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Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games

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Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games

In his paper Assessing Higher Order Thinking In Video Games, John Rice draws the conclusion that educational computer games, such as Revolution, which was developed by MIT’s Media Lab (the game itself will be discussed in a future post).

With the increased global interest in gaming, educators are looking more closely at how computer games can be used in the classroom. Teachers seem to prefer edutainment style games which offer a “drill and kill” style of repetition practice. There is a wide spectrum of games being used (some ostensibly educational, some commercial but with educational potential) and amongst those games levels of “thinking skill” are required. Some games require only lower order thinking (drill and kill) while other games are more immersive, offering the ability for players to use higher order thinking skills. Rice refers to these as cognitive virtual interactive environments (VIEs).

The benefit of cognitive VIEs is to address the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy – particularly application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. VIEs are virtual (three dimensional) environments which require extensive interaction (reading, clicking, manipulating the environment). Most often, MMORPGs are the best representation of VIEs. Games such as World of Warcraft, Sims, Civilization can be considered examples which fit the genre.

While still being ‘edutainment’ Rice has developed a series of qualifiers, in the form of a rubric, which ascertain whether a game has the elements required to challenge higher order thinking skills.

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The qualifiers, 20 in total, are scored and graded according to a viability scale.

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Rice concludes that a game which scores 15 or more is “highly probable” to encourage higher order thinking skills in users. He concludes that VIEs are a viable as educational tools as long as they can be judged as having the ability to challenge higher order thinking skills. He is particularly impressed with “Revolution” and asserts it to be a high quality educational tool.

In reading this paper I’ve drawn some interesting conclusions myself. First is a criticism of Rice’s approach. While I agree that interactive gaming (particularly virtual environments) show enormous potential as learning tools, I cannot help but be alarmed that Rice’s approach to assessing such games is too prescriptive. The rubric is neither practical nor logical within the context of gaming. Computer games, and the culture created by them, shift constantly and are subject to trends which cannot be predicted. A game like Minecraft, arguably a teaching tool with enormous potential, scores poorly on such a rubric.

The generic codes and conventions of computer games are not static. They fluctuate and with each technology leap, there will be a noticeable shift in computer game standards. The games of today were inconceivable just 5 years ago. Computer games 5 years from now are equally difficult to predict.

While it’s important to recognise the value of gaming in modern culture and education, we must resist the temptation to rigidly define game boundaries.

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Teachers want access to more technology in the classroom

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Teachers want access to more technology in the classroom

A nation wide survey conducted last year discovered that teachers want more technology in the classroom. Access to computers seems to be high and a lot of teachers are using websites, images and other media in their daily classroom routine.

However the problem, according to the survey, is that teachers feel they don’t have access to the “right” kinds of technology. The biggest barrier to technology, unsurprisingly, was budget constraints.

Teachers have their hearts in the right place. Most teachers cite ‘motivating students’ as their reason for wanting more technology in the classroom.

What surprised me was that 943% of teachers believed that interactive whiteboards ‘enrich’ classroom education. I understand the limitations of classroom technology and also the often low levels of training teachers have in using technology in the classroom. Particularly, teachers aren’t always well versed in areas like the internet and social media. However, I cannot fathom why interactive whiteboards (a 20+ year old technology) is still desired in a classroom environment.  I had access to them over 10 years ago and nobody in my school was interested in using them. Their application, quite honestly, is limited.

Overcoming budget is an understandable problem. One idea might be to apply a BYOT (bring your own technology) attitude. Allowing students to bring mobile devices to class – and use them directly for learning – will help raise motivation levels. Also, students are more likely to enjoy using computers (internet and social media) than they are using interactive whiteboards.

Teachers should start moving towards a more participatory methodology for learning. Provide students with the basic ideas or questions and let them use the resources that they’re comfortable with (online environments) and it might be surprising what they can produce.

Perhaps the problem in modern education is that we’re too focused on telling students what tools they can use to solve problems (such as learning, knowledge acquisition and skills building). Instead, let them choose their own tools. Why can’t a pyramid be modeled in Minecraft? Why can’t student presentations be done via youtube?

The best part is that teachers don’t even have to think of tools that students might choose. Students will do that! Technology? Not a problem, students will use the technology they have and whatever they’re comfortable with. Teenagers are happy to work when doing so on their own terms. Whatever students are studying, just give them core ideas and let them figure out the rest. Study after study proves that student will work when they work for themselves.

Motivation goes up. Creativity goes up. Original content and content creation goes up … all without the teacher lifting a finger.

