Transcipt of Video 1, Above: Syllabus Introduction
In
this course we explore something historically novel: the blending and
democratized application of environmental psychology, positive
psychology, educational theory and computer gaming technology to the
possibilities for meaningful community participation in sustainable
development and to the making of new and better worlds both in fantasy
and in reality. That is a fancy way of saying we will look at how new
technologies and new knowledge of how human beings and societies relate
to, function in and change their environments open up new possibilities
for problem solving on both a personal level and on an epic scale.
In this course we explore how we can all contribute to the creation, realization and implementation of our own ideas of eutopia. And in this course you get a chance to share your vision of “the good place” (Greek: Eu = Good; Topia = Place) with
your peers and instructors and, thanks to the advent of globalized
internet based social media technologies, the entire world.
And that means that you have the possibility for having an impact and literally changing the world. For the better. Your way.
Background:
Since the
beginning of recorded history human beings have looked at their
environment as it is and then used their powers of imagination to
conceive of alternatives that pleased them more. This ability to invent
worlds that do not yet exist seems to be unique to humans among
all of the earth's lifeforms and the capacity to act on those fantasies
and actual create such worlds almost certainly distinguishes us from
all the other species with which we share the planet.
The ancients fixed their
fantasies in legends and myths, thinking out loud through poems and
stories and songs, and then thinking out louder through the magic of the
written word. Books such as Plato's Republic, for example, were able to
broadcast and carry the thoughts and ideas of small groups and
individuals all around the world, enabling new forms of civilization and
its governance to be tried out thousands of miles from their point of
origin. In
the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods books like Thomas More's
“Utopia”, Francis Bacon's “A New Atlantis” and Thomas Campanella's “City
of the Sun” explicitly used the power of “story” to help people
pre-visualize what a 'better' world might look and feel like.
Books were not the only ambassadors of alternative realities of course. Drawings and paintings, sculptures and models, theater plays, dance, opera and circuses, athletic games and board games, all
of these media were put into service at one time or another to express
visions and possibilities for creating different environments and
different relationships between human beings and between humans and
non-humans in those environments.
In
the 20th century the harnessing of electromagnetic waves as carriers of
such visions dramatically extended the reach and impact of human speculative fictions. Radio and films and television allowed people all over the planet to experience very realistic and dramatic ideas of possible worlds in a way that felt as emotionally impactful as dreams, giving everybody who listened or watched the conviction that they had the capacity to be epic dreamers, “seers with conviction” –
visionaries. And as more and more people realized they could use these
technologies to express their own ideas of what the world could be, the
effect on our psychology has been profound – a democratization of
oracular thinking...
Now, in the 21st century, technology has gone a step further, actuallya quantum leap further, with the introduction of immersive interactive 3D virtual worldsand the
availability of powerful but inexpensive game engines that allow for
accurate and realistic simulations of physical processes that were unavailable to any but the wealthiest and educationally privileged groups in advanced economies.
Following
the work of Dr. Jane McGonigal we will explore the argument that
gaming, with its deep application of the principles of positive
psychology and environmental pscyhology to the construction of
emotionally compelling fantasy worlds, is already changing the way we
perceive and conceive of our possibilities and alternatives. And we will
investigate how gamification – the application of these principles to
real world outcomes in education, business and development – can empower
each of us to not just think out loud but to “think out loudest”,
giving us all a voice in the transformation of world so as to create a
desirable future.
Transcript of Video 2, Above: The Relational Summary and Dialectics
Greetings and welcome to our First Lecture in Environmental Psychology, Gamification and the Quest for Eutopia .
As you may know, the
principal assignment in this course, the way you get most of your
credit, is through the creation of what we call our 'Relational
Summaries'.
A relational summary
differs from a normal summary in that what we are looking for is the
relationship between the course material and your personal
experience. In the relational summary we use what we are learning
from our textbooks, journal articles and outside readings and
relate the topics to our own lives.
The relational summary
is a part of dialectical thinking and communication, which may be the
most important skill you ever learn as a human being.
We see dialectical
skills being important in the current presidential debates and we
treasure in our democracy our ability to be able to participate in
those debates, much as we see in town hall discussions of where we
would like our future to go. This ability for citizens as well as
the political elite to discuss and debate their future is a hallmark
of American democracy and one that is very rare in other countries
around the world. Without it we have dictatorship.
