Microphone dropped.

This was the problem in my former district. The teacher evaluation framework demanded practices that were inconsistent with many non-traditional educational practices (inquiry-based learning, discovery-based learning, interest-driven learning, game-based learning, etc.)

What about students that don't achieve a deep understanding through inquiry? Do they perform similarly on tests compared to their traditional education counterparts? This can be a misleading statement without that missing piece of information.

What about when the use of standards that are not grounded in Inquiry-based learning are mandated by administrators of state law?

What about situations where teacher evaluation systems stifle this norm. A previous district I was with had an evaluation framework so stifling in practice that it effectively killed teachers' willingness to experiment in their classrooms from fear of being rated ineffective.

Why the term "playgrid?"

Additionally, Hypothesis' technical affordances often exceeded the affordances native to the blogging platform (posting movies, pictures, etc.)

August 2nd https://hypothesiseducatorinstitute.splashthat.com/

I think this may be a little misleading. By most accounts, overall interest in tabletop roleplaying games has been on the rise.

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2013/jul/29/after-40-years-popularity-tabletop-gaming-ri/114446/

Interest in D&D has lowered in the roleplaying game community because there are so many other great options now days.

Any fans of Sid Meier's work will recognize that fact. The level of realistic detail balanced with so many fun elements makes for a fantastically covert educational experience.

Clearly, art imitating life; but one can easily see how the reverse can also be true especially in regards to perpetuating stereotypes.

This is such a critical component to successful learning. We, as a culture, have framed failure in such a way as to make it seem like the end. We need to teach students to fail forward. To a scientist, there is no such thing as a failed experiment; only more data gathered.

This is likely due to having a stronger systems knowledge as Gee states it.

You should consider getting a kit. They're fairly reasonably priced at $100 (US) plus shipping and handling. Additionally, their website has instructions for assembling your own kit; should the overseas shipping be too much.

It's really quite fun. I love how it is highly adaptable to any content area or age level.

The games can be credited with multiple designers upon publishing.

I definitely think that you can. It is very organic in its nature. It seems to be adapting to meet its users' needs over time and that can be a very messy process (just like nature). It also seems to have grown an extra organ that goes unused like an appendix (their forum).

Perhaps I am being a technological curmudgeon, but I really like how forums work (that's so 2 minutes ago). Topics are clearly organized into threads, and using the search feature is common practice. Also, information has a temporal stickiness that can be very useful for getting a lot of eyes on a project.

Ideally, I would have them use Facebook and Twitter for sharing cool ideas and driving traffic back to the forum. This would take a lot of social media management, and may be beyond the company's current capability.

The biggest limitation is that information can quickly get buried, and most people don't use facebook's search function. Once you actually get to a platform for collaboratively creating (like Google Docs) working together is much easier. I did eventually find a forum, but the last post was from early March, so in essence the forum is a ghost town.

As soon as I get some projects out of the way, yes. I want to run a game on one of the last days of school.

I had considered that, but I don't have a very strong following on twitter amongst music educators. Music teachers are notorious for a being late adopters in regards to technology. If you hear a bunch of music teachers talking about twitter, it is more likely that they are talking about Olivier Messiaen's music.

For all intents and purposes, all of the people were educators. It seems that their content matters follow the typical distribution of educators (not overly represented in any specific content). The most important attribute that I have seen is that they all seem like a very "playful" bunch of people. While I see this quality in educators once in a while, I would not typically characterize educators as being a playful group (which is a shame).

Not that I saw on the published games, but if you are in the design documentation, you could comment through Google Docs.

Just this morning, another music educator joined in with the conversation. She even added some information to the google doc.

Not intentionally. But they did a great job of putting information in places that you wouldn't think to look. Either, I joined the community mid-transition, or they are expecting that the kind of person that would join this community would leave no stone unturned.

I have, but I'm still waiting for it to arrive.

Surprisingly, I just got another hit this morning, and this person even made some comments on the Google Doc.

Thanks! I had to rewind my brain back about a decade to my theatre training.

Hi Tedy. Thanks for sharing with us your experience in Activeworlds 3d.

