Gamification offers this exactly. No thinking is required, just simple, absentminded iteration and the promise of empty metrics to prove its value. Like having a website or a social media strategy, "gamification" allows organizations to tick the games box without fuss.

There just aren't enough high-quality games that also serve serious purposes effectively. Making games is hard. Making good games is even harder. Making good games that hope to serve some external purpose is even harder.

People know that there's something magical about games. They don't always express that opinion positively, but even condemnations of video games acknowledge that they contain special power, power to captivate us and draw us in, power to encourage us to repeat things we've seemingly done before, power to get us to spend money on things that seem not to exist, and so forth

As Luntz puts it, what matters is not what you say, but what people hear. And when we're talking about games, people often hear nothing good. Making games seem appealing outside the entertainment industry is a daunting task, and a large part of the challenge involves deploying the right rhetoric to advance the concept in the first place.

-ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points.

Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn’t matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.

it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.

Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.

Yetthecircuitsofproduction,distribution,andplayofgamesinvolveongoingtensionsbe-tweenindustryrelations,distributioninfrastructure,patternsofplayer/viewerengagement,genresofrepresentation,socialagendas,andeducationalphilosophies.Thesetensionsaffecthowwethinkaboutwhichliteraciesanecologyofgamingsupportsandwhichitpotentiallydenies

Playingvideogamesisakindofliteracy.Nottheliteracythathelpsusreadbooksorwritetermpapers,butthekindofliteracythathelpsusmakeorcritiquethesystemswelivein....Whenwelearntoplaygameswithaneyetowarduncoveringtheirproceduralrhetorics,welearntoaskquestionsaboutthemodelssuchgamespresent.(p.136)

Hearguesthatmakingdigitalgamesaccessibletoawideraudiencebenefitseveryonebyprovidingopportunitiesforplayacrosscommunities.HecitesaclosedcaptioningmodforDoom-3thatprovidesauditoryinformationintheformoftext(orother)visuals.Ratherthansimplyallowingplayerswhomaybehardofhearingtoincreasetheirqualityofplay,themodhasbeentakenupandusedbymanyEnglishlanguagelearnerstohelpthemlearnandunderstandEnglishbetter.

theauthorsinsteadarguethatthecultureofvideogameplayisonedeeply“tangledup”withotherculturalpractices.Thesepracticesincluderelationswithsiblingsandparents,patternsoflearningathomeandschool,aswellasimaginedfuturesforoneself.

Geetakesontheintersectionofgamedesignandgoodlearning,choreographingpotentialsitesofengagementbetweenthetwobydrawingoncontemporaryworkinthelearningsci-ences.Wellestablishedasanauthoritywithinthevideogames,learning,andliteracyspace,Geecreatesausefulfoundationuponwhichmanyoftheotherauthorsinthevolumedraw.

Contributorscomefromeducation,thelearningsciences,filmstudies,technology,anthro-pology,gamedesign,performancestudies,computerscience,andyouthdevelopment.Suchadiversityofperspectivesleadstoaconditionofbothwealthandpoverty.Wealthcomesintheformofnewframeworks,methodologies,andalternatehistoriesthatenrichthedialoguewithmultiplepointsofview;povertycomesinthechoiceofbreadthoverdepthandinthechallengeoflocatingacommonvocabulary

Bornintoaworldwhereconceptslikecopyright,mastery,civicengagement,andparticipationareseamlesslynego-tiatedandredefinedacrosshighlypersonalizednetworksspanningthespacesofFacebook,Yu-Gi-Oh,andYouTube,today’skidsarecraftinglearningidentitiesforthemselves—hybrididentities—thatseeminglyrejectpreviouslydistinctmodesofbeing.Writer,designer,reader,producer,teacher,student,gamer—allmodesholdequalweight.Whereweusedtocallthemplayer-producers,prosumers, orevenmultitaskers, we nowjustcallthemkids. ThephrasethatbestexplainsthischangecomesfromMikey,aparticipantinoneofourcontributors’studies,whointalkingaboutgamessaid,“It’swhatwedo.”The“we”towhichhewasreferringwaskidsthesedays,theyoungpeopleofhisgeneration.

If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest.

The potential significance of the XO, as well as of other IT innovations, in developing countries calls for system-atic, independent evaluation—a true “grand challenge” for the computing and social science communities. Re-searchers can provide value by con-ducting well-designed studies of the diffusion and results of such innova-tion. The knowledge created promises to prevent wasting a great deal of mon-ey and effort and lead to quicker diffu-sion and better use of innovations that prove beneficial. While OLPC has so far fallen short of its goals, there is much yet to be learned by studying this case of IT innovation.

Expecting a laptop to cause such revolutionary change showed a degree of naiveté, even for an organization with the best intentions and smartest people.