Let's define
dialectical thinking for a moment to make sure we are all on the same
page:
dialectical
thinking:
Dialogical thinking (thinking within more than one perspective)
conducted to test the strengths and weaknesses of opposing points of
view. (Court trials and debates are, in a sense, dialectical.) When
thinking dialectically, reasoners pit two or more opposing points of
view in competition with each other, developing each by providing
support, raising objections, countering those objections, raising
further objections, and so on. Dialectical thinking or discussion can
be conducted so as to "win" by defeating the positions one
disagrees with — using critical insight to support one's own
view and pointing out flaws in other views (associated with critical
thinking in the restricted or weak sense), or fairmindedly, by
conceding points that don't stand up to critique, trying to integrate
or incorporate strong points found in other views, and using critical
insight to develop a fuller and more accurate view (associated with
critical thinking in the fuller or strong sense).
Since dialectical
thinking is analogous to dialogical thinking, let's examine a
definition of that term:
dialogical
thinking:
Thinking that involves a dialogue or extended exchange between
different points of view or frames of reference. Students learn best
in dialogical situations, in circumstances in which they continually
express their views to others and try to fit other's views into their
own.
Simple right? What we
are really after is a dialog. And in the relational summary you
write you are beginning a dialog between the authors you have read
and yourself.
And by posting your
relational summary you invite others – me, you fellow students,
people outside the class if you like – to participate in that same
dialog. You invite others to express their points of view and you try
to see if you can fit the authors views and the views of your peers
into you own.
That is the real
function of all of our assignments.
John Taylor Gatto,
whose book 'Weapons of Mass Instruction” we are reading this
semester, also believes that dialectical thinking is one of the most
important things we can learn or teach. He exhorts us to,
“Teach
children to think dialectically so they can
challenge the hidden assumptions of the world about them, including
school assumptions, so they can eventually generate much of their own
personal curriculum and oversight.”
(http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18t.htm).
Many of
our problems in the world today come from most of us spending years
in systems that not only didn't encourage dialectical thinking but
punished it. So we don't often get sufficient practice these days
in the ancient art of Socratic dialog.
Another of
our readings this semester, Bernard Suits' “The Grasshopper” is
written in the form of a Socratic Dialog and represents some
dialectical thinking at its best. It gets even better when you
engage with the book and bring the dialog about the game playing
grasshopper and the hard working ants out into our own reality where
it can be discussed with our peers.
I have a
method for creating the right environment for dialogical
argumentation that I use every year here at Mercy. I simplify things
by asking you to do the following:
Each time
you sit down to write your relational summary, take at least three
quotes from the course assigned readings, making note for us of the
pages you found them on, and take at least three quotes from outside
readings that you discovered to be relevant to our topic, in other
words books or readings you “assigned” to yourself, and make
note for us of where you found those ideas so we can find them
ourselves if we want to go deeper. Reproduce those quotes or ideas
from us and then engage in a dialog with those six quotes – or
more, more is always better – by relating them to your own life
experience and opinions and observations.
The
summary that you come up with as you try to relate your life and
opinions to what you have been reading about from other's lives and
opinions is what becomes then a “relational summary”. It makes
the readings something YOU can relate to and in turn becomes
something WE can relate to.
The second
part of the method is for you to involve yourself in a dialog or
discussion with your classmates about the relational summary they
posted. Take on the challenge of engaging with what they have
written. Question their assumptions, provide your own perspective.
Argue your point of view. Throw some new quotes and evidence at them
that either supports or refutes what they have to say.
Don't
worry about being 'right' or 'wrong' in a judicial sense – you will
win no points nor lose points for the opinions you espouse; what we
are looking for is that you back up your arguments with a trail of
evidence that we can all follow – we want to be able to ascertain
what is your personal opinion and what came from others, and we want
to be able to go back and look at the source of those from whom you
drew quotes and ideas. Most of all, we want to see that you can work
with the opinions and ideas of others, give appropriate credit when
credit is due, and that you can make a case for your own ideas and
opinions by backing them up with personal experience.
