139 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2017
    1. The evaluator must understand inquiry to know what to observe in the classroom

      Microphone dropped.

    2. Problems are sure to arise if the formal and informal evaluation of teachers is inconsistent with the essential elements of inquiry.

      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.)

    3. students who achieve a deep understanding of science content through inquiry usually do well on conventional tests

      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.

    4. Are the criteria for selection based on standards (national or state) that have a strong inquiry component?

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

    5. Fostering “communities of learners” within schools will create a norm of experimentation and evaluation that will apply to many other innovations

      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.

  2. Jul 2016
    1. Playgrids

      Why the term "playgrid?"

    2. with a range of settings for commenting and moderation

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

  3. May 2016
    1. So has general interest

      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.

    1. A game can easily be made fascinating enough to put over the dullest facts.

      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.

    2. produce some of the most powerful, persistent, and problematic lessons about race inAmerican culture

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

    1. 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.

    1. learning to be a game designer helps one become a better game player

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

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    1. Or even this semester

      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.

  4. Apr 2016
    1. Something I plan to check out for sure

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

    2. How credit is distributed for projects that are picked up by another person?

      The games can be credited with multiple designers upon publishing.

    3. educational ecosystem

      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).

    4. Do you think there are some other routes that they could be using to draw in more interaction? What would you suggest?

      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.

    5. What are some of the limitations of the site regarding getting teams working together?

      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.

    6. Are you going to try again?

      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.

    7. Do you think if you would have promoted it on their other social media there would have been more?

      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.

    8. Backgrounds, experience, careers, locations?

      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).

    9. Is there a place to provide feedback on the puzzle designs of the community?

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

    10. Has anything else evolved from this?

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

    11. Does the site also have “breakout” games included in to for the educators? For example, to access the independant games is there any kind of puzzle you have to solve?

      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.

    12. Did you purchase one for your class?

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

    13. what it would take to get others greatly involved with your efforts to create a music themed "breakout"?

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

    14. diction and V/O

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

    1. Affinity Space Project

      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.

    1. Brontosaurus was renamed Apatosaurus

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

    1. word game

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

    2. fighting, conquering, attacking, inhibiting, and blocking

      How do you feel about cooperative games like Pandemic?

    1. what those contingent yet consequential glimpses may mean for future course design and facilitation efforts

      @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.

    2. emergent expressions of learning

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

    3. glimpses

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

    4. animals began to demonstrate their self-awareness

      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

    1. musttakerequire-mentsbeforepursuingadvancedtopics

      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.

    1. I have become quite picky about my articles

      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.

    1. PAHSIT

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

    2. expert learning practices at the intersection of academic discourse and emergent social collaboration

      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.

    1. just as students are not given books and told to learn inde-pendently, games cannot succeed as stand-alone solutions to education; there must be a facilitator present to guide learning and ensure (a) that the information being taught is indeed generalizable outside the context of the game and (b) that deeper, metacognitive gains are attained as a result of socially constructed game play. We recommend combining pedagogical methods to better gather data regarding the effectiveness of video games as teaching tools and examining how gaming combined with instructional facilitation by a master teacher affects engagement, student behavior, and overall academic achievement.

      There it is!

    2. social interactions that make learning “situated” must be accounted for before the educational affordances of games can be fully described

      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.

    3. f work can be fun, games can also be work (consider, e.g., professional sports).

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

    4. game play may need to be inves-tigated as situated learning

      Now they're starting on a better track.

    1. it is not the technology but the pedagogy that matters

      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.

    2. Improvisations do not occur in isolation

      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.

    3. these veteran educators had extensive experience and knowledge of instructional practice. This familiarity afforded innovative technology designs and social arrangements

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

    4. While Pratt designed Kingdom Quest so that players earned points “to unlock additional powers and perils”, more importantly, “It was enjoyment of the game and dedication to teammates that motivated students – not the points”

      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).

    5. we advocate design-based research utilising gameful learning as a construct to map the cohabited spaces of teachers’ improvisational teaching-as-play within other disciplines, gaming environments, and settings.