What does it mean to be an insider? How do you know? And how would you describe this space to an outsider?

This game makes it easy to distinguish between insiders and outsiders by creating the affinity space within the gamespace. In essence, all people within the game are insiders. I want to take this a step further and discuss the concept of insiders inside the game. It seems the developers went to great measures empower players to create spaces that are safe from others changing things. There are micro-communities within the larger that players can belong to.

It was never renamed the Apatosaurus. It was the Apatosaurus from the beginning.

You might want to try out Dixit. There's an episode of TableTop that features the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6UlbxeDE0w

How do you feel about cooperative games like Pandemic?

So who won, you or the game?

@remiholden - So far, what are your implications for future practice?

Also, as much as we would like to detach ourselves from arbitrary ratings system, at the end of the day you still have to assign a grade. Have you had any thoughts on how you would rate such responses?

This question feels very ugly to me, because any such rating system would have a direct impact on the types of posts produced, but it is grounded in reality of expectations placed upon educators.

I like this. I wish there were a faster way to get our larger educational system to embrace emergent expressions of learning.

How do you think these glimpses are impacted by the Hawthorne effect?

Michio Kaku has some interesting ideas on the idea of consciousness. One of the more exciting things about his hypothesis is that it is testable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GS2rxROcPo

There is a logical reason for this, but it has nothing to do with the students. Frequently, guidance counselors just dump students into open classes that don't have prerequisites if the student has an open slot in their schedule. Prerequisites (at least in theory) stop counselors from doing this.

This is happening to some of my colleagues at the high school level. They have advanced performing ensembles, and counselors are just dumping kids in them that have never even picked up an instrument before, just because that class had an open seat at the right time.

I have the same issue. I now find that I am spending more time searching for an article than I am on the actual reading and writing.

It is my sincerest hope that your research does not find PAHSITy of results.

As a card carrying geek, I cannot help but recall the annotations made by the Half-blood Prince in the Harry Potter series, and how they facilitated Harry's success in that potions course.

There it is!

Although I believe they are closer, I still think that this line of reasoning will lead to a research dead end. As an academic exercise, replace the words "video games" with "books." It very quickly becomes silly because we know that some books are very useful, while other books are less. Ultimately, it comes down to how the books are being used. A great quality book can quickly become useless in bad pedagogical setup, whereas an awful book can still be highly useful if it is used properly (usually as an example of what not to do). I suspect that games can (and will) be understood similarly.

Simply accounting for social interactions may not be enough.

They are correct, but this is an example of bad logic. (e.g. All cats are animals, therefore all animals are cats).

Now they're starting on a better track.

This is why I am a little concerned about the current state of research in GBL. The focus seems to be largely on video games, which is not bad in and of itself, but I feel that it is focusing too much on the technology and not enough on the pedagogy. If the pedagogy were the true focus of the research, we would see more diversity in the types of games being used.

That's not true, but improvisations in isolation take on a very different quality which may render them useless for working with others. I am speaking here from both a musical and design orientation.

These statements may suggest an answer to my extension question above about rookie teachers.

This may be a false dichotomy. While I agree that the points weren't really the students' focus, it was the points that unlocked new learning and options within the game. As Deci and Ryan suggest, these types of rewards increase player's sense of agency and increase intrinsic motivation. This intrinsic motivation was for playing the game. So, while I agree that the students were interested in playing the game, the mechanic of earning points that unlocked rewards that increase intrinsic motivation may have played an important role (even if the students were unaware of it).

I like this shift of focus.

A thought on this diagram. In Venn Diagrams with more than two bubbles, I always find it helpful to find definitions or examples in the areas where two bubbles overlap, but not with the third. For example, what would be in the overlap between Attitude and Ignorance, but not with Identity? It is very helpful for demonstrating the difference between the center (in this case Gameful Learning) and other things that are close but not quite right.

Ah, well that can explain why I saw a quick connection between video game playing and creating music.

In psychology, this called being in a state of "flow." This state is naturally hard to define, but in essence it is a state of action/creation that is so involving that that tools that are being used for the job disappear from the creator's mind, becoming an extension his/her being. Sounds crazy, but anyone who is an experienced VGP will recognize how a game controller will disappear from the thought process. From my music background, I can firmly say that this is goal of performing with an instrument; being so fluent with the tool that it is no longer thought of as a separate thing, the focus is completely on the creation.

