The serious gaming world continues to take itself pretty, well, seriously. Kids love video games. If we can just combine those games with education, we’ll eliminate the motivation and engagement problems prevalent in schools. Students will be beating down the doors of their classrooms to get a chance to traverse a cool 3-D world where they explode adverbs with diphthong bombs.
This promise to leverage current high tech interest to cure the ills of old-fashioned schooling has a very familiar ring to it. In the first decade of the 20th century, Thomas Edison predicted that you’d need an army with swords and guns to keep excited students OUT of school. They’d be bursting through the doors to watch films, silent ones at the time, laced with educational content. In the 1980’s the early edutainment industry promised that students would be playing educational computer games, acquiring content and mastering skills without even knowing they were learning. I’ve seen that promise repeated in the last year.
The shallow notion that punctuating popular entertainment with curricular content will make learning fun is wrong, and it misses the point. The serious serious (yes, I meant to write it twice) gaming crowd knows and argues that the opportunity to leverage kids’ fascination with video games lies deeper in the experience. In part it’s about understanding why people are willing to persevere in spite of repeated failures to advance in a game. It’s also about dissecting how games provide multiple entry points and levels to accommodate many different skill levels. How can we get our students to keep trying, and how can we support the range of abilities we find in the classroom?
I want to throw some thoughts at that first question about perseverance. Why do kids, and the rest of us, keep trying at some tasks while quickly giving up on others? When do I believe that my effort will pay off? And when do I think that further effort is futile, that I’m just not good at it? Part of the answer to these questions, the research suggests, has to do with stereotype threat. If I perceive myself and believe that others perceive me as good at something, I’m more willing to keep trying at a task to maintain that perception. I don’t want to risk undermining the stereotype of my capability. If I’m “good at math”, for instance, I need to be good at math all the time. On the other hand, if I’m not good at something, for me it could be drawing, I can give up quickly without any loss of identity. Nobody, including me, thought I was good at drawing anyway.
Status clearly plays a role here. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, we (not just kids) value how others see us, and we want to maintain and improve our status. Stereotype threat focuses on the maintenance part. We don’t want to risk a status we already have. But what about establishing a new status? Kids who aren’t necessarily recognized as great gamers are willing to put in the time and effort to succeed. Beginning musicians struggle through endless hours of practice before they have the status of being good. The same is true for athletes, dancers, and anyone who achieves a level of expertise at anything. Even struggling students are experts at some things. Why persevere there but not in math or history?
Maybe status matters here too. Students, some of them anyway, gain social status for the success of persistent effort in some areas, like video games, but not in others, like academics. We need to give students multiple access points to learning and differentiated paths to success. Technology can help do both. Technology can also help students see the incremental value of their effort. Imagine a video game that, instead of listing only the top 10 scores, showed the improvement from your previous scores. You get the satisfaction of growth even if you’re not one of the best. And only 10 can ever be in the top 10.
However, we should also seek ways to award social status for that growth in academically desirable areas. We need to foster a school and peer culture that recognizes and appreciates the effort that leads to incremental improvements. If achieving status matters, we should provide ways for students to establish it in ways that matter to them.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Blogs are for old people.
Here are I am trying to be technologically hip by thinking of something insightful and interesting to share with an unknown audience on a fairly regular (maybe not so regular; it’s been a while) basis, and I keep reading that blogging is dead. Okay, “dead” might be a little strong, but it’s certainly not hip or cutting-edge anymore. The latest nail in the coffin came from The Economist. The magazine noted that blogging has gone corporate. Every company has at least one, and they use their blogs as another way to reach and influence customers. I’m not blazing trails; I’m just one of the pack.
The early blog adopters have moved on to twittering and other emerging means of communicating. A similar migration is happening with Facebook. Once mom and dad join, the kids flee (my son recently unfriended me). Who can blame them (I’m not really in the 17-year old peer group)? As Walmart, Proctor & Gamble, and other staid corporate entities develop their Facebook presences, I may follow. The problem is, wherever the trailblazers go, mom and dad and the corporations will follow. You can’t really escape for long.