This situation is common in developing countries where endemic problems of infrastructure, financial resources, technical skills, and waning political support “hinder both the completion of IS innovation initiatives and the re-alization of their expected benefits.

Often, more important is the social and cultural environment in which it will operate

Despite its considerable innovation, or perhaps because of it, the OLPC proj-ect has been unable to achieve its $100 targeted cost. The current cost of each unit is listed on the OLPC Website as $199 (www.laptop.org/en/participate/ways-to-give.shtml). However, this does not include upfront deployment costs, which are said to add an additional 5%–10% to the cost of each machine (wiki.laptop.org/go/Larger_OLPC),and subsequent IT-management costs. Nor does it include the cost of teacher training, additional software, and on-going maintenance and support. OLPC initially required governments to pur-chase a million units, then reduced the number to 250,000 in April 2007. Such large purchases are difficult to justify for governments in developing countries, and the requirement was ul-timately eliminated.

However, re-ports from the classroom suggest that teacher training is limited, and willing-ness to adopt a new approach to teach-ing is questionable. Children are excit-ed but somewhat confused about the use of the machines, and educational software is lacking or difficult to use. Also, if a machine fails, it is up to the family to replace it or the child must do without.

OLPC pilots in a half-dozen countries report positive changes (such as increased enrollment in schools, decreased absenteeism, increased discipline, and more participation in classrooms), but it is not clear if these changes are directly related to OLPC, as many evaluations are neither inde-pendent nor systematic. Independent evaluations in Ethiopia and Uruguay cite a positive effect on the availability of learning material via the laptop but also problems with buggy input devic-es, connectivity, software functionality, and teacher training.8,12,

The XO laptop developed by OLPC reflects hardware innovation in the power supply, display, networking, keyboard, and touchpad to provide a durable and interactive laptop (see the figure here). The shell of the machine is resistant to dirt and moisture, with all key parts designed to fit behind the dis-play. It contains a pivoting, reversible,

dual-mode (monochrome for outside, color for indoors) display, movable rub-ber WiFi antennas with wireless mesh networking, and a sealed rubber-mem-brane keyboard that can be customized for different languages. For low power consumption and ruggedness, the XO design intentionally omits all motor-driven moving parts. It was developed jointly by the MIT Media Lab, OLPC, and Quanta, a Taiwan-based original design manufacturer, and is manufac-tured by Quanta in Songjiang, China. The software for the XO consists of a pared-down version of the Fedora Li-nux operating system and specially de-signed graphical user interface called Sugar. It was developed by the project to explore naturalistic concepts related to learning, openness, and collaboration.

OLPC is a nonprofit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be ex-posed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community”

Our analysis draws on diffusion-of-innova-tion theory, exemplified by Rogers,18and illustrates the difficulty in getting widespread adoption of even proven innovation due to misunderstanding the social and cultural environment in which the innovation is to be intro-duced. We also bring to bear specific insights from the literature on adop-tion of IT in developing countries,2,25using them to analyze the OLPC experi-ence and draw implications for devel-opers and policymakers.

OLPC created a novel technology, the XO laptop, developed with close at-tention to the needs of students in poor rural areas. Yet it failed to anticipate the social and institutional problems that could arise in trying to diffuse that innovation in the developing-country context.

Most people working in this area are driven by an underlying belief that digital technologies are—in some way—capable of improving education.

It is important to note here that I am not arguing for the adoption of a dogmatic blanket negativity towards education and technology. In its purest sense, pessimism still allows room for an acceptance that specific things are getting better

Thus at one level, the pessimistic educational technologist is simply one who adopts a mindset that is willing to recognise—and work within—the current and historical limitations of educational technology rather than its imagined limitless potential.

Instead, there are a host of often overlooked critical issues and themes that need to be brought to the forefront of any contemporary discussion of educational technology.

In other words, educational technology scholarship should look beyond questions of how technology could and should be used and instead asking questions about how technology is actually being used in practice.

For instance, just why do most digital technologies remain at the periphery of many people's educational lives? Why has there been no educational ‘killer‐app’ or ‘game‐changing’ technology that has transformed learning along the open, mass‐participatory and convivial lines that we are continually being promised? Why does a clear gap persist between the rhetoric and the reality of technology use in education? All these questions are based around challenging prevailing presumptions of the technological transformation of education.

All I am advocating is that educational technology is approached from a position that expects nothing—a position that is not be to confuse with the nihilistic position of wanting nothing or even the sceptical position of knowing nothing.

Connected learning addresses the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning, intergenerational disconnects, and new equity gaps arising from the privatization of learning. In doing so, connected learning taps the opportunities provided by digital media to more easily link home, school, community and peer contexts of learning; sup-port peer and intergenerational connections based on shared interests; and create more connections with non-dominant youth, drawing from capacities of diverse communities. We also offer an approach to learning, design and program building that can expand the opportunities afforded by a changing media environment while minimizing the risks.