Win!

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Shut Up and Write The Book!

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Shut Up and Write The Book!

Sometimes we focus so much on coming up with ideas, or thinking about what to write, or spend too much time making sure there’s academic value in what we’re doing … but sometimes we just have to stop messing around and just write!

Good philosophy and some nice tips for getting the writing flowing. For my own writing I’ve realised that I don’t do enough and that I’m not happy with my writing style. From now on I’m going to try and write more. I want to make my writing simple and approachable – none of this academic quasi-smartass mumbo jumbo. 

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More Fun Writing Than Playing: The Critical Videogame Blogosphere as Emerging Approach to Knowledge Creation

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More Fun Writing Than Playing: The Critical Videogame Blogosphere as Emerging Approach to Knowledge Creation

Blogging has risen as a powerful form of community on the internet. I’m writing a research blog at this very minute. You’re reading these words and, as such, we are both part of the research or academic or education communities. Maybe all of them, maybe a mix, maybe just one. But that’s how you found me, through your interest in research relating to education.

The blogosphere is an umbrella term for those who write blogs and consider themselves a part of the blogging community. Within that community are categories of blogs such as ‘tech blogs’  or ‘news blogs’ or ‘education blogs’.

Abraham, in talking about blogging, identifies the community mindset relating to bloggers. They have a kind of collective knowledge or extended mind which is a way of thinking beyond the individual human idea of knowledge.

This is an interesting notion. An analogy could be suggested (by me) that the way we think is becoming less individual and more collective – like a hive. The community pools its knowledge and uses that as to become a self-perceived community of experts. This community perceives itself to be creative and productive, as if providing something to the wider internet. Indeed there is an apparent relationship between expert bloggers (who are positioned as game critics) and their readers. The blog acts as an intermediary for the ideas of their authors.

The community that bloggers are part of is an imagined community; all communities (excluding small face-to-face villages) are imagined. Such communities are distinguished by the style in which they are imagined. Any perceived falsity or “genuineness” is irrelevant.

I’m mostly interested in Abraham’s notion that bloggers are a form of knowledge creation. While they might compete within their community for prestige or to become elite, game bloggers are working together to create a community. That community creates a kind of collective knowledge through a distributed network of overlapping ‘extended minds’. This is an exciting notion as it has implications on social networking and other communities such as web forums. If bloggers (working on independent blogs as part of a game blogosphere) are creating knowledge then this idea can be applied to other areas and communities – especially those with a closer and more collaborative mindset.

I also like the assertion that through the action of repetition (practice) one can become an expert without any formal acknowledgement. 

An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. 

An expert isn’t a person with a PhD, it’s a person who has achieved domain-specific knowledge through the repeated act of writing about that topic over a period of time. This puts anybody with domain-specific knowledge into the realm of expert. Even more interesting is the realisation that expert no longer has to be a embodied as a person. Wikipedia, a collective resource, is recognised for being an expert source – an aggregation of many points of view. Collective knowledge. Extended minds.

When did the definition of an expert change? When did it become acceptable to cite wikipedia as a source? When did an anonymous blogger become an expert? The redefinition of expertise changes the way we see knowledge and knowledge creation,

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Teachers, Students, Digital Games: What’s the Right Mix?

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Teachers, Students, Digital Games: What’s the Right Mix?

There’s lots of buzz around computer games in education now. Various studies are being conducted to ascertain how much access kids have to computers, how often they’re being used in class and how effective games are as a learning tool. 

While more and more teachers are starting to use games in the classroom, there’s concern that tech resources aren’t being used effectively.

What’s more important is drawing a line between “educational games” and everything else. COTS computer games (according to Zichermann) are much more suited to educational purposes than education-centric games. 

Further, this kind of analysis doesn’t consider related factors such as social networking, which is a natural extension of modern gaming culture.

The shift away from an educational focus is gaining momentum. Even Prensky, known for his loathsome “digital native” theory, acknowledges the attitude that learning is becoming a background to achieving goals. This is the direction which education should be taking – how are students learning beyond classroom walls? By playing games, sharing and socialising, and being a part of a community, students are learning valuable knowledge and skills … which is secondary to having fun and hanging out.

The best learning occurs when we forget we’re learning at all.

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Does Game Based Learning Work?

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Does Game Based Learning Work? Short answer: Yes. Blunt’s analysis of three studies draws together enough empirical data to suggest that there is a correlation between gaming and test scores.