So what happens when new becomes old, when cutting edge turns into mundane, when the digital natives leave and the immigrants (like me) move in? Will enough people with sufficient energy stay in the neighborhoods to keep them vibrant? Which neighborhoods will survive and which will whither? It’s going to be very interesting to watch what happens. The speed with which new services arise, grow (or not), and disappear reminds me of biology experiments with fruit flies. Their lifespan is so short, the passing of generations so quick, that you can see the effects of evolution unfold in real time. Keep your eye on the web, but don’t blink. You might miss the life and death of a transformative service.
The early blog adopters have moved on to twittering and other emerging means of communicating. A similar migration is happening with Facebook. Once mom and dad join, the kids flee (my son recently unfriended me). Who can blame them (I’m not really in the 17-year old peer group)? As Walmart, Proctor & Gamble, and other staid corporate entities develop their Facebook presences, I may follow. The problem is, wherever the trailblazers go, mom and dad and the corporations will follow. You can’t really escape for long.
So what happens when new becomes old, when cutting edge turns into mundane, when the digital natives leave and the immigrants (like me) move in? Will enough people with sufficient energy stay in the neighborhoods to keep them vibrant? Which neighborhoods will survive and which will whither? It’s going to be very interesting to watch what happens. The speed with which new services arise, grow (or not), and disappear reminds me of biology experiments with fruit flies. Their lifespan is so short, the passing of generations so quick, that you can see the effects of evolution unfold in real time. Keep your eye on the web, but don’t blink. You might miss the life and death of a transformative service.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
I love standards. I hate standards.
I guess it’s clear from the title of this blog that I have a love/hate relationship with the standards movement. Breaking down curricular content areas into grade level objectives -- in 3rd grade students in Texas are expected, among 40+ other math standards, to “use fraction names and symbols to describe fractional parts of whole objects or sets of objects” -- have done much for clarifying expectations for what students should know when. Enforcing these standards on a state, or even national, level insures that all students should be receiving a rigorous education. Classrooms, schools, states, and the nation can test students on their mastery of these objectives to identify where the instructional system is faltering. Curriculum developers and publishers can create instructional materials to support the expectations. When the system works, it should be beautiful.
Unfortunately, the reality rarely matches the plan. In fact, in some ways, the standards movement may have been more harmful than helpful. Part of the difficulty rests with the lack of a common national standard. It’s expensive to maintain a different set of standards for each state, along with different high quality assessments matched to those standards. Local control (and local standards) is not a bad idea, so long as the funding is available at each local level for successful implementation and support. It’s not particularly efficient for each state or district to develop standards, the particular assessment items to evaluate the acquisition of those standards, and the training and curriculum materials to support the implementation of those objectives. Funding shortages lead to short cuts and misalignments between what we say we expect and what we actually test.
But there’s another important problem with the current standards movement; it has led to the atomization of content and instruction. The list of grade level standards has become just that, a list to be checked off lesson-by-lesson. Instructional lessons carry a list of the individual standards they address. Check, check, check. Next lesson. The coherence that connects and makes sense of the path through the standards gets sacrificed in the urgent need to cover each individual objective. The learning expectation above about fractions cannot be taught successfully in isolation. Students need a coherent understanding of fractions and of number that unites the individual ideas, concepts, and skills described in the standards. Jumping from number lines for whole numbers to pizzas for fractions to place value grids for decimals may meet individual math objectives, but it can leave students feeling that each number form is a different number system. We’re just setting them up for later confusion. Standards are great but not at the expense of the path connecting them.