Since the
relational summary is the dialectical foundation of this course, I
would like to take this opportunity to model for you how it might be
done in my lecture.
In fact, a
lecture usually IS a kind of relational summary. The professor takes
what he or she has read, pulls out relevant quotes and ideas and
builds an argument by relating the literature to his or her own life
experience as a practitioner in the field. So my lectures are
similar to what I expect from you – they are relational summaries.
Normally,
we start with a quote or observation from the literature.
So, for today's
lecture, let's assume that Jane McGonigal is right and that reality
is broken.
Transcript of 15 min Video Lecture Part 1, Above:
Let's assume that Jane McGonigal is right and that reality is broken.
She compares the way we perform in our real lives and the way we act in games and says, on page 4,
Let's assume that Jane McGonigal is right and that reality is broken.
She compares the way we perform in our real lives and the way we act in games and says, on page 4,
“As we make these value judgments, hold moral
debates over the addictive quality of games, and simultaneously
rush to achieve massive industry expansion, a vital point is being
missed. The fact that so many people of all ages, all over the
world, are choosing to spend so much time in game worlds is a sign
of something important, a truth that we urgently need to recognize. The truth is this: in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.”
“And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds.”
of something important, a truth that we urgently need to recognize. The truth is this: in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.”
“And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds.”
(Please note, as an aside, that this is the first
of the six quotes I'm dialoging with in this relational summary, and
that I've provided the reference; you can also find the argument at
this website:
(http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/big-book/excerpt-reality-broken))
One of McGonigal's big
themes is the supposed tragedy of this “mass exodus” to virtual
reality and how to counter it by improving real reality.
But how do we begin to
go about fixing it?
If you went to the
doctor and complained, “doctor, I'm broken” the doctor, assuming
she's any good, isn't simply going to tell you to take two aspirin
and call her in the morning, she will try to determine where and how
you are broken, and from that diagnosis seek the appropriate
treatment.
And so it must be when
treating the ills of reality.
First we have to decide
what parts of reality seem to be 'broken' and define for ourselves
whether we are talking about human society in general, which goes
back tens of thousands of years, or the recent human social and
technological experiment we call “civilization” which goes back
to sometime between 5 and 8000 years ago?
Or was it our
transition from a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle , going back
millions of years, and shared with many other animals, to the
sedentary agricultural lifestyle now unique to our species that
created a feeling of being out of step with reality, reality being a
nature to which we are longer well adapted, and that hence led to a
feeling of broken-ness?
These hypotheses, which
suggest a a mismatch between the type of creature the human animal
evolved to be and the environment in which it now finds itself, is
popular in popular literature that explores genetics, Biological
athropology, Evolution and sociobiology.
We find good arguments
for the idea of “man the maladapted animal” in the works of
authors like Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz and Erich
Fromm in the 1960s in books like “The Naked Ape” and “The
Terretorial Imperative”, “On Aggression” and “The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness” and recently in works by geneticist Spencer
Wells and literary author Daniel Quinn in books like “Pandora's
Seed: The Unforseen Cost of Civilization”, “Ishmael” and
“Beyond Civilization”.
The basic argument
about humans being out of step with nature is simplified by Quinn
into the notion of the “leavers” and the “takers”.
Where we went wrong,
Quinn says, is when we decided that we could decide who gets to live
and die. He says on page 239,
"The premise of the Takers' story is 'The world belongs to man.' ...The premise of the Leavers' story is 'Man belongs to the world.'"
"For three million years, man belonged to the world and because he belonged to the world, he grew and developed and became brighter and more dexterous until one day, he was so bright and so dexterous that we had to call him Homo sapiens sapiens-- which means he was us."
"The Leavers' story is 'the gods made man for the world, the same way they made salmon and sparrows for the world. This seems to have worked well so far so we can take it easy and leave the running of the world to the gods'."
Quinn uses a talking gorilla as the main character who tells humanity that the “taker” culture has used both religion and science to justify 'playing God' and to justify acting as if we can do whatever we want to our environments. He says,
"The story of
Genesis must be undone. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is
essential if you're to survive. The Leavers are the endangered
species most critical to the world - not because they're humans but
because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there
is more than one right way to live. And then, of course, you must
spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and
forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who
should die on this planet."
