Mike Edwards

Just finished the first seminar for the Jetpack for Learning competition. I was inspired to try out a quick-and-dirty take on our "notebook" idea from the original concept. If you have Jetpack installed, drop this in the Develop editor window and try it out.

jetpack.future.import('selection');
jetpack.future.import('slideBar');
jetpack.selection.onSelection(function(){
  var html = jetpack.selection.html;
  jetpack.slideBar.append({
    html:html,
    width:300
    });
});

The internet is a potentially powerful tool for enhancing learning environments. However, the unstructured nature of it can present a challenge to both students and teachers. For example, students may lack the ability to pursue a learning goal strategically and therefore find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of information at their fingertips and wandering aimlessly. Teachers, on the other hand, may be at a loss of how to assess students' learning in such a setting and unable to understand the connections that students' are making.

Reflecting Pool Mockup Screenshot

Reflecting Pool (see attached interactive PDF) aims to improve internet-based activities for students by increasing metacognitive awareness (i.e., planning, monitoring, and control of thinking) and for teachers by giving them greater access to the thought processes of their students. Furthermore, it offers a unique opportunity for all to understand and explore the collective knowledge of the class.

Finally coming up for air and getting a little time to blog about some interesting stuff I've been a part of. Just to get started, I wanted to show off a video my colleague Claudio Midolo shot of our fraction game in SMALLab, which we've provisionally dubbed "FracAttack".

Pretty excited to be in Madison--it's a really beautiful town. I'm at GLS 09 for the week to check out the latest and greatest in my little field. I'll be presenting with Dave Birchfield and Katie tonight for the SMALLab poster session, and I'm running a game with Colleen, Eric Zimmerman, and John Sharp using twitter called BACKCHATTER which should be a lot of fun to play.

If you're around, I'm the tall scruffy one in the lime green shirt!

Just a quick post about another conference's Twitter backchannel I analyzed recently. Take a look at my posts on #swineflu and #09ntc to get a full picture of what I'm up to here. Basically, I'm looking at the network formed by replies and retweets in Twitter inside of a particular hashtag. Here, I'll go over the results of Museums and the Web 2009, a.k.a. #mw2009.

Here we see MFADT student Simeon Poulin playing with the whiteboard we cooked up for the first Wakatta test charrette.

Katie and Kyle haul a violet, orange, and blue color from one side of the space to the other. They have to very carefully match the wavelength of the color by keeping their glowballs the right distance apart as the move across the playing field.

This prototype will be expanded into a more complete game, put the core mechanic seems sound and should drive the learning. Even as the creators of the game, we learned a lot about the properties of light. This is, like the color matching game and the mirror playground part of Gaming SMALLab's Light and Optics curriculum.

This is the latest version of our color mixing game. Here, Kyle and Michie are raising and lowering the red, green, and blue balls to match the color coming out from the center of the floor. The colors get faster as the game progresses--and mistakes shrink the amount of time you have to match!

Very fun and very physical--this will easily wear you out after a few rounds. This is part of the Light and Optics curriculum we are putting together for Katie Salen and David Birchfield's Gaming SMALLab project.

Colleen Macklin forwarded Kyle Li and I this excellent post on Raph Koster's blog about the Ludic Fallacy. In essence, the ludic fallacy is when people "mistake the model for reality." Koster's take was that this can drive younger people, who have been raised on the lessons in games, to be too likely to assume that real world choices hew closely to those provided to them in games. Koster's view of the consequences:

Recently I had a discussion with a management and leadership consultant, and we were discussing the generational characteristics of Millenials versus Gen X in the workforce, and we were talking about how a gamer mentality may have affected the way Gen Y behaves in the workplace: more likely to follow the rules, more likely to work in teams, more needful of reassurance, less creative and risk-taking, less likely to see the full scope of irreversible consequences of a choice, and less likely to see things in shades of gray. In a way, these sound like thinking trained by games.

The ludic fallacy comes from the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb who also popularized the term "black swan". The Black Swan theory describes events that are highly improbable and have a large impact (and that we, retrospectively, try to assume were predictable). Black Swans are particularly dangerous for people who have been trained to think they don't exist (frankly, that's pretty much all of us.) As Taleb writes in his book:

...we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.

By assuming that we can predict outliers (we can't) and that these events they precipitate are of no great consequence (they are), we allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that our lives are run in the same contained set of rules that might apply even in an advanced game simulation.

The cure? My read on Koster is that we should consider throwing Black Swans into educational games... or all games. By creating a set of circumstances where student players know that catastrophic events are possible (if unlikely), we will, hopefully, encourage kids (and adults) to think more conservatively and more long-term when making their choices. Having to plan for the 100-year flood (or the 500-year flood) makes the player prepare for eventualities that they may never experience themselves. The student players are therefore made to consider their game worlds as places where the rules apply only 99% (or more) of the time--enough that they can't totally rely on them as models for reality.

The catch? Randomness is not fun. Sort of. Nick Fortugno and others have taught me there are appropriate uses of randomness. For example, randomizing the terrain of the game tends to work. Players must then make their own choices on this playing field. But randomizing the choices themselves usually is a miserable failure. Try playing a game where all your moves are based solely on the roll of a die, like Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders. They're awful, unless you're a four year old.

It seems, then, that the Black Swans have to be carefully inserted into games in the form of "terrain" changes--the sudden appearance of ridiculously powerful enemies, the total elimination (or tripling) of one's resources, the widespread reformatting of a game's map. They effect the field on which the player makes choices, without inhibiting or supplementing the ability to make them in the first place. The resulting choices will be difficult and victories will be rare and hard won, but the core of gaming remains.

These events also need to be real outliers, going beyond the single super-powerful card in the deck (which savvy players would be able to predict). For example, the "Your Parents Never Met" card in Chrononauts is an okay example, but, I think, it'd have to be even more unlikely than it is now. You should be aware, in the back of your mind, that something truly awful can happen down the line, but you shouldn't be able to count cards or analyze models well enough to predict it.

Will this work? Will it cure the Gen Ys (or, as they're known in Taiwan, "strawberries") of their reliance on limited game rules in real life? Will it still leave them with their confidence, their tactical good sense, their teamwork--positive consequences of game training, according to Koster? I dunno. But it's worth a shot. And, who knows, we might even... WAAARGH! THREE-HEADED ALIENS ARE ATTACKING!