Good news. NCTM has recognized that 40 to 60 individual, equally-valued math objectives per grade level is a recipe for speed teaching. Each standard on the list gets 5-minutes. Better pay attention. The organization’s Curriculum Focal Points document attempts to identify the core standards upon which others are built. The Report of the National Math Panel reiterated the need to focus on the critical ideas and to build coherent curricula. Last year’s National Research Council report on science education moved in a similar direction. Hopefully, we can sustain the momentum, but there’s plenty of work to do to reconcile my rocky relationships with standards.
Unfortunately, the reality rarely matches the plan. In fact, in some ways, the standards movement may have been more harmful than helpful. Part of the difficulty rests with the lack of a common national standard. It’s expensive to maintain a different set of standards for each state, along with different high quality assessments matched to those standards. Local control (and local standards) is not a bad idea, so long as the funding is available at each local level for successful implementation and support. It’s not particularly efficient for each state or district to develop standards, the particular assessment items to evaluate the acquisition of those standards, and the training and curriculum materials to support the implementation of those objectives. Funding shortages lead to short cuts and misalignments between what we say we expect and what we actually test.
But there’s another important problem with the current standards movement; it has led to the atomization of content and instruction. The list of grade level standards has become just that, a list to be checked off lesson-by-lesson. Instructional lessons carry a list of the individual standards they address. Check, check, check. Next lesson. The coherence that connects and makes sense of the path through the standards gets sacrificed in the urgent need to cover each individual objective. The learning expectation above about fractions cannot be taught successfully in isolation. Students need a coherent understanding of fractions and of number that unites the individual ideas, concepts, and skills described in the standards. Jumping from number lines for whole numbers to pizzas for fractions to place value grids for decimals may meet individual math objectives, but it can leave students feeling that each number form is a different number system. We’re just setting them up for later confusion. Standards are great but not at the expense of the path connecting them.
Good news. NCTM has recognized that 40 to 60 individual, equally-valued math objectives per grade level is a recipe for speed teaching. Each standard on the list gets 5-minutes. Better pay attention. The organization’s Curriculum Focal Points document attempts to identify the core standards upon which others are built. The Report of the National Math Panel reiterated the need to focus on the critical ideas and to build coherent curricula. Last year’s National Research Council report on science education moved in a similar direction. Hopefully, we can sustain the momentum, but there’s plenty of work to do to reconcile my rocky relationships with standards.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
What Before How
I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about multiplication. Keith Devlin, a Stanford mathematician, author, and NPR Math Guy, has created a swirling controversy through his Devlin’s Angle column on the Mathematical Association of America website (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devangle.html). Last summer Devlin sparked a debate by exhorting teachers to stop defining multiplication as repeated addition. His follow-up articles this summer fanned the flames and ignited a raging firestorm in the blogosphere. 4x3 can readily be rewritten by the repeated addition of 4+4+4. But what does repeated addition look like for, say, 3/4 * 5/8? It’s a challenge to articulate a definition that is both accessible to kids in elementary school and still true as the numbers become more complex.
I’ve enjoyed reading the unfolding arguments. It’s a healthy and important discussion, because determining what we should teach is essential before we decide how to teach it. Designing technology to more effectively instruct and engage students in a misconception or limited explanation shouldn’t be the plan. I fear that too much of the “innovation” and promise of technology doesn’t go deep enough into the roots of why our kids aren’t succeeding. It’s far too easy to take the existing curricular canon and put it into a glossy technological wrapper and be satisfied that kids “like” using it. We need to push ourselves further.
So, the search for a new way to define multiplication continues. When we have it, we can devise ways for technology to help visualize it, explore it, practice it at appropriate levels, and connect it to the content that came before and follows. It’s rigorous work, but if we get it right we can truly make a lasting and meaningful difference with kids’ understanding. It’s worth the extra effort.
I’ve enjoyed reading the unfolding arguments. It’s a healthy and important discussion, because determining what we should teach is essential before we decide how to teach it. Designing technology to more effectively instruct and engage students in a misconception or limited explanation shouldn’t be the plan. I fear that too much of the “innovation” and promise of technology doesn’t go deep enough into the roots of why our kids aren’t succeeding. It’s far too easy to take the existing curricular canon and put it into a glossy technological wrapper and be satisfied that kids “like” using it. We need to push ourselves further.