(Another aside: This is
the second quote I'm using in this relational summary, this time from
outside readings not assigned to the course. I'm relating the ideas
from our course readings to ideas from material I have hunted and
gathered myself; this is a key part of the relational summary,
bringing in outside arguments. You can learn more about the ideas in
Quinn's Ishmael from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29;
In this way I'm leaving a paper trail of my sources).
Suggesting that human
culture explains where we went wrong might not be the full answer
though. Not many people in the world want to leave its running “to
the gods”. People started acting as though the world belonged to
them rather than the other way around because many did find life in
'harmony' with nature to be, as Hobbs famously pointed out in his
Leviathan “nasty, brutish and short”.
So despite some
evidence from certain tropical environments favoring the Rousseauian
concept of the Noble Savage living a carefree life in balance with
her surroundings, there is also evidence of great hardship for groups
of people trying to live well while 'belonging to the world'.
So there is another
perspective we might consider. And that is the idea that maybe
Nature itself is “broken”. Maybe the very nature of Nature –
the way the universe in general and the Earth in specific were
created – inevitably leads any intelligent and feeling organism to
feel dissatisfied. In that case reality isn't just broken, but
perhaps was never such a great place to begin with.
Regardless of the level
of reality in which you may find yourself unhappy, identifying the
priority areas is still of the essence, and finding ways to improve
the parts that trouble you most seems to be one of the major tasks
we face in life.
Fortunately, Dr.
McGonigal identifies several areas where she finds reality to be
broken and gives several possible solutions.
In Part 2,
“Reinventing Reality” she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson saying “All
life is an experiment, The more experiments we make, the better”.
And the experiments she urges us to run, using games as the safest
and most rewarding testing ground, are encapsulated in the following
list, compiled from throughout the book on
http://fragileearthstudios.com/2011/07/11/fixes-for-reality/:
- Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.
- Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
- Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.
- Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.
- Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting with our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “pro-social emotions.”
- Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.
- Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing.
- Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help is feel more rewarded for making our best effort.
- Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.
- Compared to games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to tame good advice and try out happier habits.
- Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratification we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.
- Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
- Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort – and over time, they give us collaborative superpowers.
- Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together.
McGonigal concludes that “Maybe we should be
treating our reality more like a game.”
However, given limited
time and resources we still need to find a starting point, we need to
pinpoint at least one major area where our daily reality makes us
suffer, and it is important that we identify an area that we have at
least some control over, and apply our fixes there first.
John Taylor Gatto
clearly identifies an area that he believes is central to the problem
and vital to the fix, and that is something that is very close to all
of us, and to a certain extent within our control:
School.
The idea that school
itself could be our chief problem may strike some of you as odd.
Schools are supposed to be something we need more of, not less of,
right? Schools are supposed to be our most important solution to our
problems, right? When we talk about “helping” third world
countries, we talk about building more schools. When we talk about
the path to success we talk about the need for more schooling.
But according to John
Taylor Gatto in “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, schools themselves
may be the very things that are most broken in our reality, and Jane
McGonigal is inclined to agree. And it isn't just a matter of
differentiating between so-called “good schools” and so-called
'bad schools”. According to Gatto it is the very nature of the
institution that makes it rank as the greatest of our problems.
So here is the second
of the three quotes from our assigned readings I want to call
attention to:
“Our “American” schools (both
public and private) are fashioned after the Prussian system of
education. The Prussians were well-known for their regimented society
and their efficient military. “Divide children by subject, by
age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more
subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind,
separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous
whole.” A society divided is a society which cannot find its way.
So it was there in Prussia and still is here in America that we have
a society of people able and willing to take orders.
“Mandatory education serves
children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into
servants.” A society of servants requires a class of leaders.
“One in every five American jobs is
some form of oversight over the behavior of others.”
These quotes come from page xviii of
the “Prolouge: Against School”. More can be found at
http://www.hcsedu.com/BOOK_REVIEWS/Weapons_of_Mass_Instruction/.
The Gatto perspective,
which we should all think through with an open mind, is that our
schools aren't failing. Not by a long shot. The problem is that
they are succeeding too well. How can that be?