Young people today have the world at their fingertips in ways that were unimaginable just a generation ago.

the teens we inter-viewed throughout the United States regularly told us that engaging with social media is important for developing and maintaining friendships with peers.

n the 1980s, the mall served as a key site for teen sociability in the United States (Ortiz 1994) because it was often the only accessible public space where teens could go to hang out (Lewis 1990). Teens are increasingly monitored, though, and many have been pressured out of public spaces such as streets, parks, malls, and libraries (Buckingham 2000). More recently, networked publics have become the contemporary stomp-ing ground for many U.S. teens. Just as teens fl ocked to the malls because of societal restrictions, many of today’s teens are choosing to gather with friends online because of a variety of social and cultural limitations (boyd 2007). While the site teens go to gather at has changed over time, many of the core practices have stayed the same. The changes we are seeing today are a variant of these core practices, infl ected in distinctive ways as youth mobilize social media

Much of what is written and discussed about educational technology is, therefore, more a matter of faith than it is a matter of fact.

14 | CONNECTED LEARNING

The articulation of connections in social media serves three purposes. First, these lists operate as an address book, allowing participants to keep a record of all the people they know. Second, they allow participants to leverage privacy settings to control who can access their content, who can contact them, and who can see if they are online or not. Finally, the public display of connections that takes place in social network sites can represent an individual’s social identity and status (Donath and boyd 2004)

Young people in the United States today are growing up in a media ecology where digital and networked media are playing an increasingly central role. Even youth who do not possess computers and Internet access in the home are participants in a shared culture where new social media, digital media distribution, and digital media production are com-monplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts.

13Fourth, all the above trends are leading to the phenomenon known as “Pro-Ams”. Today young people are using the Internet and other digital tools outside of school to learn and even become experts in a variety of domains. We live in the age of “Pro-Ams”:amateurs who have become experts at whatever they have developed a passion for (Anderson,2006; Gee,2008;

Third, digital tools are changing the nature of groups, social formations, and power.

More and more today, people do not have to play just the role of the spectator. Since they can now produce their own music, news, games, and films, for example, they can participate in what used to be practices reserved for professional or elite musicians, film makers, game designers, and news people(Shirky, 2008)

igital tools are giving rise to major transformations in society. These transformations are crucial to the NMLS. First, digital tools are changing the balance of production and consumption in media. It is easier today for everyday people not just to consume media but to produce it themselves. Everyday peoples—not just experts and elites—can produce professional looking movies, newscasts, and video games (thanks to “modding”) and many other such p

eople can be “manipulated” by media and can “manipulate” others with media. It is often relevant to ask whose (vested) interest is served by a given media message and to wonder whether people mistake whose interest such messages really serve, for example, an ad whose message really serves the profit motives of a company but which a consumer can mistakenly take to be in his or her best interest.

here are many different social and cultural practices which incorporate literacy, so, too, many different “literacies” (legal literacy, gamer literacy, country music literacy, academic literacy of many different types). People don’t justread and write in general, they read and write specific sorts of “texts” in specific ways and these ways are determined by the values and practices of different social and cultural groups.

People learn a given way of reading or writing by participating in (or, at least, coming to understand) the distinctive social and cultural practices of different social and cultural groups.

While the traditional model of learning has been grounded in the concept of “learning about,” the idea that knowledge is something to be studied and accumulated, new theories of learning have begun to understand the affordances in the networked world that privileges notions of “learning to be,” the ability to put the things we learn into action, often within the context of an epistemic community or community of practice.

If the paradigm for learning in old media is a notion of direct transfer, the question that interests us most is “what does a theory of learning look like for collective, social, and participatory media?”

What we are 2witnessing now, with new media, is a second transformation, marked by a shift from interpretation to participation (Jenkins, 2006). In just the past ten years, we have seen that change happen throughout the world of journalism, with news itself first being seen as factual, later being seen as interpretive, and with the emergence of the blogosphe

nsmission of knowledge. We want to suggest that now even that is not enough. Although learning about and learning to be worked well in a relatively stable world, in a world of constant flux, we need to embrace a theory of learning to become. Where most theories of learning see becoming as a transitional state toward becoming something, we want to suggest that the 21st century requires us to think of learning as a practice of becoming over and over again.

This ability to access or locate information is undoubtedly important; yet the skills children need in relation to digital media go well beyond this. As with print, they also need to be able to evaluate and use information critically if they are to transform it into knowledge. This means asking questions about the sources of that information, the interests of its producers, and the ways in which it represents the world, and understanding how technological developments and possibilities are related to broader social and economic forces.

provides a fairly clear and succinct example of this approach: ‘media literacy is the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts’. Access thus includes the skills and competencies needed to locate media content, using the available technologies and associated software.