So, the search for a new way to define multiplication continues. When we have it, we can devise ways for technology to help visualize it, explore it, practice it at appropriate levels, and connect it to the content that came before and follows. It’s rigorous work, but if we get it right we can truly make a lasting and meaningful difference with kids’ understanding. It’s worth the extra effort.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
First Pitch
Yes, I’m throwing out the first pitch at tonight’s Red Sox game against the Angels. My wife won the prize at a charity auction and gave it to me for my 50th birthday. It’s an incredible gift, and one that allows me to reflect directly on some of the research I’ve been reading and writing about -- particularly the research on anxiety and performance.
Ever since my wife presented me with the gift last fall, friends, family, and strangers have inquired about my fitness and ability. “You know, it’s pretty far from pitcher’s mound to home plate. Can he throw it that far?” “Has he been practicing?” My cousin sent me a link to a YouTube video of a mayor throwing the first pitch into the dugout. “You don’t want to be like THAT guy.” Thanks everyone for the pressure.
I’m no athlete, so I’ve been playing a little catch. Sixty feet, six inches. When I’m just throwing the ball with my wife or son, it doesn’t seem like a problem. But practice is different from high stakes performance. Throwing in an empty field is different from throwing under the gaze of 35,000 fans. Okay, so none of those fans finding their seats and buying their hot dogs will actually be watching me; they’ll still be there. Will anxiety about not screwing up dominate my thinking and make me forget how to throw? Is this how some kids feel when they’re getting ready for high stakes testing?
I’ve got it easy. Whether I bounce the ball into home plate or throw a looping strike, I’ll give a satisfied smile and a fist pump. They only take pictures of me, not where the ball goes. Wish me luck.
Ever since my wife presented me with the gift last fall, friends, family, and strangers have inquired about my fitness and ability. “You know, it’s pretty far from pitcher’s mound to home plate. Can he throw it that far?” “Has he been practicing?” My cousin sent me a link to a YouTube video of a mayor throwing the first pitch into the dugout. “You don’t want to be like THAT guy.” Thanks everyone for the pressure.
I’m no athlete, so I’ve been playing a little catch. Sixty feet, six inches. When I’m just throwing the ball with my wife or son, it doesn’t seem like a problem. But practice is different from high stakes performance. Throwing in an empty field is different from throwing under the gaze of 35,000 fans. Okay, so none of those fans finding their seats and buying their hot dogs will actually be watching me; they’ll still be there. Will anxiety about not screwing up dominate my thinking and make me forget how to throw? Is this how some kids feel when they’re getting ready for high stakes testing?
I’ve got it easy. Whether I bounce the ball into home plate or throw a looping strike, I’ll give a satisfied smile and a fist pump. They only take pictures of me, not where the ball goes. Wish me luck.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Digital nomads with their heads (and data) in the cloud
My son Jake, a rising high school senior, doesn’t have his “own” computer. Instead, he seems to have everyone’s. At school he moves from the computers in the computer lab to those in the student center to those in the film studio. He emails documents to himself or carries work on a flash drive. At home, well, at home no computer is safe. I’ll open my work laptop and find FirstClass open, my son’s Facebook page on the browser, and a couple of homework documents on the desktop. “Do you need any of this stuff?” I ask. “No, I got it.” My computer was handiest; he used it and pushed his work into the Internet cloud to be retrieved at the next available machine. When we travel Jake always manages to find someone or someplace with a computer, iPhone, or some other cloud-friendly device. He connects with friends, moves pictures to Facebook, and checks tennis scores. Welcome to the world of the digital nomad.
Don’t get me wrong, Jake wants his own laptop. He needs a base (we have an aging iMac at home that is “his” in general), but his ability to exist in the cloud frees him from that base (making anything “his” at any moment). And the shrinking size of computers and growing power of cell phones offer the promise that maybe the base can move with him as well. Or at least be available wherever he goes. For him, with the exception of a few specialized applications, school work has no boundaries. Any computer in our house, at school, at a public internet station, or anywhere will do.
As more and more work, student and teacher, exists in the cloud, the opportunity to do something really interesting with it grows because we can all access the cloud and what it contains. Despite my own experiences, direct and vicarious, with mash-ups and remixes, I’ve been slow to see the potential of the collaborative Web 2.0 promise. I’m finally beginning to see the light, but it’s fraught with questions and issues we still need to figure out.
Let me give a specific example: We are about to launch a new program, Timeliner XE. The original TimeLiner 1.0 in 1986 turned Apple IIs and early PC’s connected to dot matrix printers into simple systems for generating banner time lines with ease. Type in events in any order, and the software created a proportionally-spaced chronology that could be printed out sideways on the scrolled paper of those early printers. Simple and sweet. Over the years and releases, the program added the ability to print posters, save as html, create slide shows, and add graphics, links, and other media. This new version takes a huge leap forward. Timeliner XE, built with Adobe Flex and Air, contains a built in browser that enables users to gather, organize, and present information within the same application. In addition to time-related events, any sequential information -- like the life cycle, the steps in a research project, or the plot of a book -- can be managed in the program. It’s very cool.
So what happens to the time lines and sequences that students and teachers create? While having thousands of students create their family histories or story arcs for Tuck Everlasting each year is nice, can’t we take their efforts further by putting the work into the cloud? Imagine a Day-in-the-Life time line that students from around the world contribute to. Each contribution gets its own category and color code so that they can be distinguished and turned on and off. How about collaborative time lines highlighting the flow of information and technology around the world as it happens? What might it look like for users to stand on the shoulders of previous work rather than simply repeating what others have already done? We’re having fun imagining the possibilities.
We’re also straining to understand the implications. What student information is private? Is it okay to share a student’s day in the life in the cloud? Can other users change someone’s time line? What about ownership and attribution? How do we make sure that copyright is respected in what gets posted? It is exciting, but it’s also complicated.
Many of our students are already living in the cloud. It’s happening even as the rules are being created and understood. We’re working on it. I hope you’ll be part of the unfolding story.
Don’t get me wrong, Jake wants his own laptop. He needs a base (we have an aging iMac at home that is “his” in general), but his ability to exist in the cloud frees him from that base (making anything “his” at any moment). And the shrinking size of computers and growing power of cell phones offer the promise that maybe the base can move with him as well. Or at least be available wherever he goes. For him, with the exception of a few specialized applications, school work has no boundaries. Any computer in our house, at school, at a public internet station, or anywhere will do.
As more and more work, student and teacher, exists in the cloud, the opportunity to do something really interesting with it grows because we can all access the cloud and what it contains. Despite my own experiences, direct and vicarious, with mash-ups and remixes, I’ve been slow to see the potential of the collaborative Web 2.0 promise. I’m finally beginning to see the light, but it’s fraught with questions and issues we still need to figure out.
Let me give a specific example: We are about to launch a new program, Timeliner XE. The original TimeLiner 1.0 in 1986 turned Apple IIs and early PC’s connected to dot matrix printers into simple systems for generating banner time lines with ease. Type in events in any order, and the software created a proportionally-spaced chronology that could be printed out sideways on the scrolled paper of those early printers. Simple and sweet. Over the years and releases, the program added the ability to print posters, save as html, create slide shows, and add graphics, links, and other media. This new version takes a huge leap forward. Timeliner XE, built with Adobe Flex and Air, contains a built in browser that enables users to gather, organize, and present information within the same application. In addition to time-related events, any sequential information -- like the life cycle, the steps in a research project, or the plot of a book -- can be managed in the program. It’s very cool.