Gatto contends that our
schools are succeeding in doing what they were really set up to do,
which is to keep people from being independent creative thinkers and
from being able to compete in the marketplace. In other words,
schools were set up not to help you get a good education, but to put
barriers in the way of you getting a good education.
He gives plenty of good
evidence for the idea that the dysfunction of schools is deliberate,
but even if it weren't, a strong case could be made that the reality
of schools is still broken in the sense that the way schools operate
goes against millions of years of co-evolution between human minds
and the environments we evolved in. The argument that people are
maladapted to the institutional school environment is made most
strongly by J. Gary Bernhard in “Primates in the Classroom: An
Evolutionary Perspective on Children's Education” .
I use Bernhard as the
second of my quotes from unassigned readings that I think are
relevant to the dialectic we are engaging in.
On page 75 Bernhard
reminds us that,
“An interesting
aspect of the context of closeness and cooperation in nomadic
foraging societies is conversation. People seek one another out, keep
up on all the latest news, talk before , during and after the hunt,
tell jokes and tease one another...”
He quotes from the
Anthropologist Tonkinson (1978, 127) who lived among the !Kung
bushpeople of Botswana, saying, “Also characteristic are a
gregariousness, a love of animated discussion and repartee, and a
keen interest in what transpires in all dimensions... [conversation]
keeps up good, open communication among the members of the band;
through its constantly flowing expression it is a salutary outlet for
emotions, and it serves as the principal sanction in social
discipline...”
Transcript of 15 min Video Lecture 1, part 2, Above:
Now contrast that with the way we treat conversation in schools. We forbid students to talk 'out of turn', forbid them to talk before, during and after the hunt for knowledge, forbid teasing, animated discussion and repartee, and we wonder why discipline is always falling apart in such an environment.
Now contrast that with the way we treat conversation in schools. We forbid students to talk 'out of turn', forbid them to talk before, during and after the hunt for knowledge, forbid teasing, animated discussion and repartee, and we wonder why discipline is always falling apart in such an environment.
We ignore tens of
thousands of years of the desire to be in a conversation being the
prime attractor for maintaining social decorum and participating in
the social contract observing the golden rule.
The threat in
traditional societies was that if you misbehaved you would be cut out
of the great conversations that humans alone possess the brains to
have. You would be silenced or ostracized. But in school
environments everybody feels punished the minute they walk into the
classroom because they are not allowed to talk freely. For
generations this was the most powerful social sanction you could
impose on a person: deny them the right to free speech.
In fact the American
utopian experiment and our cherished 1st amendment to our
constitution is precisely about guaranteeing this most important
right. Tyranny occurs when the right to speak freely is removed.
Yet ironically in our schools we encourage tyranny on the part of the
teacher and we try to put down the natural rebellion students engage
in to recover their stolen rights. A so called lack of discipline
is usually associated with students trying to be part of any real
conversation, voicing your own views particularly when expressing
unpopular opinions. Good discipline, good school behavior is assumed
to occur when students merely parrot back what the teacher has
permitted you to say and when you follow their prescribed script.
We should also observe
that in a hunter gatherer society the natural environment has not
been dumbed down by reducing the landscape to just a handful of
plants and animals. The natural environment is a place where people
have not been “dummified” by repetitive monocrop agriculture or
factory work (as James Scott from Yale University describes it in
“Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed) ; the environment is so rich that there is
plenty to talk about that immediately creates a so called “teachable
moment”.
In a sufficiently
complex natural environment, merely commenting on what you are seeing
– talking about the weather and commenting on the sounds and sights
and smells your senses are taking in -- becomes a valuable education
in itself. By comparison most classrooms are entirely too dull, and
it is no wonder that whatever students freely talk about is going to
seem off topic. Students in particular and human beings in general
prefer to talk about things relevant to their concerns and survival,
not the sterile and meaningless environment the school system has
provided.
Of course this is hotly
debated with one camp believing that classrooms should be sterile so
that students are not distracted from the message the teacher is
dictating.
For my third quote from
our assigned readings I choose Bell et al.'s Environmental Pscyhology
textbook, page 450 in the section on “learning environments” .
