When think of assessment, think of games as the best case scenario. Education, now, has mal-adaptive features, in that it doesn't give feedback.

Next week will be high stakes assessment.

Think like a Historian:
Cast's thinking HISTORY: Evaluate, Compare, develop your own viewpoint.

Writing, Creating, sharing

UDL Guidlines: Your task is to look at the guidlines and say "What's construct relevant?"
When I assign an essay, do I care how they actually do it. Painbrushes may be construct relevant. But in writing an essay, is that what we are really trying to teach them?
History example: I do care about the essay, but not how they do it.

they could use: hand, voice, single swithc, joysick, adapted keyboard

Can they get to these vehicles?

Then, if the writing itself is not construct relevant?
then spellcheckers, posters, etc... Are they thinking like a historian?

A sentence starter is embedded into the essay writer. good stuff. There is also an image cue.

Instructional Video: You should probably watch Marisa Segel's Guacamole video

Do you believe in magic?

I thought about calling this video "sleep deprivation", but I opted for something a little more cheery. I really enjoyed making it, but as mentioned, you really would be better off watching Marisa Segel's Guacamole video. See you Monday!

multimedia

Isabel is the skinny one on the left. Molly is the fat one on the right. They have issues.

Below is a video about soccer that raises awareness for HIV. I'm a huge soccer fan.

Interesting UDL slideshow: Shift happens

This is a sideshow about identity web 2.0.

http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834

I post it because many aspects of the presentation exhibit multiple means of representation, and because the presentation style very original!

The presenter confronts the viewer with a multitude of disturbing facts about population, resources, and technological proliferation. The facts span the last twenty or so years--did I mention they are disturbing?--and they crave a solution. Enter presents product--to create a digital identification system that mimics the simplicity of that found in the use of passports and drivers licenses in the real world (as opposed to having a different log in name for every website). Sounds like a pretty good idea....

Its not the content that is UDL'd, but the way it is introduced. Nearly every word he says in his presentation is supplemented with a visual. The visuals are a mixture of simple textual representations (one at a time), pictures, screen grabs, logos, and diagrams. The overall all effect of such exhaustive representation is the feeling that you are watching a movie rather than a slide show. I think the style lends itself particularly well to the content, but I'm not sure it will work for everyone. I sincerely encourage anyone to check it out and see if it works for them. I've never seen anything like it.

Universal Design

Hello UDL bloggers,

Welcome to "Logan's Universal Design Blog", a place where, depending on your browser, all of your wildest dreams may or may not come true. This is a place where in one highlight reel diigo Maradona can rewind time and score a touch down with his left foot for the patriots and a goal with his right hand for the ex-patriots; a place where dogs of all sizes are welecome; a place where imagination meets weekly marination and out pops one incredibly sticky note that you and I can share over candle light with the soothing sound of audio books in the background. Mostly though, I'll just be writing about what I learn each week in UDL.

I'm not really sure what we are supposed to write about for this first blog post, hence the silly beginning, so I guess I'll just say a little bit about my background and why I wanted to take UDL.

Background:

I am a special education major from the University of Georgia. In fall of '06 I left Georgia to work as an intern for United Cerebral Palsy in Washington DC. I love DC, but Cambridge/Boston is making a go at the "my favorite city" superlative.

I spent most of last year traveling with a documentary film I was a part of, the subject matter of which also concerned issues within the realm of people with disabilities. More specifically, the film features a friend of mine who tried to get his wheelchair pimped on pimp my ride, and who's wheelchair also served as a test for architectural accessibility as we crossed America to reach the television studio.

Why UDL?

What if the studio would have been inaccessible!?

Having had very close relationships with people who thrive in accessible atmospheres (and fail in inaccessible ones), I hope to learn more about the physical, psychological, and curricular barriers that inevitably impede the progress of society as a whole.

I say society as a whole because I don't believe we know what gifts people have to give to any sector of any community until they can actually access that sector. That belief hardly needs justification. However, a glance at its scope may make resonate longer.

Let's say Steven Hawking really is the smartest person in the world. Isn't it in everyone's best interest to make everything (buildings, attitudes, and information) accessible to THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WORLD. Stephen Hawkings uses a wheelchair btw.

Intelectualism not your thing? How about parenthood or commerce? Bet you are or will be involved in one of those. Accessible places provide entry for strollers, mothers of babies in strollers, customers who want to buy a new stroller (or anything else), the next Stephen Hawking who could tell us stroller designs that would save baby lives, and on, and on...

These issues of physical accessibility generalize to knowledge as well. Diverse learners must have diverse routes to knowledge. Stephen Hawking can't write. Imagine if he were only assigned written assignments his entire life.

Being a TIE student here at HGSE, I am particularly interested in the advancements of technology that make UDL more possible to implement. As a special educator I tried my best to universally design my classroom, but truthfully, it kicked my butt. Two years have passed since I was hacking out an attempt at UDL in a highschool classroom. In just two short years there has been an explosion of useful tools on the web that assist teachers with UDL. It appears that UDL itself is becoming significantly more accessible. I'm really looking forward to getting a closer look this semester.

thanks, and see ya Monday.