Jokay, Techo Tim and a Trade Fair

During our first in-world class, we interviewed Jo Kay (Jokay Woolongoong) about Jokaydia, how she came to start it and the types of projects that are happening on the grid. She explains many of the affordances of virtual worlds. Our recorded meeting can be seen here.

The we received a tour by Technotool Tim of North Country School District. In his region he provides landscape design students the chance to try out their design in 3D. Our recorded meeting with Tim can be seen here.

Sunday a group of us attended the North Coast TAFE virtual trade fair. A group of marketing/business students put on the fair to practice developing and presenting marketing services to a virtual client. As is often the case in virtual worlds - after the serious work we had a little fun in the Mystery Box.

Reflecting on the move to Jokaydiagrid

This is now the 6th year in which I have taught the course Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds. Though the name is being changed to Games and Simulations, and the course has gone through a redesign each term, it still has the same goal. To explore the potential of 3D virtual spaces for learning.

Home base is now Jokaydiagrid. I am unexpectedly pleased with the transition away from Second Life. Jokaydia lacks the critical mass that offered so much on Second Life, always people to find (40,000 at any given time in SL, often only 1 in JG), always educational, art and music events to attend, talented designers creating beautiful, fanciful, terrifying vistas, and accessible experts from every field willing to meet with curious learners. But the very thing that makes SL a resource to experienced users makes it formidable, inaccessible and scary. In the limited time a one credit course affords, there wasn't enough time to fully take advantage of SL.

Jokaydia is welcoming. Easy (relatively - for those who have been climbing the steep learning curve). And in the first two weeks that my students spent getting acclimated to the new environment they were not accosted by anyone but me. The 17 men and women who are students and the 4 returnees who are helpers have adjusted well. All have created an avatar and learned the basics. Some have already had opportunities to meet together in world, meet other educators and participate in an event.  Not bad for week 3 in a place that often seems empty.

My "classroom" is as it was in SL non traditional and evolving. Some would say messy. But that is what makes it interesting for me.

Project IGNITE VT

Today I participated on panel of educational innovators for the Project IGNITE (Identify, Gather, & Nurture Innovative Transformative Educators) workshop. Four panelists: Lucy Gray, Anthony DiLaura, Kyle Brumbaugh and I attended the workshop via Google Hangouts.  My topic: Gaming in Education.

But what about the violence?

Today I was asked about the problem of violence with regard to gaming in school. I seem to field this question a lot and have a lot of different responses. I will use this post to collect my ideas and invite your comments to help me make my position clearer. The role of violence in games is complex and the role of violence in games in schools is equally complex.

Team or individual victory
Most games, whether on video screen or off have victory as the ultimate goal. Basketball, hopscotch, speed skating, spelling bees, chess and checkers, Age of Empires (computer), Chaos and Order (mobile internet) all have this in common. The object is to prove you are (your team is) better, smarter, faster, stronger.  Consider the language of victory. We "crush" our opponents, we "blast" past them, we "destroy" their pieces. Is this "violence" or the domination of pieces on the game board.

Real, almost real, virtually real, fantasy, abstraction.
I don't know if the distinction ultimately matters but it seems worth raising the point. In sports controlled aggression is real and physical, one player blocks, tackles, picks and rolls, body checks another.
In checkers, we "capture" the opponents pieces and they are removed from the board.
In role playing games like WoW and OaC fantastic wars between creatures are fought, those killed are sent to the cemetary (removed from the board or returned home) from where they can start again. While in first person shooters, virtual militaries fight each other. On the screen no one really gets hurt.

Does virtual violence lead to violence in daily life?
There is research to support both sides of the argument, but all of it lacks a thorough examination of the concept of violence. There is no research that compares the effect of violent behavior on the football field with violent behavior on the computer screen. Or the study of civil war weaponry in school with violence on the playground.

Do kids know the difference between video games and real life?
There is evidence to suggests that very young children (pre-schoolers) can not discern the difference between events that happen on the screen and those that happen in real life. (Segovia and Bailenson, 2009). But ask any third grader the difference between what happens in a game and in real life, and they will tell you. "It's only a game."