They say,
“Some researchers
believe that classrooms should tend more toward the complex rather
than the simple. Having more stimuli and opportunities for
environmental exploration provides an enriched environment that
facilitates learning. Others disagree, arguing that complex learning
environments are distracting and make it difficult for the student to
concentrate on school work... Of course, classrooms serve more
purposes than just learning content relevant to a specific topic.
They also involve learning how to learn, learning social
responsibility and acquisition of cultural values. Different
classroom environments may facilitate one of these purposes but not
the others. Working for the right fit between pupil and learning
environment is probably the most desirable approach (e.g. Ahrentzen
et al., 1982), a view consistent with adaptation level theory as
presented in chapter 4. Because things change with time, it is
important to evaluate classroom design modifications continually.”
The pointer back to
Chapter 4, “Theories of Environment-Behavior Relationships” and
Adaptation Level Theory on page 110 is a good one because it honors
the fact that for every individual learning is different and for each
there may be “an optimal level of stimulation”. The problem is
that there is no “one size fits all” prescription for schooling
and the danger of schools is that they teach to either the lowest
common denominator, or they teach to the mean, the so called
'average' student, or they break people apart into designated groups
– from so called special education to the suppposedly 'highly
gifted', all of which stigmatize us and injure young people's ability
to integrate their unique skills into society in a way that gives us
all the chance for a happy self actualized life.
McGonigal might argue
that virtual reality now gives us the ability to customize classrooms
for each individual student so that nobody has to suffer through a
learning environment they don't feel comfortable in. We can
customize the manufacture of minds the same way we now customize
consumer products, and nobody has to feel stigmatized.
But if we are still
going to create brick and mortar classrooms, if we are going to
inevitably err in our design of a learning environment by trying to
accommodate a roomful of different people without trying to
homogenize them, then the proper error, some would argue, would be
too look at the types of environments in which the human mind evolved
and create circumstances that at least in some respects are analogous
to those that shaped us.
Bernhard in Primates in
the Classroom analyses the school environment from the perspective of
a nervous system that was honed over millions of years on a planet
where people did talk all the time (talking was the one thing our
species did that set us apart from all the other animals) and in
which the act of sitting still and listening to others talk
uninterrupted occurred mostly at night in dark environments around
the warm glow of a campfire. This was the time of storytelling when
the elders and the wise and most accomplished told their tales to
pass on wisdom to the tribe. The bright light of day saw us on our
feet hunting and gathering in unimaginably complex environments,
searching for materials to build tools and shelters and running from
predators and constantly chattering to one another.
No wonder students
find it hard to sit still and sit quietly in a classroom in the
middle of the day. So long as the sun was up we were mostly up on
our feet and if we were sitting doing productive work, like basket
weaving or clothesmaking or sorting and chipping stones, we were
constantly moving our hands and, more importantly, constantly talking
with one another.
Parents instinctively
know this – we read stories to our children at bedtime just before
lights out, not in the middle of the day, and we discuss our
discoveries and activities around the dinner table.
But school asks us to
go against our entire history of adapting brain and body to the
circadian rhythms that govern our attention structures in complex and
highly stimulating environments. We demand normal night-time
behavior, conditioned over millenia when darkness simplified our
surroundings, during the hours we are most interested in active
motion and exploration and communication.
Is it no wonder, then,
that children find it so hard to cooperate with the artificial
mandate we impose on them to suspend all motion and spontaneous
talking and listen to the shaman like teacher tell stories?
I did an experiment in
my own classroom in the early 1990s with a group of so called
“troublemaker” students. I simply drew the shades, turned out
the overhead lights, put an orange-red light bulb in one corner of
the room, looking like a campfire, and whispered greetings as the
students filed into the classroom. They immediately adopted a hushed
tone and whispered back, “what's going on?” I whispered, “sit
down around me in a circle, I want to tell you a story.” And they
played the game with me. They were quiet yet alert, excited but
calm. I told them about the need to “hunt and gather” for
information that could save our “tribe” from disaster and told
them that when the sun came up we would have to get up and explore
the room for clues to solve a problem I had written on the board. I
said in my whisper “and remember, to solve the problem you HAVE TO
talk to one another, because the clues are scattered throughout the
room and nobody can solve it on their own.”