The idea of the study was simply to discover whether COTS (commercial, off-the shelf) games facilitate improved learning in a classroom environment. The results strongly suggest that there’s benefits to combining gaming and learning. Blunt used a theoretical framework which considered multiple concepts:

  • ARCS (attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction). This model identifies four areas in which learning is broken into parts. The theory is that students require motivation as well as practical examples of how a system works (which the students can use to help their understanding).
  • Good Video Game Design. Of particular importance is the computer game’s quality. The game must have rules (restrictions and generic codes), goals & objectives, be challenging and be engaging.

Blunt conducted three separate studies at a university level. All of the subjects were business related – business, economics, management. Each subject had a corresponding COTS computer game which fit the curriculum. As a study control, the subjects that were chosen had two or more class groups. One group was allowed to play computer games as a part of the curriculum, the other class (which was learning exactly the same content) didn’t have access to a computer game – ie it was a standard class. At the end of the course, students were given standardised tests.

The results were very encouraging. The classes which included computer games had a much higher average score and more “A” level results than classes without the games. Also, classes with computer games had no students fail the course, while the other classes had a number of fails. The results also considered other matrices such as gender and ethnicity. Overall, computer games seemed to have almost no discernible affect on gender or ethnicity. The only other significant factor was age. Students under 40 years of age performed significantly better with computer games. Students over 41 didn’t benefit from using computer games in class.

Blunt concludes that his results are significant, however the problem he is trying to address is the lack of empirical data which can be used to prove a causal-comparative relationship between computer games and learning.

Simulations. We have plenty of empirical studies about simulations over the last 25 years. We know simulations work. We know simulations improve performance. We know simulations improve learning. Yet, I challenge anyone to show me a literature review of empirical studies about game- based learning. There are none. We are charging head-long into game-based learning without knowing if it works or not. We need studies. – Dr J. Cannon-Bowers

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Ontology Is Overrated

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Ontology Is Overrated

Shirky’s analysis of the archaic use of categorisation systems is spot on. 

The way humans have classified knowledge has, traditionally, been rigid. The methodology was to create categories under which all knowledge (such as books) could be placed. This was a solution to a physical problem regarding the actual storage of books and represented bias towards formal thinking and strict rules.

However, categorising in this manner is no longer relevant. The internet has revealed a more simple, more direct way of self-organisation (albeit quite still disorganised). Users, instead of adhering to strict categories can “tag” links and resources with numerous identifying words. Tags allow various connections to be drawn between resources more simply and more organically. 

So instead of filing a link under “Entertainment/Movies” a link can be tagged as movie, film, actor, genre, and an infinite number of other tags. These tags allow the link to be cross-compared with other links with similar tags. It’s a really efficient way of organising without forcing everything into predefined boxes.

Core to this thinking are two ideas:

1. The search function. Searching tags is an alternative to finding information. Rather than using a categorised list and browsing through it, users can search for terms, keywords and tags. The results will be more related to the user’s needs without the need for a rigid hierarchy or structure.

2. Signal Loss. The bigger the system gets, the worse the system becomes. Inevitably more and more materials will refuse to fit into categories. This makes a strict category system hard to manage and the problem becomes exponential the bigger the knowledge base becomes. However with tagging, the larger the knowledge base, the less signal loss. Relevant materials become easier to find because the tags allow for more precision.

Shirky presents a thoughtful and compelling argument for reconsidering the way we categorise. Sites like del.icio.us proved that user tagged content is an efficient, self-managing system. Regardless of the problems resulting from how users interpret and tag links, if enough users independently tag a link, then that link will be easy to search for. Differentiation becomes possible on a macro scale with a single link able to have twenty or thirty tags.

Thus, the rise of word clouds – popular tag clouds and tag searching will become more relevant and common.

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Various Social Networking Studies

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Various Social Networking Studies

This is more of an amalgamation of various papers by danah boyd (note the all lower case!) She’s written various reports regarding social networking, some of which are particularly interesting. She’s done a lot of research into teens online and, most importantly, boyd is an advocate of having an online presence.

People who don’t hire a candidate because of their online history will “miss out on the best minds of my generation. Bright peopl epush the edge, but what constitutes the edge is time-dependent. It’s no longer about miniskirts or rock and roll; it’s about having a complex digital presence”.

 

The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip and Bullying in Networked Publics

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1926349

Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices and Strategies

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128

Social Network Sites: Public, Private … or What?

http://www.danah.org/papers/KnowledgeTree.pdf

Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

Albrechtslund discusses the notion that online social networking is a kind of participatory surveillance. In doing so, he redefines the concept of surveillance and develops his analysis for how it is both participatory and mutually beneficial.