    6. gameful learning is a useful construct for future research attempting to illuminate the qualities of teachers’ game facilitation motives as phenomena distinct from game characteristics (i.e., mechanics like points)

      I like this shift of focus.

    7. Elements of gameful learning

      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.

    8. Rather, it described1 jazz musicians improvisin

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

    9. There was a combination of strain, expectation, enthusiasm, and some fear in the air. The collective nature of our endeavor involved not only that everybody had to ... play within the overall changing texture, but that each participant also had to achieve a level of feeling at ease doing so. I remembered Robin Engelman’s words: “I have experienced the feeling of becoming [what] I have been playing... the feeling of literally losing your identity”. ... [P]eriods of inactivity, dubitation, and weakness interrelated with moments of resolution and fiery activity. There was a nutritious dialogue going on. We were opening a realm of dialogue and exchange. We were building a social reality and a culture.... our own version of the world. [Odria, (2011), pp.55–56]

      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.

    1. mired in approaches that oftentreat students as passive agents who need to learn content matched to school disciplines,organized through curricul

      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.

    1. the use ofleaderboards

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

    2. When we forget how to play, play looks frivolous.

      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)

    3. abandoning leaderboards

      Well done!

    4. “unlock”them as students completed quests

      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.

    5. Quests were designed aroundGardner’s (2011)Multiple Intelligences

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

    6. audio/visual learner

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

    7. “How much XP do you think that would be worth”, and we start tocommunicate value. Likewise, students can challenge my ascribing of XP by honestlysaying a project had too much XP or too little for their time

      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.

    1. an expression of agency contrary to the often disempowering position that constrains many K-12 and higher education practitioners

      This statement resonates with me very deeply right now.

  5. Mar 2016
    1. Since it was only the two of us playing she was able to patiently describe the moves as well as some the basic strategies.

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

    2. The players often become quite loud and there is much banter between the opposing teams

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

    1. but it was obvious that the game designers felt like the girl character needed to be showing more skin / sexuality than the boy

      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.

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    1. Even though I know it was only a game, I felt bad that I chose the dark side.

      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.

    2. Players get to decide which life skills to gather throughout the game. The rule book briefly touches on different types of Jedis, but isn’t prescriptive. I would like to have seen more reasoning as to why I might choose one skill over another. For example I leaned more towards the skill of intuition, while Ben tended to chose logic. However, at the end of the game it didn’t matter what kind of skills we had, it only mattered how many total skills we gathered. I think it would be more meaningful to chose skills in order to become a specific type of Jedi over simply accumulating skills.

      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.

    1. In the meantime, I will continue to stretch my own skills by playing against him

      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.

    2. I have found in the past that I’m more likely to win against my husband if we are playing while out and about (I’d say I’m less likely to be distracted by my surroundings than he is).

      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?

    1. game's design is well done and when players that I encounter show their appreciation of its design

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

    1. Although seldomconsidered in conjunction with action gameplay, meditative activities such as mind-bodytraining and eastern relaxation technique alsoact in part by enhancing selective attention(Lutz et al. 2008, Tang & Posner 2009).Whether these two rather different treatmentsachieve their effects through comparableneural modulation may be a fruitful avenue ofinvestigation in the future.

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

  6. Feb 2016
    1. they actually teach gamers to learn

      John Dewey expounds upon this idea in Experience and Education.

    2. But the positive effects are almost completely neglected

      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."

    1. I did not provide recommendations about how annotators should create their Hypothesis handle.

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

    1. Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease," Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads

      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?