Then I turned on the
lights and opened the shades and said in a loud voice, “right,
let's get to work!!”
Immediately the
classroom turned into a magical environment for treasure hunting.
After about a half an hour of frantic conversation, working with
microscopes and dissection scopes and books and probes, milling about
with high energy, I drew the shades again, turned out the lights and
went and sat by the “fire”. Almost immediately my students
calmed down, ceased what they were doing and gathered around me,
quieting into a hush. I asked softly, “welcome back to the cave.
It's been a long day hunting and gathering. Let's talk about what you
discovered and see what you brought back to camp...”
This simple but
effective experiment, repeated many times with different groups,
confirmed to me the notion that environment not only powerfully
affects psychology, but that the school environment is unusually
antagonistic to normal human behavior and is thus responsible for
most of the problems that teachers and parents and students all
complain about. Yet almost nobody seems to do much about it.
Over the years I went
further with these experiments in applied environmental psychology –
I started having the students select movie soundtracks to play during
certain lessons, enhancing the teachable moments by treating the
classroom as if it were a landscape in a Hollywood movie and allowing
the students to feel like characters in various adventure and science
fiction stories.
By using music and
visual aids and, with the student's help, an understanding of what
environments their young minds and bodies wanted to be immersed in in
order to learn most effectively, we turned our classroom from a place
of boredom, hostility or goofiness into a place of mystery, adventure
and productive experience. We turned classrooms into spaceships,
jungles, and even a utopian biosphere called Marsville. When we
couldn't make the classroom simulate the environment we wanted we put
students in front of a blue screen and let them see themselves on a
television monitor with whatever fantasy landscape they wanted behind
them.
With a little bit of
Hollywood magic we were able to deal with the broken nature of
reality and use a bit of fantasy imagineering to fix it, at least as
far as how we saw it in our minds eyes.
The year that the
movies 'Deep Impact” and “Armeggedon” came out we researched
the threat of the earth being hit by a meteor, watched scenes from
Hollywood blockbusters and scientific documentaries and set about
learning “survival science”, discussing how we might survive in
shelters, grow food, recycle water, and provide electricity. To
learn to “shoot down” prospective meteors we used a computer game
called 'green globs' that taught the use of quadratic equations to
destroy green spheres in a cartesian coordinate system which we said
represented the meteors. In this way students became enthusiastic
about learning math because it was suddenly relevant to stopping a
real threat – it wasn't algebra, it was 'ballistics'.
Let me go into a
little greater detail about the Green Globs Program.
I used green globs in
my classroom at Hollywood High School's At-Risk Youth Career Academy
in the mid 1990s as a way of teaching math and ballistics to
students. But please note that I was never a math teacher. I
was working with retired Air Force personnel as part of a government
sponsored project to improve math and science to help our armed
forces. I found Green Globs to be the best way to motivate my
students and really give them understanding of applied math but the
mission of our students was not to learn equations that, as they said
so often “we'll never use when we graduate”, the objective was
to work in teams to solve a problem of possible meteors and possible
missiles from space threatening their country. These threats were
represented by the green globs on their “radar screen” - a
cartesian coordinate system that finally had meaning.
We had a big screen
with a projector in the front of the class representing mission
control and a row of computers in the back where team members sat in
groups of two or three trying out quadratic equations from various
text books to see what effect they would have. When they
thought they had a good equation that would knock out the maximum
number of globs with a single shot in their back room simulations,
potentially saving resources and time and ammunition, they
would send a hero up to the front to take the shot against the "real"
menace. Each team had a certain "budget" of
shots.
The program was wildly successful -- students taught themselves math to cooperate and compete to counter the "threat from space". They memorized trigonometric functions and equations for circles and ellipses and point-slope formulas merely because they wanted to be better heros against the imaginary threat. We did no teaching of math concepts and no drilling. They simply played the game in this context and the learning and memorization came naturally.
The program was wildly successful -- students taught themselves math to cooperate and compete to counter the "threat from space". They memorized trigonometric functions and equations for circles and ellipses and point-slope formulas merely because they wanted to be better heros against the imaginary threat. We did no teaching of math concepts and no drilling. They simply played the game in this context and the learning and memorization came naturally.
