State of the Blog, September 2008

It’s time for some navel gazing as we take a look at who is taking a look here. I could tell school was back in session when the numbers started spiking in September. Judy Wilson and librarian Katy French over at Palomar College in San Marcos, California added an old post of mine to a list of web sites for students to examine in a course on website evaluation. Learning Family Values While Killing Monsters was written back in November last year, and discussed an article by Robin Torres over at WowInsider.com. I suspect it was included over at Palomar College not just for my excellent writing (haha), but also for the fact I referenced the source material. The instructor indicates sourcing of materials lends credibility to a post.

Those opinion-meisters at Reddit posted a link to my post from late July regarding the new ESA survey indicating females comprise 40% of the gaming audience. Discussion so far has centered around whether females truly comprise 40% of the audience for advanced MMORPGs and not just casual games. Read the profanity-laced conversation here.

Lee Wilson and Nicola Whitton, both of whose opinions I respect, linked to my post on Seven Questions to Ask Before Using a Video Game In the Classroom. Both disagreed with Question 7: Are the graphics and gaming quality on par with contemporary entertainment titles? Both seemed to suggest the graphics in casual titles may not compare with the newest $60 games for home consoles, but were adequate in relaying pedagogical content. I suppose I should have elaborated and indicated I was concerned with really basic graphics that are even below casual game standards. Probably I was thinking of the research outcomes from the old AQUAMoose project at Georgia Tech, where programming a game from scratch (not the programming language Scratch, but literally from scratch) led to some disappointing feedback from the target audience.

To sum up, I’m still here and posting, and thanks for the feedback. The old goal of one post each weekday has been suffering of late, but I should manage to get something of interest up on a regular basis. As always, shoot me an e-mail if you’d like to call my attention to something.

Educational Games to be a Focus of TCEA 2009

I was asked recently by the folks over at the Texas Computer Education Association to serve on a panel discussion about educational videogames at TCEA 2009. This proves to be similar to the one I was involved with at FETC 2008, to which Lee Wilson invited me. With educational gaming being a focus at the conference, TCEA 2009 is shaping up to be extremely interesting.

Texas Students to Explore Science in Online Virtual World

Lee Wilson over at Headway Strategies has written another fine article on educational gaming. Recently, Technology & Learning published a two part article by Wilson on the myths surrounding educational videogames. Formerly a senior exec over at Harcourt, Pearson, and Chancery Software, Wilson runs a consulting firm in Austin and writes The Education Business Blog. He is quite knowledgeable when taking the pulse of ed tech, and I quote him in an upcoming article of my own coming out in the next couple months. Right now, Wilson says, the cutting edge of ed tech is in online virtual worlds.

The March issue of Cable in the Classroom Magazine includes an article by Wilson entitled Virtual Worlds = Virtual Learning. In it, Wilson describes how Whyville.net is being leveraged by the Texas Workforce Commission to engender positive attitudes toward science in school kids and perhaps help instill the notion of pursuing science as a career. The TxWC is partnering with Whyville to create the Whyville Bioplex, with the goal of reaching “25,000 students with a biotech experience in their middle school career-education class in the next year.”

Whyville is a STEM-based academic virtual world (VW), where students can login and play at educational games with other kids around the country. I’ve encouraged teacher use of Whyville in my district, and listed it on my Top 10 Free Educational Videogames.

Wilson summarizes the benefits of using VWs for science exploration and gives a brief history of Whyville in the article. Here’s his summary paragraph:

The scientific method is an active practice. We do lab work to move beyond theory—to teach students how to be scientists. Virtual worlds allow us to safely take students to the frontiers of science where the really interesting questions await. By exposing them to the reality of science, we can engage a new generation of minds in this great endeavor.

More Videogame Myth Debunking

Here’s a nice editorial column from the Fond du Lac Reporter newspaper over in Wisconsin by David Williams debunking a few videogame myths. Recall we’ve taken a look at gaming industry myth debunking before, particularly Ben Sawyer’s Top 10 Myths of Serious Games, and Lee Wilson’s two-part article in Technology & Learning.

Here, Williams rips pundits asserting that videogames cause violence, are responsible for decreasing exercise, and are in general a waste of time. While eschewing the research to back up his points, Williams nonetheless makes a good common sense case for his points. Well worth the read.

References:
Williams, D. (2008, January 20). David Williams column: Time to pull plug on video game myths. Fond du Lac Reporter. [Online]. Retrieved January 20, 2008 from:

http://www.fdlreporter.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?

AID=/20080120/FON04/801200399/1329/FONlife

Teaching and Motivating Students: Discussing Educational Games at FETC 2008

FETC 2008 starts next week, and it is shaping up to be an exciting conference. Lee Wilson over at Headway Strategies invited me to participate in a symposium, “Using Games and Simulations to Teach and Motivate Today’s Students.” The symposium will be led by Dr. Karen Billings, Vice President for the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) Education Division. The forum format should provide for a variety of topics to be discussed, and I’m looking forward to contributing to the discussion and learning from it as well.

Slaying More Myths About Videogames

Last month I wrote about fellow Texan and Education Business Blog guru Lee Wilson’s excellent article on myths about educational videogames that ran in Technology & Learning. This month, Part 2 was published, and Wilson explores three more commonly held misconceptions on the topic.

First, Wilson addresses one of the strongest criticisms against educational games, mainly that instructional elements are akin to pearls on swine. In other words, an innately fun medium is being bent and stretched to accommodate educational purposes. Wilson allows that people like Justin Peters are partly right: good game design is needed, regardless of the serious or recreational nature of the game. But, there are many, many successful educational games that are both fun and … educational. He points out Whyville at University of Texas as a prime example. Instant gratification is not the point for complex videogames. Wilson points to several games that require hours of dedication in order to achieve goals. He notes that Steven Johnson said in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, that “… compared to most forms of popular entertainment, games turn out to be all about delayed gratification—sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.” The Civilization series and World of Warcraft are brought in to buttress this point.

Next, Wilson tackles the notion that games are good enough to teach kids on their own, without help from the teacher. This myth kind of goes to the opposite extreme of other myths that stand against the use of games in the classroom. Wilson brings in David Shaffer over at U. Wisconsin, author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn to argue the point: “Wandering around in a rich computer environment without guidance is a bad way to learn … The knowledge that matters in any domain is the knowledge that experts have …” [I’ve long noted that programs don’t teach kids, teachers do; programs are just tools that teachers use. Skilled teachers will teach well with whatever tools are available.] Wilson also noted the last NECC get together had 18 conference topics dealing with incorporating games into core curricula. Likewise universities are increasingly ramping up efforts to inculcate gaming into teacher preparatory programs.

Finally, Wilson addresses the most vexing notion of all, that there is no scientific literature backing up the use of gaming in educational environments. To fight this myth, Wilson notes the plethora of research activity surrounding Harvard’s River City project, Indiana’s Quest Atlantis project, and one of the many research efforts focused on World of Warcraft.

This myth is particularly pernicious. The main focus of this blog is to explore the wealth of published research out there centered around instructional gaming. Just browsing through the last couple dozen or so blog entries should dispel the notion there is no research backing up educational videogames. Yet, the myth persists. Recently, Miguel Guhlin wrote in his excellent ed tech blog about the notion that Marc Prensky misstated research surrounding his ideas on digital natives and immigrants. Yet, Prensky is a practitioner, not a researcher.

Be sure and check out part two of Wilson’s article. He has made a significant contribution to the discussion with these two articles.

References
Wilson, L. (2007, October 15). Getting it wrong: Slaying myths about video games (part 2). Technology & Learning. [Online]. Available: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.php?articleID=196604734