Persistent Pondering http://persistentpondering.posterous.com Where do social action, art, music, technology, media, pop culture, and most importantly, student needs intersect? posterous.com Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:34:00 -0700 Video Games Transforming Education: Infographic | SiliconANGLE http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-transforming-education-infographi http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-transforming-education-infographi
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Interesting infographic. I like that it's broken down to specific skills and disciplines.

I also concur with the need to curb too much gaming, but video games in education cannot be denied as a powerful learning tool.

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Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:47:00 -0700 Context | Institute of Play http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/context-institute-of-play http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/context-institute-of-play

Many social institutions are challenged to fulfill their missions in the complex new global reality arising as a result of advancements in digital technology.

Take educational institutions, for example. A report released in 2009 by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University and the Alternative Schools Network in Chicago found that U.S. schools are having serious difficulties engaging and retaining students, let alone educating them to succeed in today’s world. The report found that about 7,000 students drop out of high school each day, 1.2 million per year, with grave implications for our economy, our political system and our society.

Similarly, a report released by the National Conference on Citizenship in 2008 found that 55% of people under 30 were unengaged in local or national political processes.

Whereas many American social institutions are suffering a crisis of disengagement, digital and other social media are attracting audiences in unprecedented numbers. These audiences are participating in new kinds of forums that supersede traditionally differentiated modes of activity and locations—like work-play, politics-entertainment, school-home, global-local. These audiences are creating, sharing, mixing, modifying, searching out, curating, critiquing and commenting on content that inspires them, in order to build new kinds of communities and ecosystems of engagement that follow them wherever they go.

The Institute acknowledges these trends as part of a new reality, replete with challenges and opportunities. In this new reality the scope and skill set of engaged citizenship is widened, and many traditional modes for learning, problem solving and participation are rendered less relevant.

It is therefore essential that social institutions create new culturally relevant modes of engagement and models for learning, problem solving and participation. Without them, society will lack a foundation for educated, engaged, empowered citizenship.

This is the context for the Institute’s work. We believe that games, game design and the principles that underlie them have vital roles to play in engaging twenty-first century audiences, as well as in building critical skills like systems thinking, creative problem solving, collaboration, empathy and innovation. We believe they have a unique relevance as social tools to rebuild the foundations of citizenship.

Our belief is grounded in recent educational research and supported by experts, as well as by important thinkers throughout the ages. In this section we offer some additional resources to anyone interested in learning more.

Why gaming in education? How can we not?

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Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:59:00 -0700 ‪National STEM Video Game Challenge 2010 Youth Prize Winners‬‏ - YouTube http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/national-stem-video-game-challenge-2010-youth http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/national-stem-video-game-challenge-2010-youth

Amazing! I feel so behind!

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Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:53:00 -0700 National STEM Video Game Challenge http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/national-stem-video-game-challenge http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/national-stem-video-game-challenge
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Tue, 12 Jul 2011 07:59:00 -0700 Top 100 Learning Game Resources | Upside Learning Blog http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/top-100-learning-game-resources-upside-learni http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/top-100-learning-game-resources-upside-learni
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Thank you, Paul Oh for this awesome resource! Lots to learn here.

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Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:04:00 -0700 Newell sees no distinction 'between games and educational games' | Joystiq http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/newell-sees-no-distinction-between-games-and http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/newell-sees-no-distinction-between-games-and
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Are legislators paying attention? Administrators? How many more people need to say this for there to be real change in more schools?

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Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:55:00 -0700 What do you love? by Google http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/what-do-you-love-by-google-gaming-in-educatio http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/what-do-you-love-by-google-gaming-in-educatio

Cool mashup of browsing various media.

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Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:57:00 -0700 TEDxManitoba - Rick Van Eck - The Gaming of Educational Transformation http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/tedxmanitoba-rick-van-eck-the-gaming-of-educa http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/tedxmanitoba-rick-van-eck-the-gaming-of-educa

More on the why games work in education. Great overview of theoretical and pedagogical foundations of game design and its place in education.

 

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Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:34:00 -0700 The Curfew http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/the-curfew http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/the-curfew
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Best Educational Game from Games for Change. This might be the one to really get me playing.

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Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:21:00 -0700 Three Qualities That Make Video Games Better Teachers Than Teachers | EdReach http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/three-qualities-that-make-video-games-better http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/three-qualities-that-make-video-games-better
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We must not fight this notion, but we should accept this and develop strategies to better engage and educate our students.