Albrechtslund identifies cyberspace as a spacial metaphor for the internet. There are similar related analogies such as global village, information highway, world wide web, etc. The spatial discourse relating to computers is an attempt to organise and classify the internet. However the internet is not hierarchical and is not constrained by the same laws as physical space. Therefore the internet cannot be described in terms of classic organisation. 

Furthering the non-linear view of the internet, Albrechtslund notes the interrelated space between the cyberspace and physical space. In such, it’s demonstrated that social network is not only an online practice.

Digital society has a number of key issues to be considered. One key issue is that of persistency. All information, including relationships, is stored online indefinitely. This is a consideration relating to social practices being no longer temporary, their organisation and audiences. As well as persistency, social networks are a mediated public space characterised by their searchability, replicability and invisible audiences. Searchability refers to information being made available through keywords and phrases, allowing for collection and sorting of information. Replication is the ability to detach communication (including pictures and video) from its original source. It can be perfectly reproduced, altered and put into other contexts (remixed). Lastly there’s the notion of invisible audiences. This concept is the idea that although we may have an intended audience (friends and family) there is a larger potential audience – everyone with access to the internet. 

Redefining Surveillance. Albrechtslund takes the traditional notion of surveillance and changes its purpose. Surveillance is commonly used in a hierarchical sense – the watcher and the watched – or as data collection. However social networking has created an environment where people are willingly publishing this information online. It’s free for all to see and collect. This, Albrechtslund claims, is empowering. It’s a form of social and playful surveillance. Simply put, it’s exhibitionism. 

This explains the moral panics, conspiracy theories and dystopian views of digital culture – the people who don’t understand why anyone would engage in online social networking and willingly share personal information. 

Thus, surveillance can be seen, in a social networking sense, as a mutual horizontal practice. Instead of top-down, hierarchal surveillance, people are able to watch themselves and their friends, family and acquaintances. This empowers participants, builds subjectivity and promotes sharing. Albrechtslund calls this mutuality – participatory surveillance.

  1. user empowerment
  2. social networking as space sharing
  3. mutuality

As already noted, participatory surveillance is a kind of empowering exhibitionism. It’s the self construction of identity and a tool used to rebel against shame associated with not being ‘private’. Exhibitionism is a liberating force against the refusal to be humble. 

I like this idea. We socialise with strangers and construct identities (both real and anonymous). We move from passive to active by participating in culture creation and sharing. This sharing should not be underestimated, since it is the core of how social networks function.

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Teens and Technology – Pew Report 2013

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Teens and Technology – Pew Report 2013

Pew Internet is a good source for quantitative data regarding teens and internet use. Their recent reports have made some interesting conclusions about teen behavior online. Most of the following data is from the Teens 2012 keynote by Dr K. Purcell.

http://pewinternet.org/Presentations/2012/July/Teens-2012-Truth-Trends-and-Myths-About-Teen-Online-Behavior.aspx

Some of the more interesting findings summarised. For the following data, the term ‘teen’ refers to the age group 12-17 (school age) teenagers unless otherwise stated.

  • 80% of teens use social networks
  • 95% of teens use the internet (the highest age group)
  • 88% of teens use a desktop/laptop computer to access the internet
  • 49% of teens use a phone to access the internet

Phones:

  • 77% of teens have a cell/mobile phone
  • only 23% have a smart phone
  • 47% of teens talk to friends on the phone several times a week or more (decreasing)
  • 69% of teens send text messages several times a week or more (increasing)
  • only 17% of teens send emails several times a week or more

Some surprises there. The low frequency of smartphones amongst teens is likely due to their high cost and relative “newness” in the tech market. Teens are more interested in texting than talking. Email is not a popular option amongst teens, possibly because it’s not considered mobile or immediate. More effort is required to email whereas texting is short and faster.

Social Media

  • 93% of teens have a facebook account
  • 16% of teens use twitter, of which 12% have an account
  • only 2% of teens use tumblr and skype
  • 27% of teens record and upload videos of themselves online
  • 62% of teens keep their profiles private (viewable only by friends)
  • 39% of adults have “friended” their children on social networking sites

Clearly teens prefer facebook as their go-to social networking venue. Very few use twitter (more common amongst adults) and almost no teens use tumblr or skype (which is surprising!). Also, teens seem to be good at maintaining their privacy online and quite a few connect to their parents on social networking sites as well.

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