This is the mindset that I was referring to previously when I was contrasting the mind frame of K-12 educators with their Higher Education counterparts.

If he had positive findings from this practice, why did he stop using it?

I find the implication of this sentence to be based in deficit-based thinking. It implies that the previously mentioned person has forgotten how to play. It completely ignores the variety of life circumstances that many people bring to the table. What if the student has not forgotten how to play, but has made life choices that make it so the minimum amount of time that the class requires is all he/she has available (being a parent with a 40 hour week job, for example)

Well done!

This is huge. The ability to unlock new quests as a reward provides learners with a strong sense of agency. It also teaches that the true reward of learning is having the privilege to learn even more. This does not create a false sense of external motivation. Deci and Ryan would approve.

Arghh. First learning styles, and now this bit of neuromyth. This is not helping my sense of ethos for the author.

Wait. We are still using learning modalities or styles? Hasn't this been largely debunked?

Just a silly musing. It cracks me up that due to the open ended nature of an XP system (unlike the closed system of traditional grades) we could apply the Labor Theory of Value to the determination of XP worth.

This statement resonates with me very deeply right now.

Since your initial lessons, have you continued to play? If so, are you getting better at the game?

Do players from opposing teams enthusiastically offer bad advice to try to throw off the other team, or is that considered bad form?

These are obvious design choice that were made, but I struggle to understand why? I struggle to find what the game has to gain through these choices. Including these design choices will not boost sales in any way (the artwork is not featured on the cover, thus it is not being used for market purposes). The target audience would probably have enjoyed the game just as much without these choices.

I love it when games do this. There are very few other media that has the potential to do this to the extent in which games can. I remember feeling similarly when playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Do you feel that your in-game choice represent choices that you have made out-of-game, or did it just dismay you that made those choices in-game because of high ethical standards that you hold out-of-game? Please don't feel pressured to answer, as the nature of this question can be highly personal.

I like your critical thoughts here on the game's mechanics. Without having the benefit of actually playing this version of the game, your suggestions sound like it would make for richer/more rewarding experience.

Another interesting experiment would be to do a little cross-training. Play some action video games for a few months and then come back to this game to see if there is any noticeable performance boost.

So his attentional resources are strained in a more stimulating environment. I find this interesting because it contradicts what we would expect given his experience as an action video game player (from what we learned in Bavelier et al.). Do you ever take strategic advantage of this?

Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Your comment here reminds me of the author's perspective on defining "quality."

I find this to be an interesting juxtaposition. Has any subsequent research been conducted in this?

John Dewey expounds upon this idea in Experience and Education.

Why is this? The research is out there, and now days it is readily available, yet mainstream media and public opinion seems ardent in their defense of this "common knowledge."

Full disclosure, I picked my handle because I can type it very quickly and it is the same as my twitter handle.

Do you feel that this issue has caused any long-term damage to the field of games and learning? What have been the unforeseen consquences?

It's not that they do not experience the distraction, just the effects of being distracted are much less significant.

translation: VGPs had enough attentional resources to focus on the target and the flankers even when the target demanded a higher cognitive load.

A target piece of information is surrounded (flanked) by other non-target information that may or may not be congruent with the target information. For example, Press Left when the center character is an H or F. Press Right when the center character is an O or R.

HHHFHHH OOOFOOO

variations on the test can use shapes, colors, etc.

translation: progressively higher levels of behavioral abstraction are coded in the prefrontal cortex as you move from the back to the front. The back has the lowest levels of abstraction. The front has the highest.

It is also the source of fallacious thinking such as confirmation bias.

This has been one of the big struggles in developing AI. Programmers can code very specific tasks or concepts, but the computer will still not have the abstract/underlying knowledge to apply in a different context. This is where machine learning hopes to make significant advancements towards reaching a strong general AI.

Futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil on hierchical architectures and cognition:

http://blog.ted.com/the-hierarchy-in-your-brain-ray-kurzweil-at-ted2014/

I love the meta-ness of how research into AI is teaching us more about ourselves.

