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Escape to . . . Reality?

Feb 6, 2011 2:50 pm
Written by edusophia
2 Comments

Teenagers playing video games A former colleague and friend, Mark Burkholz, had his son’s picture land in The Boston Globe in a feature article titled “Parents seek balance as screens’ allure grows,” an article about the seemingly ever-increasing amount of time that children and teenagers are spending on gaming.  In the article, Mark is quoted as stating that these skills (those learned in gaming) are crucial ones for living in an adult society.  He and I have discussed this in depth: Mark contends that team-building, teamwork, and strategy development are all important to advancement within the current workforce.  Yet, society and the media both appear to badger us with the message that increased time spent gaming is related to decreased performance on some far more desirable criteria, such as grades.  Even the author of the article on Mark’s son Noah seems to leave us with the impression that gaming is a bad thing.  Who is right?

According to an article published by John Tierney in The New York Times, Mark is.  Tierney cites researcher Edward Castronova, professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, as stating that the problems faced in games aren’t all that different from work activities in his article “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming.”  Jane McGonigal, a researcher at Institute for the Future, took this a step further in an article appearing in The Wall Street Journal titled “Be A Gamer, Save the World.”  In the article, Dr. McGonigal suggests that the power of games could be used to solve real-world problems.  Tierney’s article resonates with this idea: it mentions the First Aid Corps, an organization who has produced an app for iPhone and Google Android cell phones that allows individuals to make a game of sorts by cataloging nearby defibrillators to provide a valuable service to those in need of them.

Could traditional education also be leveraging games to help solve instructional challenges?  As Tierney points out, leveraging games as an instructional tool dates back at least as far as Charlemagne.  Yet, game usage as a part of classroom instruction tapers off dramatically as students advance through grades.  According to both Tierney and McGonigal, gamers are happy, and recent research has suggested that happiness and academic achievement are at least interrelated.  Schools could potentially increase the happiness of students and thereby improve academic achievement merely by incorporating game-playing into the curriculum.

However, the real benefit to education lies in the gaming ecosystem.  As British Journalist and TED speaker Tom Chatfield and others have pointed out, it’s amazing how resilient humans are when playing video games.  According to McGonigal, gamers spend up to 80% of their time in games losing.  Two factors are obviously at play here.  First is the classic Gambler’s fallacy.  Just like a gambler, we believe that the previous losses will eventually regress to the mean and we will then be “rewarded” with a win.  We know intuitively that a toss of a coin will – over time – turn up an equal number of “heads” and “tails.”  Therefore, after a few losses, I am “destined” to win.  While this does not work for the gambler in a pure game of chance, it certainly plays out well for the gamer, where repetitive play yields improved skill.  Second is the low cost of failure.  With gaming as a virtual reality with little to no impact on the “real world,” losses are less averse than they ordinary would be.  The gaming system creates an artificial construction where people need not be stigmatized by losses.

Think of the huge potential benefit to education: a “lossless” world where students are empowered to fail and thereby to learn something as a result.  Moreover, the variable reinforcement schedule of most video games – the little trinkets and rewards distributed throughout the game – make the patterns much less prone to extinction.  The resulting overall environment would be one in which students were not afraid to fail and received the patterned and important feedback that would drive them to further play and, as a result, further learning.  The potential educational benefits for students is tremendous: they can test out ideas and immediately see the simulated result, with no real world consequences.  A biology student can literally make decisions about how to control infectious diseases and see a simulated result of those decisions.

The possibilities of real-world problems that are escapable are endless, but why are you sitting here wasting your time reading this?  I think we both best be getting to our video games.

Laptops: Yesterday’s Treasure; Today’s Trash

Jan 29, 2011 2:51 pm
Written by edusophia
1 Comment

Laptop_in_Wastebasket Much of the recent emphasis in secondary and primary education, particularly beginning in the early 2000’s, has been on 1:1 laptop initiatives.  Such initiatives seek to provide a single laptop to every student enrolled in some subdivision of a school: a grade, an entire school, or even a school district.  The working premise of such programs is that the initiatives will deliver some form of improved outcome for students such as higher test scores, lower absenteeism, or reduced dropout rates.

Such initiatives began to take on a grander scale.  One of the first major laptop initiatives to be deployed was through the State of Maine’s Maine Learning Technology Initiative.  This initiative selected Apple Computer, Inc. for the hardware and soon began rolling out laptops to middle schools and high schools across the state.  According to the initiative, 100% of middle schools and 55% of high schools in the state now have a 1:1 ratio.  Other states quickly followed suit, such as neighboring New Hampshire and Connecticut and 1:1 laptop initiatives quickly became the “in” thing to do.

However, the promise soured almost as soon as the laptops were removed from the box.  In a poignant article in the Wall Street Journal, laptop programs were coming under fire for the expense of the program as well as the inappropriate use of laptops by students.  According to the article, the then-current four-year contract between the Maine Department of Education and Apple was a staggering $41 million.  Many other programs were being cut entirely or even scaled back because of the cost.  There was also parental backlash as well: parents felt that the easy access to laptop computers merely enabled participation on social networking sites such as Facebook, leading to decreased time spent on actual study.

But were the concerns of parents justified?  In a New York Times article titled “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops,” staff writer Winnie Hu profiled the Liverpool Central School District, who had made the intriguing decision to scrap their 1:1 computing initiative altogether.  Citing the use of the computers as means to exchange test answers, download pornography, and hack into local businesses, the article highlights the district’s decision to completely abandon their initiative.  With no data that the program was improving student outcomes, the school could not remain committed to the program in the face of the expensive price tag.

Is this really true?  Have laptops – which were yesterday’s educational treasure – become today’s trash in such short order?  With budgets being slashed, schools are beginning to reexamine their commitments to such initiatives.  Unfortunately, the data for improving student performance isn’t particularly compelling.  In a special edition titled “Educational Outcomes and Research from 1:1 Computing Settings,” The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment concluded in a meta-analysis of recent articles that while such programs provided significant advancement on technology use and literacy, only modest gains were to be found in terms of student achievement.  Project RED, an advocacy group, is more bullish, releasing the results of a survey at ISTE 2010 that claims that students at 1:1 schools outperform those at non-1:1 schools on several measures.  Unfortunately, lead contributors to Project RED include Intel and Apple, both of which obviously benefit from increased 1:1 computing.

So what is the real truth?  The difficulty with parsing this lies in the fact that many varied factors impact individual student performance.  It’s often difficult to ascertain, particularly when there is likely a Hawthorne Effect at play.  However, the real issue is that technology is simply a tool: it is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself.  In the aforementioned The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, one big theme emerged: the success of 1:1 computing initiatives hinged largely on the individual classroom teacher.  Proper training and professional development of those teachers was crucial to any program’s success.  We can’t simply place laptops into the hands of students and expect that singular action to improve anything but potentially technology literacy.  Rather, teachers must be taught how to leverage these tools in the classroom.

Much of the talk surrounding technology in education has been on transferrable versus transformative use.  In a transferrable use, teachers simply continue to do what they have always done, except with new digital means.  A teacher who is typing his overhead slides into a PowerPoint is engaging is this transferrable use.  The question is how to get the use to be transformative: to use the technology to teach students in new and interesting ways.  If a 1:1 program is to be successful in improving student achievement, it must be used in that transformative way.  As long as the purchase of laptops for students predates or occurs simultaneously with the purchase for teachers, we are likely to continue to see transference instead of transformation.  And, for as long as that continues, today’s laptop treasures will continue to be tomorrow’s trash.

Education: We Deliver

Dec 18, 2010 9:39 am
Written by edusophia
0 Comments

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I had the opportunity to attend the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference this past week.  On ThursdayiStock_000009327296XSmall morning, I had the occasion to listen to Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.  In the course of his talk, Mr. Lehmann spoke at length about the term instructional delivery.  In his talk, he made a statement something along the lines of:

We don’t deliver.  Pizza men deliver.  We teach.

While I can appreciate the spirit of the point that Mr. Lehmann was trying to make – that teaching is a process that actively engages the learner – I simply couldn’t focus on the remainder of his presentation because of my anger over this statement.  It is wrong on a number of levels:

  1. It is at odds with being a lifelong learner.
  2. It reinforces the “sage on the stage” view of the teacher.
  3. It is not reflective of current research.