Many educational conceptions of literacy tend to define it in terms of a set of skills or competencies

suggest that children lack the skills to evaluate online content, let alone create it.

main exception to this is in the area of gender, where anxiety about violence in computer games and the evident gendered split in game-playing uptake provoked huge debate. The statistics cited here about the gendered nature of game playing break down to confound popular expectations that game playing is an exclusively male preserve. Bryce and Rutter (2002) argued that discussions about the nature of gendered game playing tend to focus on game content rather than looking at the factors that might determine specific gender-related pleasures and motivations, and they concluded that game playing is more evenly spread across genders than is commonly supposed.

he attribution of blame to the media, and computer games in particular, bore scant relation to the facts. This was not an isolated example of poor press coverage but a classic displacement whereby problematic cov- erage was made to take the blame for complex social events.

This only enhanced the view that the study of computer games represents a classic "before and after" opportunity to explore the impact of a new media technology in terms of both the changing nature of youth and childhood and the effects of globalization.

. Because we tend to regard young people as vulnerable subjects, research has tended to concentrate on showing how young people can be susceptible to media culture (e.g., Kline's, 1993, study of children and the marketing of toys within the wider media and commercial culture).

In recent years, concern with violence as an effect of exposure to the media has seen a definite swing toward an interest in the role of media in influ- encing consumption--as me

As with the introduction of mass literacy in the 19th century (Barker, 1989; Luke, 1989), the introduction of each new medium (radio, film, television, and finally the Internet) during the 20th century has been accompanied by anxiety about its imag- ined effect on less educated, "vulnerable" social groupings.

I am goingto explain it to you once again, give you somedrill and practice until you have mastered it, andurge you not to make this mistake again. . . .

This highly prized value of making teaching andlearning efficient is historic and, when harnessedto electronic technologies, unrelenting. The lureof productivity—teaching more in less time forless cost—can be traced back to the origins of pub-lic schools in the early 19th century and has beena consistent goal for schooling ever since

They want schoolswhere such knowledge is shared by all membersof the community; schools where diverse mixes ofadults and children work easily together in variedgroupings. Hence, interactive computers and tele-communications are mind-tools that help studentsgrasp concepts, use all of their senses, and practicewhat they have learned creating self-directedlearning communities, according to such advo-cates.

First, there is the drive to bring schools techno-logically in step with the workplace because of thefear that students will be unprepared both to com-pete in the job market and adjust to the changingmarketplace where bank teller machines, barcodes on products, answering machines, and otherelectronic devices prevail. The computerizedworkplace and the ubiquity of telecommunica-tions in daily routines outside the home have con-vinced advocates of modernizing schools thatstudents must become familiar with electronictechnologies. Computers, in other words, are thefuture and schools must prepare students for it.

The supervaluation of the abstract blocks progress in educa-tion in mutually reinforcing ways in practice and in theory. In the practice of education the emphasis on abstract-formal knowledge is a direct impediment to learning-and since some children, for reasons related to personality, culture, gender, and politics, are harmed more than others, it is also a source of seri-ous discrimination if not downright oppression.

Bricolage is a mecaphor for che ways of che old-fashioned traveling cinker, the jack-of-all-trades who knocks on the door offering to fix whatever is broken. Faced with a job, the cinker rummages in his bag of assorted tools to find one thac will fit the problem at hand and, if one tool does nor work for the job, simply tries another without ever being upset in the slightest by the lack of generality.

If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor. For example, many learn difficult video games with no professional teaching at all! Others use Nintendo's system of telephone hot lines or read magazines on strategies for games to find the kind of advice for video games that they would get from a teacher if this were a school subject. Moreover, since one reason for poor instruction is that nobody likes to teach reluctant children, the constructionist route will make teaching better as well as less necessary, thus achieving the best of both worlds.

It is to be read on a more ideological or programmatic level as expressing the belief that the route to better learning must be the improvement of instruction-if School is less than perfect, why then, you know what to do: Teach better.

Formal learning requires special access to ordinary things, on the one hand, or, on the other, easy and dependable access to special things made for educational purposes. An example of the former is the special right to operate or dismantle a machine in a garage. An example of the latter is the general right to use an abacus, a computer, a book, a botanical garden, or a machine withdrawn from production and placed at the full disposal of students.

the very face of the earthhas been modified by man. The layout of surfaces has been changed, by cutting,clearing, leveling, paving, and building. Natural deserts and mountains, swamps andrivers, forests and plains still exist, but they are being encroached upon and reshapedby man-made layouts.

Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment? To changewhat it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressingwhat injures him. In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harderfor most of the other animals. Over the millennia, he has made it easier for himself toget food, easier to keep warm, easier to see at night, easier to get about, and easier totrain his offspring.

o our accustomed way of thinking, technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed use