Gaming for Grades

I believe almost any game can be adapted or used in the classroom for some purpose regardless of student age, from child to adult. Sometimes it requires thinking outside of the box or analyzing each part of the game to find how it can be relevant to modern day education, though. Any game where multiple people are on the same ‘side’ encourages and teaches teamwork skills. Games, where students play against each other, shows them how to overcome challenges and be a good sport. Even games played solo can teach patience and focus at least. I believe the trick is to find games the students are interested in as these have the best potential to be used and helpful. I even have a friend who told me that during law school she had a professor that used poker to teach them how to keep a straight face, or poker face while debating and presenting cases. I believe there is not a single game that can be used in all situations and that careful consideration needs to be made when picking the game for the intended audience and learning environment. However, here are two examples of mainstream games being used for educational purposes.

Assassin's Creed, a lesson in history

It is said that history is written by the victors and this plays into education as well. In countries where the government or ruling body is more authoritarian can have history books that teach very jaded views of what actually happened. The Assassin’s Creed game series covers many time periods including the Crusades in the middle east, Renaissance in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the American Revolution, and even the age of piracy in the Caribbean.  The first game takes place in the Middle East during the Crusades and is played from the perspective of the Nizâris, or assassins of a minor Shi’i sect that was an important political factor at the time. The problem is that the majority of the educational texts written about this period of history were written by Sunni opponents or European travelers who did not understand the history or significance of the region. The game tells the story from a Shi’i assassin point of view, including teaching the reasons and motivations for the actions that were taken and their effect on history. It is important to note that the game is ‘historically guided’ but is not entirely accurate also, it is a game after all. However, an article from the American Historical Association points out that for undergraduates, the accuracy is less important than the excitement and curiosity to learn that the game invokes in history students. The article (Trépanier, 2014) states,

Yes, “historical” video games are filled with inaccuracies. Yet more than a limitation, these inaccuracies can serve as a pretext for discussion. For example, what factors, beyond sheer ignorance, caused these inaccuracies in the first place? How do various cultural influences, such as the conventions of cinema, shape the way in which they present history? How do they relate to ethical and commercial considerations?

In the game, the time period is represented accurately from the character designs, real world events, to the accents and wording that is used. The game teaches how life ‘felt’ during those periods. This feeling the game conveys to students of history, helps them understand regional bias and prejudices that these Shi’i, whose story the game tells, encountered and how they dealt with it by the ways of the time period. Is the game biased or slanted towards a particular point of view? Yes. And that is ok, even in education. As Squire (2011, p. 24) points out, “… remember that all representations of history are imperfect. Simplification is at the heart of historical interpretation; books include some facts and leave out others, while films tell stories from particular perspectives. Games happen to frame history according to certain variables (and not others).”

This popular meme represents the modern day gaming-student and is not fictional in some cases.

World of Warcraft, economics 101

I love the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. My favorite going on 12 years is World of Warcraft. This is a fantasy setting game where ‘good and bad’ (in the game each side feels they are the good guy with the other being the bad guy) fight for power, resources, and recognition. While the game as a whole can be used to teach teamwork and organization skills, there is one part of it that is used more than any other for education, its economy. In World of Warcraft, the players drive the economy through the buying and selling of resources through an auction house. The prices of these resources vary depending on their usefulness, availability, and demand, just like a real economy. Students can learn how supply and demand work in a free-trade setting and the influence that has on related goods and services in an environment without real-world consequences.

I have been lucky enough to see World of Warcraft being used this way for a classroom and it opened my eyes to the potential of gaming in the education of all levels. I have gotten the impression over my six years of online education that educators do not always see the big picture or even the little picture when it comes to games in education. Educational games do not need 100% factual information in all areas if only a portion of the game applies to the lesson being taught. For example, in World of Warcraft, there are big events called raids where 10-25 people all gather to fight big monsters. This part of the game has little (although some) impact on the economy lessons and does not need to be a deciding factor in its use. Just like their being elves, orcs, and Pandaren (big panda bear people, yes I am serious) has no bearing on the educational value of the game for the economy lesson. That said, the different races and the side they fight for can be a lesson in prejudice and preconceived notions about good and bad, right and wrong that has real world value.

Educators need to think outside of the box and use the resources their learners will understand. These two games would not work for every class or every student but they can in the right class setting. Not every student is a gamer or understands the value games can possess for learning but with the world becoming more digitally inclined more people to understand the concepts of gaming than don’t. As educators, we need to take advantage of this and use it for our own purposes. Every source of learning is biased in some form and to think games should be excluded from learning because of bias or being called entertainment is… biased.

References

Squire, K. (2011). Video games and learning: Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Trépanier, N. (2014, May). The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games. Retrieved from https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2014/the-assassin%E2%80%99s-perspective.

Educational Technologies

Teaching no longer means sitting and listening to a teacher feed you the knowledge and it is not what students expect or want from their educations anymore either. Learning needs to be relevant to both topic and delivery, or the students disengage from the learning and turn to their mobile devices. Many educators are of the opinion that they are using these devices for entertainment only, but that is not necessarily the case. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2002) college students use their devices for many educational functions:

Ø  79% agree that Internet use has had a positive impact on their college academic experience.

Ø  73% say they use the Internet more than the library for information searching.

Ø  68% of college students reported subscribing to one or more academic-oriented mailing lists that relate to their studies.

Ø  65% of college students who email professors say they report absences via email.

Ø  58% of college students have used email to discuss or find out a grade from an instructor.

Ø  48% are required to use the Internet to contact other students in at least some of their classes.

Ø  46% agree that email enables them to express ideas to a professor that they would not have expressed in class.

These numbers come from 14 years ago, and mobile devices are more prevalent now than they were then. The question is no longer about if mobile devices and the Internet should be used in education but how do we show learners the best ways to find information through them. Teachers are supposed to educate learners to help them fit into the world around them, and we cannot do this by depriving them of the primary means of communication and learning in the world right now.

Laptop/Tablet/Smart Phone

These are nearly the same thing anymore as far as what they can do performance wise. A phone can be used to write quality academic papers as easily by some as on a computer. To younger learners there is virtually no difference between any of these technologies. One thing is quickly becoming obvious to me though; learning has become physically fluid. Learning happens all around us all of the time and with the aid of mobile devices, even formal education is no longer confined to desks. All three devices can run the same operating systems with newer models, so having to switch from one to another becomes less about the hardware involved and more about the cloud they save it to for access from anywhere.

While these devices can be disruptive, there are fewer chance students will wander to them for entertainment if we make the learning involved and exciting. Instead of forcing older methods of learning like taking notes by hand let them type or record, there is no harm in it, and it is how the majority of learners naturally function now. Taking that away from them is disruptive to their usual ways of learning and interacting with the world around them which is also destructive to quality learning. Students need to learn how to learn not what to know what they need to know is also fluid depending on advances in their fields, technology, and human understanding.

In my classes, I would allow and encourage the use of their devices as they wished. I would also make sure there were multiple open communication avenues between students and myself through these devices. I would make sure all of my materials were not just scanned and available but were instead available in formats that are engaging and draw the learner into the topic. Mobile devices allow people to connect in ways that were not possible previously. There is a global shift to shared learning and knowledge that education needs to not only embrace but help lead the way to these new information gathering and learning technologies.

Search Engines

I picked search engines as my educational software technology of choice because it can access all of the other software options. Search engines are the highway to the Internet and everything it offers. They take learners to the websites, scholarly search engines, and wikis where at least 73% of college students begin looking for information (Jones, 2002). Search engines can help learners find apps that they can use for communication such as Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, or Skype. They allow people to find a topic and sort by the media format they prefer such as website, video, images, maps, and more. Understanding how to search properly can make a world of difference between finding unsupported opinion and evidence based facts, and they can mean the difference between finding creative commons materials that are free to use (such as the graphics above) and copyrighted materials that could cause ethics issues. They can be as useful or hazardous as the user makes them depending on their understanding of it. That is why I feel it is so important to teach good internet navigation skills and research practices.

In my classes, I would make sure my students understood the basics of search engine use. I would also provide links to search engines that were specific to their lines of study because they are usually better suited for finding useful information because of peer and professional review and usage. I would make sure they were aware of sub-search engines. For example, Google is a search engine, but there is also Google Scholar, which contains only scholarly peer reviewed materials. I would also provide a link to an article such as this which shows how to input a search effectively to get what you seek without non-relevant searches also coming up. Using the right search engine and using it effectively would remove a lot of the fears educators have about the credibility and reliability of the sources of information. Before that can happen though more educators need to see the Internet and its abilities as extensions of their teaching toolkit instead of something to fear and avoid because our younger learners will not relate to us or our teaching otherwise.

Reference

Jones, S. (2002, September 15). The Internet Goes to College. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2002/PIP_College_Report.pdf.pdf.

Social Networking Technologies in Edcuation

“At some point, we’re going to have to get our brains around what it means to participate in an online community or “social network” the way our kid are beginning to do if we really want to help them do it well.” – (Richardson, 2010, p. 132)

Social networking technology is all around us and being used for personal and business communications. Education is finally starting to see the potential for social networking for both educators and students. There are many social networking technologies out there and it can be intimidating to try and figure them all out, so instead let’s just focus on two for now.

Facebook

Facebook is an amazing platform for social networking on personal and business levels. Through Facebook you can share ideas, articles, videos, pictures, and so much more. I follow many education-related pages on Facebook like Edutopia and Educause, both of which share education-related information and link together educators of all levels to share knowledge and experiences. Facebook allows you to group the people you follow into groups so you can share information about more than one topic to those specifically interested in it. Posts on Facebook can also be left public so anyone can see them by coming across your page or the page of a friend, or because it was shared. Facebook also has a chat feature that works on computers and mobile devices that work like texting.

I would use Facebook to bring up world events that pertained to the learning. The ability to connect learning to real events strengthens the learning so why not use it to help bring real events into the class? The other way I would use Facebook in class would be to have a private page for the class where they could share about themselves and make friends and connections with their classmates. Making the page private would hopefully help the shyest students to come forward and give the platform a try without as much fear of being judged or mocked for their abilities.

Twitter

The days of waiting for answers are behind us now because of the Internet. Even in education, students are wanting instant answers. Online students of all ages typically chose this medium to work with busy lives. When students or educators need answers quickly, Twitter can provide them with a ‘room’ through the use of hashtags to ask their question to the class and faculty and get answers fast. While Twitter and Facebook have much in common in that they are both used to share links, articles, videos, and the like, Twitter was specifically designed to be a conversation via text. Twitter only allows for 140 characters per entry and as such is perfect for quick back-and-forth conversations between like-minded groups.

Twitter is perfect for quickly notifying students and faculty of changes to schedules, reminders of assignments due, and checking up on each other for group assignments or if absent from class. I would use Twitter in all of these ways for my classes including notifying corrections to links or clarifications that all would benefit from.

The differences

While Twitter and Facebook have many of the same features, they tend to be used differently. I think of Facebook as the gathering around the table for a holiday meal, it is where friends and family relax and just pass time including playing games and sharing pictures. Twitter is more like a conversation that can take place in real time. A good example of this ‘real time’ usage of Twitter would be following the presidential debates. People use Twitter to comment on the debates as they are happening and even to ask questions that the candidates might be asked. Twitter has been the information source of choice for many incidents across the world as the recent Paris attack, school shootings, and breaking news. Both have their place in education depending on their intended use.

If there are still doubts as to the need to embrace these technologies, it is worth noting that in 2005 the Pew Research Center started a social media usage poll and found about 7% of adults used this technology (Perrin, 2015). In comparison, the same poll shows that by 2015 65% of adults use social media now. That is an increase of 58% in 10 years and it is only increasing. In the future, that number will increase dramatically as roughly 90% of young adults ages 18-29 use these technologies regularly now. With these numbers, it is safe to say that social technologies are not going anywhere and so we had better learn and teach the best ways to add them to our education.

References

Perrin, A. (2015). Social Media Usage: 2005-2015. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Investigating Emerging Technology in Education

Technology 1

The first emerging technology I am interested in is gamification. Gamification is, typically, the use of simulations to present real-life scenarios or dilemmas in a safe environment for people to work with and learn. Gamification of this nature is already in use in some areas of education at some learning centers. The most noteworthy so far is in use by the University of Minnesota’s School of Nursing where they use the game to engage in scenarios that help them learn everything from how to deal with an emergency to how to assist during surgery. Here is an example of such a game.  This simulation of nursing allows the learners to react in a real-time sense without fear of mistakes being life-threatening and can also be used by multiple students for team building scenarios. I feel this same technology could be used in online higher education in a similar manner. Imagine having a game where you are the educator, and you have students, maybe some of those students are struggling, and you do not know how to help them. With gamification simulations, we could experiment with solutions and get a reasonable idea of how they would work but without any harm to the student as we search. This technology could also be used to teach technology use, as ironic as that sounds. The game could be set to start by simply clicking a link in the references, and it could take you into a game where you learned the required skills. For example, we could have a mini-game for this week showing how to get a blog site up and running including how to insert pictures, video, and other common components. This game would allow even a beginner to learn a variety of skills included advanced features or concepts and to practice their use in a safe environment.

Technology 2

The other emerging technology I am interested in is learning analytics. While this is not a new technology, it is new to gain support from educational professionals and data scientists. The best site for the most information on this is a wiki site. However, the links and resources it provides are all excellent.  Learning analytics covers a wide variety of data mining concepts, all of which could be useful to education in one manner or another. My favorite potential use of this technology is for the personalization and adaption it provides to learners. As we all know everyone learns differently and we all have preferred methods. We do not always get to pick the format our resources are presented in, however. With learning analytics, it would monitor the ways information was presented and compare it to our learning comprehension via small quiz’s or assignments, this data gathering will begin to present a pattern of the material delivery method and our learning and can adapt to give learners their preferences where possible. The second use of this technology that I like is its ability to predict outcomes. For example, the data from learning analytics is especially useful for predictive purposes such as retention rates and alerting instructors when a student might be struggling with part of the course (Learning Analytics, n.d.).

It is also worth noting that the two technologies I picked can also work together. Learning analytics can be used to provide data to a gaming simulation to simulate student behaviors and patterns which help the educator have a more realistic experience and outcome.

References

Learning Analytics. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2016, from http://tech.ed.gov/learning-analytics/.