Some absolutely fascinating work involving hierarchical architecture and cognition, and brain mapping has been conducted recently. Give it a read if you are like me, and like to nerd out about such things.

translation: at older ages, tasks that require greater working memory require more attention resources.

Interwebz, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain that this is the assessment that was formerly used in public education settings to determine if students should be placed in Gifted & Talented programs.

All of the studies presented in this paragraph point to different aspects of the same concept: having more attentional resources positively influences a person's ability to learn.

translation: knowing how players are going to move despite misleading motions by the players limbs (I think... I might be wrong on this one)

Translation: training for this task on one angle teaches the brain to solve the problem from that angle.

this is the strength of the connection between two nodes.

better knowledge of probabilities gained by the visual experience held in their brains.

translation: in VGPs, more visual information made it to the neurons that hold the information in working memory until a decision is made. The visual information is "noisy" and it is harder for nVGPs to filter the important information for making decisions.

You're not fooling anyone. We all know that you just wanted to put in an abbreviation that looks like the word "pickle."

How often do we do this in education? If we intentionally do not provide scaffolds are we lauded or lampooned?

Does action gaming create players with better skills, or does attract people that naturally have those skills?

no difference is found in attention between nVGPs and VGPs when external cueing is present.

Action VGPs were able to take in 20% more visual information than nVGPs.

While multi-tasking (as how the general public views the term) has been largely dismissed, this understanding of multi-tasking remains to be true.

A recent study suggests that a lack of sunlight, not time in front of screens, is the likely culprit

Are these kinds of practice be tolerating in a typical public school setting? For me, I know that there is nothing formally stopping me from using such practices, but if I were to be observed in a class where I was using such techniques my efficacy as a educator would be called into question.

This is a very broad hypothesis that will require many different types of data to effectively test.

I do not find it coincidence that the examples that the authors' cite are fields that are usually dismissed in most of academia. These topics naturally present content and tasks that are highly complex and difficult to measure.

The issue of transfer between contents has been highly studied. A recent study (2015) that looks into transfer of knowledge between chess training and mathematics examines how heuristical thinking can be transferred if actively taught. Check out my blogpost for a quick overview of the study.

adj. generally considered or reputed to be

This is all well and good to say, except when the "user's needs and goals" don't align with the standards that we are expected to push.

This is where, I believe, gamification has its greatest potential for a positive impact. Some aspects of life just are inherently not very motivating for me. Folding laundry, for example. My intrinsic motivation is very low (not non-existent, but very low). Gamification can add extrinsic reward elements to a situation where there is very little potential for damage.

There they are! I thought they'd show up to this conversation at some point :)

This is strongly consistent with Deci and Ryan's work in Self-Determination Theory.

I used to do this with a friend at recess time :)

I have always found this to be an interesting question. They can make the gameplay easier (and ultimately less interesting). However, the game designers put them in the game for a reason! How can it be cheating if the designers intentionally put them there?

↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A start

This remains true as long as the majority of the population knows information that is true. What happens when the majority mistakenly believes false information? An unintentional tyranny of the majority suppresses the correct information.

This is a correlation, but as we all know correlation does not imply causation.

Do you feel this is true k-12 education?

While this may be common at the elementary level, I see quite the opposite of this at the high school level. It is very common for high schools to have clubs and organizations around students' interests and passions. As most arts programs bands and theatre are electives or extra-curricular, successful programs survive by creating this nurturing atmosphere.

A slightly off-topic thought I just had; If the Flynn effect continues (gradual increasing of individual's intelligence over time resulting in the renorming of IQ scores every few years), isn't grade inflation going to naturally happen if grades continue to be standards-based? Again, it's off-topic because this type of inflation is not "pernicious."

This statement in and of itself is indicative of a much larger problem. Critical thinking skills should not be developed for the purpose of passing a standardized test. Additionally, different epistemological traditions have differing methodologies for defining truth. Taking a testing model that fits well into one tradition and forcing it into another is an inauthentic methodology for measuring knowledge/skills/understanding.