Is there violence in School?
No, and yes. One of our imperatives is to keep children safe.  Yet, because there is violence in the real world we study violence in school. We try to understand history through wars. The civil war is a favorite topic among teachers and students because it can be made so real. We watch reenactments, visit battlefields, study armor and weapons. Many boys (and I dare say history teachers) imagine themselves victors on the battlefield. In elementary school we introduce the terrible brutality of Naziism through the eyes of young children who suffered.  We study scary stuff in which children have been not only heros but victims. And there is no getting around that all children experience some form of victimization by bigger, stronger, smarter, children.

What do games do?
Those who embrace gaming as a source of good learning and even good social action argue that games give us a break from the challenges of daily life. Games give us a sense of accomplishment that we associate with fun. Getting better at games leads to self confidence.  Games teach us to collaborate with teammates who share a common goal and complementary skills. Games help us feel optimistic and competent. (McGonigal, 2010, JP Gee, 2012)

For myself the violence in games is background noise. When I play, my goal isn't to kill, it is to save myself, save my team, save the world. But that is one perspective. I guess the only way to really answer the question, "But what about the violence?" is to talk about the issues and encourage the questioner to decide. What are your thoughts?



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References
Gee, J.P. (2012). Learning with video games, Edutopia via Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnEN2Sm4IIQ
McGonigal, J. (2010). Gaming can make a better world. TED http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
Segovia, K. and Bailenson, J. (2009). Virtually true: Children’s acquisition of false memories in virtual reality. Media Psychology (12) 371–393

Learning and Knowledge

image licensed under creative commons by
Briar Press, at briarpress.org

In my two classes this past week, we've been discussing Bruner's (1996) notion of Folk Pedagogy - the set of beliefs a person holds about knowledge, learning and how one learns. (Folk Pedagogy is a laywoman's "epistemology.")

Some of the key distinctions among these beliefs include the nature of knowledge: what it is, where does it sit, who possesses it, is it an objective entity, does knowledge get transferred from one entity/person to another, can one transfer one's knowledge to another, how does one acquire knowledge, what is the outcome of teaching, what is the antecedent of learning, how does learning occur, what model best explains the brain, knowledge and learning.


I recently asked my students to blog about these to questions. Below I consider my own answers.

• What is learning?
• What is knowledge?

Knowledge

There is knowledge that the individual holds, that a group holds, that is stored in books, databases, devices, and knowledge that we aspire to gain.  I believe that the word knowledge refers to skill, ability and our explanations of our environment and the problems we face. As we interact with the world our knowledge develops. I don't think there is much "objective knowledge;" there are currently accepted "facts." But knowledge evolves and changes. One who seeks knowledge is more concerned with the testing, interpretation and advancement of currently accepted information, than with the acquisition of facts.

Personal knowledge is highly idiosyncratic. What we know is based on the unique combination and order of experiences we have had and the degree of interest with which we engaged with those experiences. 

Learning 

Learning is a process of examining our existing knowledge in the face of new information. It is not the direct transfer of knowledge from one person to another. A teacher does not transfer a packet of knowledge from her knowledge store to that of the learner.  A teacher conveys a verbal (or other) representation of her knowledge. A learner will interpret this representation through the dual lenses of her past knowledge and her interest. Is this information worth looking at closely? Does it make sense in the context of prior knowledge? Does it ring true based on past experience?

Our definitions of knowledge and learning are changing

In a world in which information is abundant and accessible, and in which our lives are filled with complex problems, people no longer rely - for their day to day living - on the knowledge which they alone hold. We have the capacity to work with knowledge that is outside of ourselves (we operate the controls of a machine and make woven fabric without having a knowledge of weaving, we cook food that we do not know how to raise or gather, we compute large amounts of data and draw conclusions that we could not draw based on our own knowledge alone, experts in biology, economy, and health interact with the knowledge that exists in their "fields" and among multiple fields).

My own notions of knowledge and learning are evolving. 

Through my own study of knowledge and learning and and reflection on my own practice as a learner and teacher I become aware of my beliefs. My "knowledge about knowledge" is challenged by the ideas of my colleagues and by my own observation. 

I hope that my students will teach their students to reflect about learning and knowing and encourage them to expand their ideas.

Reference:

Bruner, J. (1996). Folk pedagogy, in The Culture Of Education. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. Ch2 (44-65)

Learning with and from children

Today I had an amazing experience of teaching and learning in a virtual world. The world is MineCraft. I am the learner. The teacher: the 10 year old son of one of my students (a teacher).

Preamble...
My teacher, we'll call him Bear has been present on and off throughout my graduate course for teachers. He helped his mother make the transition from Second Life to World of Warcraft. And though he hadn't experienced WoW before, he knew enough about virtual worlds and gaming to offer suggestions for how to locate and activate inventory, navigate a map, and overcome the short term effects of game-death. He served as an expert discussant during a class meeting about gaming and schools. And while precocious and articulate he is very much a bubbling active curious kid.

My classroom
Bear sits at the laptop on his kitchen table while his Mom looks on.  I sit in my office 100 miles away. For this first session we each have a single player version of the game open, and Bear shares his screen through Skype. I occasionally ask Bear to slow down, but his instructions are impeccable. His explanations are thorough. He has decided, correctly, that I need to know some things to get started and that other things can wait until I have more experience. (How does he know that? Does he intuit it? Has he taught this course before? Or has he modeled his teaching after some similar experience he's had as a learner?). I follow along setting up my new world as he creates his.

My first impression is about the representational nature of the game. Every object is a variation of a block. Like legos there are cut-away pieces to make trees and plants. And like legos most things are made of cubes. If it is a white cube it is snow, a light blue cube is ice, a dark blue cube is water. Minerals are more interesting but look nothing like the rock, coal, precious metal or stone that it represents. This is a game that demands you to see with your imagination, to identify small color changes in a pixilated pattern to distinguish gold from coal.

Next I notice that the game is layered with complexity. It is apparent that to learn to play you need intellectual resources. Bear reports that mostly he uses trial and error to figure stuff out and is usually right, but he does turn to websites and online friends to help. There is a set of knowledge that must become automatic in order to move on to higher levels of crafting and battling, click combinations, early tool recipes, effective use of the world resources.

The boy comes out.
Bear is patient. He slows down, repeats himself and answers my questions without apparent annoyance. And from time to time his excitement overwhelms him and the boy-teacher becomes a boy. He zips around the screen slashing, building, digging and cooing "Isn't this so cool." I hold back my questions to allow the wave of enthusiasm to take me up. This teacher is passionate and he is able to share that with me - his student.  Even if, at those moments, I cannot learn to do what he is doing, I can learn to want to do what he is doing.

As teachers, parents, researchers we can speculate about what young people are doing in these new digital spaces. We can try them out (we must try them out) and uncover what we might do in the spaces.  But we also must talk to, play with, learn from kids.  They are now operating in a collaborative world where they are often learner and teacher. They are developing new ways to learn and we can learn from them how to teach.

Transnational relations

Olive and I spent a couple of hours together today.

Two women facing a challenge, with no clear cut solution, working together to save a virtual land. Marlboro Island in Second Life, where my TLVW class meets and works, suffered its first grief attack in years. A visitor set off the nuisance tetris script, which generates physical boxes, ad infinitum. Boxes that fill the island in three dimensions, boxes that push avatars off platforms, boxes that crash sims. Together Olive and I worked to report and ban the offending avatar, delete his objects (repeatedly), stop all scripts (unsuccessfully), stop this script. There was urgency. Keep the sim from crashing. Solve the problem before other students arrive. It took real time, real thinking, real effort, real collaboration. Finally Olive found the source and deleted it.

Two women talking. About our experiences, about our class, about what we've read and thought about. Two women who know very little about each other's "real lives," brought together in virtual space.  We have common experiences, like two people who have spent a lot of time together. One tells a story and it resonates for the other. One points out something funny and the other finds humor there too. We share emotions and insights. We are two women, one american, one egyptian who would not know each other if not for a virtual connection.