    1. the enhanced attentional controldocumented earlier is not, in this view, theproximal cause of the superior performanceof VGPs, i.e., an end in and of itself. Instead,it is a means to an end, with that end beingthe development of more generalizable knowl-edge as one is faced with new tasks or newenvironment
    2. It is not always the casethat VGPs show greater suppression of dis-tractors. Rather, distractor processing appearsto be greater in VGPs than in NVGPs underconditions of relatively low load. Under suchconditions, task difficulty is sufficiently low forVGPs to remain efficient on the primary taskand at the same time still be able to processdistractors
    3. Although some of thesebenefits could be driven initially by changesin resources, the fact that they can last forfive months or longer suggests more profoundand long-lasting changes in representationthan what is typically afforded by attentionalresource
    4. much evidence demonstrates thataction video game play leads to not only en-hanced resources, but also a more intelligentallocation of these resources given the goals athand.
    5. VGPs may better employ exec-utive strategies to reduce the effects of distrac-tion.

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

    6. It is unlikely that action game play to-tally obliterates the attentional blink, but thesedata suggest a much faster rate of attentionalrecovery in VGPs.
    7. VGPs’ blink is much lesspronounced, with some VGPs failing to showany blink
    8. VGPs continued to show effects of flanker iden-tity even for relatively high-load target tasks,thus suggesting the presence of greater atten-tional resources.

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

    9. simple flanker compatibility tasks

      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.

    10. increasingly higher levels of behav-ioral abstraction being coded as one moves fromcaudal to rostral locations along the prefrontalcortex

      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.

    11. the abil-ity to enhance neural processing selectively byallocating more resources is central to behav-ior optimization, but it depends fundamen-tally on an internal understanding of whichneural pool is important to augment at eachpoint in time
    12. In contrast, appropriate abstractionallows hierarchical architectures to captureregularity across variations in task and stimuli.

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

    13. Learning theory hasshown that discriminative models require lessdata to learn the observed relationships butare task specific

      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.

    14. hierarchicalarchitectures

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

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

    15. machine learning

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

    16. hierarchical architecture in human action

      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.

    17. Finally, having greater resourcesdoesnotsystematicallyguaranteemoreefficientlearning; resource allocation needs to be guidedby the presence of structured knowledge thathelps select where useful information lies
    18. working-memory training results in en-hanced recruitment of the frontoparietal net-work associated with top-down attentional con-trol

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

    19. Raven’s Ad-vanced Progressive Matrices

      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.

    20. much evidence in-dicates that action video game play improvestop-down resource allocation, thus leading tobetter selective attention and enhanced pre-cision in representations
    21. resource allocation acts as a key gate-way to learning by refining the distinction be-tween signal and noise and enhancing the qual-ity and precision of the to-be-learned infor-mation

      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.

    22. An increase in resources may therefore enablelearners to achieve greater asymptotic perfor-mance (more learning capacity), or even fasterlearning, because critical distinctions will bemore accessible to those learners with greaterresources.
    23. devel-oping representations that are invariant to irrel-evant internal limb motions

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

    24. The pattern of synapticweights that optimizes performance on thistask is a simple instantiation of a discriminantfunction and thus is completely specific tothe trained reference angle

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

    25. synaptic weights

      this is the strength of the connection between two nodes.

    26. moreaccurate posterior distribution.

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

    27. an increase in the connectivity between themodel’s sensory layer, where neurons code fordirection of motion, and its integration layer,where neurons accumulate the informationthey receive over time from the sensory layeruntil a criterion is reached for decision andrespons

      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.

    28. p(c|e)

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

    29. All require subjects to make a deci-sion based on a limited amount of noisy data

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

    30. Rather than hy-pothesizing distinct mechanisms for each taskimproved, it seems more parsimonious to con-sider one common cause: learning to learn
    31. A key question concerns whether the effectsof action video game play are causal or areinstead reflective of population bias, whereinaction gaming tends to attract individualswith inherently superior skills

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

    32. when attentionis driven in a bottom-up fashion (i.e., by exoge-nous cueing) no differences have been foundbetween VGPs and NVGPs

