Educational Gaming Topics at FETC 2008

The annual Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC), FETC 2008, is coming to Orlando, January 22-25 at the Orange County Convention Center. Here’s a blurb from their web site:

FETC is one of the largest, most successful conferences in the United States devoted to educational technology. The conference program is designed so educators and administrators have an opportunity to learn how to integrate different technologies across the curriculum–from kindergarten to college–while being exposed to the latest hardware, software and successful strategies on student technology use. FETC is designed for teachers, principals and deans, district administrators, curriculum designers, media specialists, technology directors and various other educators.

I noticed that Dr. Chris Dede of River City fame is a featured speaker. In addition, there will be at least three sessions on educational video gaming:

- Leading Digital Immigrants to Teach Math to the Video Game Generation, Ntiedo Etuk

- Using Educational Games to Develop Student’s Content Knowledge, Meredith DiPietro with Richard E. Ferdig and Jeff Boyer

- Why Game Development Matters, Jeff Boyer with Rick Ferdig and Meredith DiPietro

FETC continues to gain national recognition and prominence each year. This year will be no exception.

Thar's Research Gold in Them Virtual Hills

I found an interesting article examining the state of research surrounding virtual worlds whilst lurking over at Terra Nova. A recent issue of Science carried the article entitled, “The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds.” It took some effort to find a free copy of the article online, but I located a PDF of it here.

Author William Sims Bainbridge, over at the NSF, begins by lumping both Second Life and World of Warcraft into the same category of VWs. Comparisons between the two most popular, highest covered VWs seem appropriate enough. Bainbridge’s big contribution to the discussion, though, is to examine the different avenues for research each VW offers.

In terms of scientific research methodologies, one can do interviews and ethnographic research in both environments, but other methods would work better in one than the other. SL is especially well designed to mount formal experiments in social psychology or cognitive science, because the researcher can construct a facility comparable to a real-world laboratory and recruit research subjects. WoW may be better for nonintrusive statistical methodologies examining social networks and economic systems, because it naturally generates a vast trove of diverse but standardized data about social and economic interactions. Both allow users to create new software modules to extract data.

Bainbridge spends the remainder of the article discussing various research efforts in the two worlds, while touching on some other efforts in places like Whyville, Quest Atlantis, and River City. The main categories for the remainder of the paper include: establishing virtual laboratories in world; observational social and economic science; and computer and information science. Bainbridge’s conclusion discusses the multitude of opportunities for research and the varieties in approach that are possible in VWs.

Bainbridge concludes on a positive note, remarking on the large number of academic efforts within VWs.

Many virtual worlds may foster scientific habits of mind better than traditional schools can, because they constantly require inhabitants to experiment with unfamiliar alternatives, rationally calculate probable outcomes, and develop complex theoretical structures to understand their environment … The “graduates” of SL and WoW may include many future engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists ready to remake the real world in the image of the virtual worlds.

This is a nice article with a good approach at examining the research issues surrounding VWs. Be sure and check out the extensive citation list as well.

References
Bainbridge, W. S. (2007, July 27). Science, 317(5837), 472-476.

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