Not to mention that it is just plain arrogant.  I don’t know Mr. Lehmann personally, however, so I will assume that such arrogance is not typical of his persona and that this was merely a speech device for added effect.

To the first point, this statement presupposes that the pizza delivery man is beneath me and therefore has nothing of value to contribute to me or my education.  I am extremely grateful to my father for teaching me that even the garbage man had something valuable for me to learn, and that he reinforced that learning can occur anywhere, even from the most unlikely sources.  I like my pizza with lots of meat.  I could care less about the veggies.  Well, it’s become a running joke now.  Out of a desire to eat more healthy, my parents and I hardly ever eat pizza.  Whenever we’re here, though, we make it the excuse to eat pizza.  So, my parents joke that it’s about time that they visit so that I can eat a meat lover’s pizza.  This past summer, when they visited, we had to order delivery rather than eat in, and so we placed an order with a Manchester, NH institution, Caesario’s Pizza.  When the delivery man arrived with my pizza, we actually had an impromptu dialogue about the “old country.”  It was an informative educational experience that may not have happened if I didn’t believe that learning could occur anywhere.

Second, the statement seems to reinforce the “sage on a stage” view of teaching, that students sit in their chairs and “drink in” the knowledge of the sage before them.  I am certain this is not what Mr. Lehmann intended to say: this concept is incongruous with the rest of Mr. Lehmann’s talk, where he took issue with the concept that an education is something that can just be “poured into” the minds of students.  However, while there is something special about being a teacher, the profession isn’t sacred, and I think we should be careful about suggesting that teaching is somehow more profound and meaningful than “lesser” professions.  When my water heater broke the other day, I needed a plumber, not a teacher.  Each profession has meaning in our economy.  True, teachers have special skills – and, I would venture, something in their DNA – that makes them good at what they do.  But, to establish that difference by denigrating other professions serves no meaningful purpose but to establish one’s own boorish pretentiousness.

Last, Mr. Lehmann’s statement simply isn’t in line with current research.  In his article “Most Likely to Succeed” in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell – author of The Tipping Point and Blink – outlines how research at Stanford and the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education shows that the delivery of the material – how it is presented in the classroom and how that presentation engages the students – determines student mastery and therefore teacher efficacy.  Knowledge and mastery of the subject does not make one effective.  As a high school student, I studied with the first chair trumpet player in the Tulsa Philharmonic.  After a number of months had passed and my performance had improved marginally, I switched to taking lessons from the second chair, and the improvement in my performance began a steeper ascent.  I then switched to the gentleman who had taught them both, and the improvement was exponential.  All three of these men were extremely talented musicians and all three possessed the knowledge which I sought.  Only one of them, however, could deliver the material in such a way as to cause exponential growth in my ability as a musician.

We do need to worry about instructional delivery.  Connecting with the students – as Mr. Lehmann suggested – certainly is an important piece of education.  But equally important is the contemplation of how we deliver that material to the students in a way that excites and engages them.  I can recall an instance where I had to teach a series of technology orientation session to different groups of students on a wide variety of unrelated, unconnected topics in an overly warm classroom.  I’d rate the first session as decent, but the last session was so much better.  My talk had become refined.  I had learned to connect the unrelated.  More importantly, I had learned how to connect to the student.  I had learned how to deliver.  Pizza companies have spent a lot of time figuring out that magic bag that keeps your pizza piping warm all the way to your house.  Those of us in education should return the favor by continuously working on instructional delivery so that the pizza delivery man’s daughter is getting a better education each time we see her in class.

Resistance is Futile

Dec 1, 2010 11:05 pm
Written by edusophia
0 Comments

I think that one of the most difficult things in writing a blog is where – or, perhaps, when – to start.  After all, there is no particular logical point.  So, having accepted that fact, we now begin this journey together . . . at what I hope the success of which will later determine to be, well, the logical starting point

I had the occasion today to attend the 2010 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, where the keynote speaker for the day was a gentleman by the name of Wes Fryer, who just happens to hail from my home state of Oklahoma.  In his talk today, Wes showed a video from Karl Fisch about convergence and the changing technological world in which we live:

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