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

    33. the fact that there was no difference in accuracyin any of these tasks suggests that the differencesalso cannot be attributed to differences in crite-ria, or VGPs being “trigger-happy” or willingto trade reductions in accuracy for increases inspeed
    34. many aspects of top-down attentionalcontrol such as selective attention, dividedattention, and sustained attention are enhancedin VGPs
    35. Despite faster reaction times, accu-racies were left unchanged, establishing that ac-tion game play does not result in trading speedfor accuracy.
    36. Action video game play sped up reactiontimes, and this was true whether the task was inthe visual or the auditory modality.
    37. Wefound that action game play enhances the rateat which information accumulates over timeby∼20% as compared with control partici-pants

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

    38. Another cognitive domain enhanced by ac-tion games is spatial cognition
    39. Several studies have alsodocumented enhanced task-switching abilitiesin VGPs, meaning they pay less of a price forswitching from one task to another

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

    40. VGPs have also been documented to bettertheir nongamer peers on several aspects ofcognition such as visual short-term memory(Anderson et al. 2011, Boot et al. 2008), spa-tial cognition (Greenfield 2009), multitasking(Green & Bavelier 2006a), and some aspects ofexecutive function
    41. contrary to the folk belief that screentime is bad for eyesight, action video game playappears to enhance how well one sees

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

    42. action video game play retrains corticalnetworks such that each layer of the process-ing hierarchy makes better use of the informa-tion it receives from earlier layers
    43. This difference suggests achange in the dynamics of the visual system:VGPs can resolve events at a higher temporalfrequency
    44. Action video game play enhances the spatial andtemporal resolution of vision as well as its sen-sitivity
    45. the fact that VGPs best their nonaction game–playing peers (NVGPs) on standard laboratorytests that are quite dissimilar to video gamesbegs further investigation
    46. Although no new academic concepts orfacts were taught by these games, they allowedthe children to develop skills, such as attentionand control, that underlie the ability to learn inschool.

      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.

    47. ideo games teachis the capability to quickly learn to performnew tasks

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

    48. A handful of behavioral in-terventions have recently been noted to in-duce more general learning than that typicallydocumented in the learning literature. Theselearning paradigms are usually more complexthan standard laboratory manipulations, remi-niscent of the “enriched environment effects”seen in animal rearing (Renner & Rosenzweig1987), and they typically correspond to real-lifeexperiences, such as aerobic activity (Hillmanet al. 2008), athletic training (Erickson &Kramer 2009), musical training (Schellenberg2004), mind-body training (Lutz et al. 2008,Tang & Posner 2009), working memory train-ing ( Jaeggi et al. 2008, Klingberg 2010), and,the focus of this article, action video game train-ing (Green & Bavelier 2003, Spence & Feng2010).

      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.

    49. Thus, for all practical purposes, thespecificity that typically accompanies learningis a curse.

      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.

    50. putative

      adj. generally considered or reputed to be

    1. he user's needs and goals are the primary consideration at every sta

      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.

    2. that if the task was already uninteresting, reward systems did not reduce internal motivation, as there was little internal motivation to start with. The authors concluded that "the issue is how to facilitate people's understanding the importance of the activity to themselves and thus internalizing its regulation so they will be self-motivated to perform it" (

      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.

    3. y Deci, Koestner, andRyan

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

    4. . One significant problem with this model of gamification is that it can reduce the internal motivation that the user has for the activity, as it replaces internal motivation with external motivation. If, however, the game design elements can be made meaningful to the user through information,then internal motivation can be improved as there is less need to emphasize external rewar

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

  7. gamesandlearning.files.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.files.wordpress.com
    1. kidstaking on identities from the game

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

    2. Does Using “Cheats” Make a Player a Cheater?

      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?

    3. heat codes

      ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A start

    1. wiki enthusiasts argue that giving all members of a larger community the ability to correctany mistakes will ultimately lead to more accurate information.

      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.

    2. he emergence of systems-basedthinking has arisen hand in hand with the development of digital simulations.

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

    1. viewed more as a threat to ―safety‖ than a means of accessing important, decentralized knowledge systems

      Do you feel this is true k-12 education?

    2. Children in school rarely share a common passionate endeavor

      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.

  8. Jan 2016
    1. grade inflation

      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."

    1. critical thinking skills that are not necessarily designed for passing standardizedtests

      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.