So what happens to the time lines and sequences that students and teachers create? While having thousands of students create their family histories or story arcs for Tuck Everlasting each year is nice, can’t we take their efforts further by putting the work into the cloud? Imagine a Day-in-the-Life time line that students from around the world contribute to. Each contribution gets its own category and color code so that they can be distinguished and turned on and off. How about collaborative time lines highlighting the flow of information and technology around the world as it happens? What might it look like for users to stand on the shoulders of previous work rather than simply repeating what others have already done? We’re having fun imagining the possibilities.
We’re also straining to understand the implications. What student information is private? Is it okay to share a student’s day in the life in the cloud? Can other users change someone’s time line? What about ownership and attribution? How do we make sure that copyright is respected in what gets posted? It is exciting, but it’s also complicated.
Many of our students are already living in the cloud. It’s happening even as the rules are being created and understood. We’re working on it. I hope you’ll be part of the unfolding story.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Brain Doping
A recent edition of Economist magazine had a very interesting editorial and article about the coming wave of cognitive enhancement drugs that augur the possibility of some tough ethical dilemmas ahead. As research uncovers chemical paths to improving memory and mental processing power for those afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive disabilities, what happens to those who seek to use those chemicals for a brain boost rather than just a neurological repair? Many of us already use over-the-counter drugs, like caffeine, to enhance general alertness or to help study for a test. Where do we draw the line?
Already, it seems, a surprising number of intelligent folks are stepping well over the caffeine line. The scientific journal Nature surveyed its readers, a pretty knowledgeable crowd, about their use of cognitive enhancers (Nature 452, 674-675 (2008)). Of the 1,400 respondents to the poll, one in five “said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory.” Does that mean that 20% of Nature readers are cognitive cheaters?
Maybe I’m overreacting, but if we found that 20% of Sports Illustrated readers used prescription drugs, like steroids, for non-medical reasons to enhance athletic performance, I wager many of us would feel that those folks were doing something unfair. How should we think about “natural” intellectual ability versus one that is artificially enhanced? Is it cheating to use drugs to help you study longer or more readily recall what you’ve learned? What about the student who uses a beta-blocker to reduce the effects of anxiety before a test? Are non-prescription boosters okay but not ones that require a doctor’s permission?
I’m not sure I know how to answer these questions yet. If only the well-informed and well-to-do have access to these brain boosters, then I do think there’s a problem. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. On the other hand, improved intellectual ability seems like a good thing in general. Shouldn’t we encourage it whenever we can? Except when it’s unfair or unhealthy. But who decides that? It seems like a good debate is brewing. I look forward to participating in it. I may need a cup of coffee to keep me awake to read all the relevant research and opinions.
Already, it seems, a surprising number of intelligent folks are stepping well over the caffeine line. The scientific journal Nature surveyed its readers, a pretty knowledgeable crowd, about their use of cognitive enhancers (Nature 452, 674-675 (2008)). Of the 1,400 respondents to the poll, one in five “said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory.” Does that mean that 20% of Nature readers are cognitive cheaters?
Maybe I’m overreacting, but if we found that 20% of Sports Illustrated readers used prescription drugs, like steroids, for non-medical reasons to enhance athletic performance, I wager many of us would feel that those folks were doing something unfair. How should we think about “natural” intellectual ability versus one that is artificially enhanced? Is it cheating to use drugs to help you study longer or more readily recall what you’ve learned? What about the student who uses a beta-blocker to reduce the effects of anxiety before a test? Are non-prescription boosters okay but not ones that require a doctor’s permission?
I’m not sure I know how to answer these questions yet. If only the well-informed and well-to-do have access to these brain boosters, then I do think there’s a problem. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. On the other hand, improved intellectual ability seems like a good thing in general. Shouldn’t we encourage it whenever we can? Except when it’s unfair or unhealthy. But who decides that? It seems like a good debate is brewing. I look forward to participating in it. I may need a cup of coffee to keep me awake to read all the relevant research and opinions.
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