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Sat, 25 Jun 2011 14:12:00 -0700 GameSalad - Game creation for everyone ™ - GameSalad Arcade http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/gamesalad-game-creation-for-everyone-gamesala http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/gamesalad-game-creation-for-everyone-gamesala
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WOW!!! This looks great. Gotta play.

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Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:28:00 -0700 Video Games and Storytelling http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-and-storytelling http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-and-storytelling

A must-have discussion when considering gaming curriculum in the classroom.

 

 

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Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:22:00 -0700 Video Games and Learning http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-and-learning http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/video-games-and-learning

It's a few years old, but here's a great discussion of the power of video games and learning. I am intrigued with tangential learning. Perhaps, this is the key.

 

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Thu, 05 May 2011 10:17:00 -0700 Why Videogames are Such a Force in Learning, Civics, and Social Innovation on Vimeo http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/why-videogames-are-such-a-force-in-learning-c http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/why-videogames-are-such-a-force-in-learning-c

As gamers play, they build structures to succeed. They build communities to meet their goals. They gain access to knowledge to complete their missions. This transfers to civics. BUT, we have to create environments where they feel empowered to have a mission, opportunities to collaborate for planning and gaining knowledge, and support to grow their identities and voice. They have to care to want to make a change.

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Thu, 05 May 2011 07:58:00 -0700 Kids as Resources to Inform and Transform Curriculum http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/kids-as-resources-to-inform-and-transform-cur http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/kids-as-resources-to-inform-and-transform-cur

Loved this video for its honesty. Constance Steinkuhler cuts to the chase and stops me from making similar missteps. Gaming engages, but it's not about knowing tons about the games. It's not about being gaming experts. It's about knowing how to bridge gaming to learning. Knowing how to adapt their idenitities as gamers and what it means to their identities at school, at home, at work. It's about knowing and understanding our students' cultural wealth. What are their funds of knowlege? They are highly engaged in gaming. Why? What do games make them want to learn? Find out. Use students as a resource to integrate meaningful ideas into curriculum.

It's scary to walk into a classroom without a whole lot of structure, but isn't this how we approach life? We find something we like. We ask questions. We seek answers. We challenge ourselves to make sense of it in our worlds. We can learn more from our students than we think. We just have to be brave enough to do it.

 

Online Games and Interest-Driven Learning are Transformative for Today's Young Learners from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

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Tue, 03 May 2011 07:27:00 -0700 Please Take this Gaming Survey http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/please-take-this-gaming-survey http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/please-take-this-gaming-survey

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Sun, 01 May 2011 19:50:00 -0700 Digital world re-shapes learning | WBEZ http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/digital-world-re-shapes-learning-wbez http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/digital-world-re-shapes-learning-wbez
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Chicago Quest...Another school with gaming-based core principles.

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Sun, 01 May 2011 19:39:00 -0700 Game for anything. Is this the the digital future of learning? http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/game-for-anything-is-this-the-the-digital-fut http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/game-for-anything-is-this-the-the-digital-fut
Solving the puzzle

Solving the puzzle

IMAGINE a grade 6 classroom, silent but for the frenzied tapping of keyboards and the beeps and pings of screen games. It's an intense silence, more familiar to parents when children are immersed in Halo — or texting at the dinner table.

But in this case they are studying a core subject at Quest to Learn, an innovative new school in New York City. Here, digital games are embraced as highly effective learning tools and the curriculum has been turned on its head: every subject is a puzzle or game to be solved.

While pupils read books and use pencils on occasion, playing and making games is paramount. The free public school's approach is believed to be a world first — and the students love it.

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Quest to Learn "builds on the best of what we know about how kids learn but does it with a 21st-century twist," says founder Professor Katie Salen. The best includes active learning by problem-solving, and the twist is using games to engage students. The curriculum is created by teachers and game designers working together.

"The teachers are masters of understanding developmentally where kids are at," Dr Salen says. "They are masters of content, and game designers are experts at understanding engagement and flow and incentive and challenge — that collaboration is a key part of what we do."

The school now has sixth and seventh-grade students (aged from about 11) and plans to expand up to 12th grade. It is for children living nearby and there is no test admission. Established in late 2009, the school has so far recorded average marks for maths and literacy. But Q2L rated highly in terms of pupil engagement — in the top few per cent of all New York City schools, Professor Salen says.

"In a city where huge numbers of kids are dropping out of school," she says, "it is quite a good thing that the students want to be there." A sister school is to open in Chicago, where expectations are high.

"The only way we're going to catch up with the rest of the world is to re-invent how teaching and learning occurs," explained the acting head of Chicago Public Schools, Terry Mazany. "That's why this is so vital. It's going to be an innovation engine for the district."

On a recent trip to the cramped Manhattan headquarters, Elizabeth Purvis, executive director of Chicago International Charter School, seemed dazzled by what the New York students were able to do.

"You can't watch how these kids work, how invested they are in what they're learning, and not come away amazed," she says.

Dr Salen — who is also professor of design and technology and director of the Centre for Transformative Media at New York's Parsons the New School for Design, and a game designer — co-wrote the game bible, Rules of Play. She says Quest to Learn addresses the widening gap between traditional schools and their tech-savvy pupils.

"We need to think about digital literacy as a proper literacy of the 21st century. If you don't really understand how to search the web, how a computer works, or how smart phones work and how signals get transmitted through satellites, you are really missing some core understandings that will be important for being able to participate in the workforce.

"It is the responsibility of schools to help kids understand the best and most purposeful ways of working with technology."

And she's convinced of the power of games for learning. "What [digital] games do really well is provide structured challenges for people: they drop you into a complex problem-space and they provide something that is just out of your reach. Trying to figure out how to reach that challenge is incredibly fun. Games give constant feedback, so the player knows where they are and they are constantly being given support and rewards for how they are doing — which is a really great way to keep people engaged in an activity."

But there are those who see video games as the opposite of educational. Professor Salen's Rules of Play notes that, despite the medium's huge possibilities, there are plenty of banal, witless games out there.

Games, the book says, can be both "timeless masterpieces and masterful time-wasters". But she points out that any medium — books, film, TV — has its dross and shouldn't be dismissed on that basis.

"The military have always used games as a way to strategise around choices in how one might proceed. Games allow the chance to try out many different options without there being any real-world consequences."

In education, she says, it's valuable for a student to test ideas and have 100 tries at something rather than just one.

Each school term begins with a conundrum, a mystery that the class must work together to solve. Instead of learning the facts of American history, for example, students embark on a quest to discover why six ghosts haunting the Metropolitan Museum — including an indigenous Indian, a white settler and an African-American slave — have been fighting for 150 years. This quest involves everything from reading primary source materials to playing and making relevant digital games.

Classes are interdisciplinary, such as an English and maths hybrid called CodeWorlds. Here, for instance, students might be presented with a set of library books, written in a code they are asked to decipher, using maths techniques.

Q2L adopts the jargon of the gaming world: pupils work on "missions" rather than units of study and lessons are "quests". They achieve levels from novice to master rather than A to D grades.

The teachers come from traditional teaching backgrounds but have an affinity with collaborative project-based work and new technology, Dr Salen says. "They feel they can really be designers of experiences for young people rather than content disseminators or gatekeepers around kids getting grades and testing. It gives them an empowerment around being creative individuals."

Operating on a public-school budget but with grants from the Gates Foundation, among others, the school is a litmus test for digital learning. While Professor Salen admits she and her colleagues feel the pressure to prove themselves, she has no doubt about the effectiveness of games. She first took board games into her university classroom when teaching interactive design in the 1990s.

"I started to look at games as more than just a space for play and began to realise that, as designed systems, they were incredibly interesting. I wanted to try and understand what it was about games that made them so engaging for people."

Designing a game, Professor Salen says, involves analysing the system that underpins its subject. And that skill's got to be useful — in or out of school. In the school's core subject, sports for the mind, students design computer games. For homework, they test and rate those of their classmates.

"All of these skills are things that we think are really important in the 21st century — the ability to critique media, to build models and simulations about ideas, the ability to give feedback and work in teams."

While the school is cautious about expanding too fast, there is plenty of international interest. Q2L is looking at how to provide teaching tools that can be tailored to other schools, Professor Salen says. She sees this as vital for educators of the future. "We need to teach kids how to navigate the [digital] system and how to make choices and really, how to be a citizen in a world that is totally wired and totally global."

WITH THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

 

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Sun, 01 May 2011 19:29:00 -0700 Cambodia land mines: Video game teaches Cambodian children to avoid land mines http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/cambodia-land-mines-video-game-teaches-cambod http://persistentpondering.posterous.com/cambodia-land-mines-video-game-teaches-cambod
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