I must say that this week’s readings/podcasts
left me with very mixed feelings. Even
after watching the two podcasts about using Second Life with online learning, I
am still not convinced of the purpose.
Personally, being a cartoon character sitting with another cartoon
character as we watch a third cartoon character teach doesn’t seem
necessary. I know that virtual worlds
are improving all the time and I even talked to my father-in-law who has
experienced a scenario that almost felt like the holo-decks aboard the Starship
Enterprise. But what was described in
the videos seemed little more than a kitschy way to experience online learning
in a way that more closely resembles traditional school. I’m just not sold on the idea.
Games and learning theory, on the other hand,
really set my mind working. So much of
what Gee talks about in Learning and
Games goes right along with my core beliefs about education: room to fail,
self-regulation, cooperation/collaboration, and working at your own pace.
Failure is not an option…but it should
be
“It should be noted that
humans and other primates find learning and mastery deeply, even biologically,
pleasurable under the right conditions, though often not the ones they face in
school,” (Gee, 2008, p. 24).
Giving students room to fail in an environment
of safety is something most teachers try to create in their classrooms. But even in the best classrooms, we are
working against ourselves if we preach one thing, but test another; and most
classroom tests are designed to have high-risk failure with little or no
opportunity for correction. Using grades
the way they are administered in classrooms today completely loses sight of
what learning is supposed to be about.
We no longer worry about whether or not a student actually masters the
material. They get the grade they get
and we move on because we have to cover the pacing guide in order to check off
all the boxes. Anyone who sits down and
thinks about this phenomenon can see the problem, but most are content to
simply shrug their shoulders and say, “what can we do?”. Figuring out a way to bring some of what
games offer us in the way of learning is one thing we can do. Getting rid of grades based on percentages is
another (but that is not the focus of this reflection).
Here we go
loopty-loo.
“[F]or experiences to
be useful for future problem solving, they have to be interpreted. Interpreting
experience means thinking—in action and after action—about how our goals relate
to our reasoning in the situation. It means, as well, extracting lessons
learned and anticipating when and where those lessons might be useful.” (Gee,
p. 21)
Again and again in my
professional life, the idea of feedback loops and cycles of learning comes up
in my readings. As we continue to work
on helping students become more self-regulated learners in our 4/5 Learning
Community, we have been focusing on the work on Zimmerman.
The loop he designs
begins with forethought and goal setting which then leads to action. Before getting to the action phase, notice
that a key component in the “forethought phase” is setting goals. Having goals is important. We have done a lot of work with goals in the
past two years as we have implemented the Marzano Causal Model as a part of our
Teacher Evaluation System. In the
classroom, teachers set the goals. In gaming, the game sets the goals, “but
often leave players free to achieve these goals in their own ways,” (Gee, 2008,
p. 23). This autonomy is a part of
students’ intrinsic pleasure with playing games. Having perceived control is important. As Gee notes, “all deep learning involves
learners feeling a strong sense of ownership and agency, as well as the ability
to produce and not just passively consume,” (p. 35).
Within the “action”
phase, the student is again doing exactly what Gee is advocating – looking at
what is going on and being metacognitive about how it relates to and affects
the original goal and what the player/student needs to do to either course
correct or continue. Making students
consciously aware that they are doing this is huge in getting them to be able
to apply it in new situations.
All Wings
report in.
“[G]amers highly value
collaborative play, for example, two people playing Halo together to
beat the game, or the grouping in massive multiplayer games like World of
Warcraft. Indeed, collaboration and competition often seem to be closely
related and integrated in gaming, though not in school.” (Gee, pp.34-35)
Cooperative Learning
is one of the cornerstones of my educational practice. Unfortunately, many who hear this phrase
think of group work and group projects.
But true cooperative learning teaches students how to interact with each
other in collaborations that enable them to utilize the strengths of all team
members and learn to listen and work together.
As Frey argues, viewing learning as a process where the learner is
influenced by those around him means that an individual cannot learn as much on
his own as he can within a group who can add to and influence his
conceptualizations (2009, p. 14). Further, Gee asserts that games use the
concept of “distributed knowledge” or “distributed cognition” to help players
during games. “These terms are meant to
describe the ways in which people can act smarter when they combine or
integrate their own individual knowledge with knowledge that is built into
tools, technologies, environments, or other people,” (2008, p. 32). In
video games, this seems easy, but in the classroom this is often hard for
students, especially gifted ones, who would rather just zoom ahead and finish
the work. But learning how to work with
others is still valuable because eventually we all come to a place where we are
on the edge of our abilities and we need to be able to work with others as many
players do in the game examples Gee cites.
Leveling Up
Here is a video from Paul
Anderson describing how he used the concept of gaming to improve his classroom.
One of the
features of most games is the ability to level up and move forward as you are
ready. This is something we almost never
do in education. There are many reasons
behind this – and many of them are very reasonable and even noble. But the longer I teach, the more troubling I
find it that we continuously teach to the middle leaving the majority of the
students either confused because we move to fast or bored because we move to
slow. I am not a fan of tracking in the
traditional sense, and I am certainly not a fan of sitting students in front of
computers all day as the computer teaches them (you can watch more of Paul
Anderson’s videos about that phenomenon).
But there must be some in between where students are able to work with
groups of varying abilities for part of their day while they are able to pace
themselves and move at a speed comfortable for them as they learn and master
content.
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There are several other things I would like to
say about this article, but I don’t have the time to delve into everything at
the moment.
References
Frey, N., Fisher, D.,
Everlove, S. (2009). Productive group
work: How to engage students, build teamwork, and promote understanding. Alexandria,
VA: ASCD.
Gee, James Paul. (2008).
Learning and Games. In Salen, K. (Ed.) The Ecology of Games: Connecting
Youth, Games, and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Achieving self-regulation:
The trials and triumphs of adolescence. In Academic
Motivation of Adolescents. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