By contextualizing the
learning in terms of meaningful fantasy landscapes that had some
connection with reality but was safer than reality, we made serious
learning fun. By making the goal mastery of skills in a
non-threatening environment where failure is not punished or
ridiculed but is a sign that you are pushing your limits, we took all
of the anxiety out of science and math.
As an aside, for the
purposes of our Relational Summaries, note what I've just done here:
I used my discussion of our readings to launch into a very personal
explanation of MY particular experiences as a teacher trying out some
ideas I got from the literature and some that I came up with myself.
In this way my summary of the literature becomes relational to my
life and ideas and opinions, and that is what I want to get from you
too. We aren't interested in hearing once again what we already
read, we want you to take us on a journey into your past, your
present, your experiences, your observations, your experiments, your
trials and errors. We want to learn from YOU! So please do relate
what you are reading to your life.
Transcript of 15 Minute Video Lecture Part 3, Above:
In my life experience, going back to my early experiences as an inner city teacher deeply troubled by the chaos in the classroom, what we did back in the late 80's and 90's when I was working with so-called 'at risk students' in South Los Angeles, was “gamify” the classroom. Back then we didn't have that word for it. But now “Gamification” is seen by more and more people, from corporate leaders to educational leaders, as one of the best ways to make work and learning relevant, effective and fun.
In my life experience, going back to my early experiences as an inner city teacher deeply troubled by the chaos in the classroom, what we did back in the late 80's and 90's when I was working with so-called 'at risk students' in South Los Angeles, was “gamify” the classroom. Back then we didn't have that word for it. But now “Gamification” is seen by more and more people, from corporate leaders to educational leaders, as one of the best ways to make work and learning relevant, effective and fun.
Even the Wharton School
of Business at the University of Pennsylvania teaches a course on
“gamification” that explores how game elements can be used to
improve the way we do things.
Privileged kids have
almost always been given the chance to gamify their learning
experiences, have almost always been permitted and encouraged to
tailor their educations to their own particular learning styles, to
bring their passions and excitements into the learning environment.
If ways of capturing intrinsic motivations for learning a subject
were not provided in school they were inevitably provided by family,
friends or community. The question as far as school in general
goes is, “can we really make learning environments that make
learning meaningful and fun for everyone? Or is this impossible to do
within the standardizing school environment?”
Jane McGonigal, author
of Reality of Broken, takes things further than gamification. She
doubts the efficacy of trying to take our school curriculum and
merely create “educational games” and new point systems and
rewards and incentives from the outside in. She suggests that merely
gamifying the workplace or the school environment fails to capture
the essence of what we need to do to fix things in our world.
There are many other
critics of gamification who argue persuasively that we are going
about it in the wrong way.
In
an blog post by Kristen Bourgault called Gamification
in Education: Epic Win, or Epic Fail? At
http://www.digitalpedagog.org/?p=1416,
she
talks about “THE
CHEAPENING OF GAMIFICATION”, saying (and here I use my third quote
from an unassigned source):
Is gamification really the magical process that
so many believe it to be? Many critics would argue against it, saying
this process merely cheapens and distracts from the learner’s
experience.
Look around you – elements of video games are
creeping into many of your daily activities. Have you booked a flight
recently on Trip
Advisor? Commented on a Huffington
Post article? New ways of “earning badges” and “unlocking
achievements” are cropping up every day. But does the ability to
earn a badge automatically increase our engagement in an activity?
Game designer and consultant Margaret
Robertson doesn’t think so. In a recent blog post speaking out
against the term ‘gamification’, Robertson wrote, “What we’re
currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking that
thing that is least essential to games and representing
it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a
relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and
loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and
acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way
constitute a game.”
“Gamification is
the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at
the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be
pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are
things that should be both. There are many, many things that should
be neither.” Margaret Robertson
You may be tempted to jump on board and trade
your grades in for badges and call it a game. But this simple act
doesn’t dramatically change the learner’s experience. Take some
time to really understand what makes a good game great. Create a
compelling narrative to pull your students through the course. Set up
mentoring and collaboration opportunities such as those you encounter
in games to enable learners to share what they know. And frequently
chime in with feedback. Use those badges to chart progress, but
meaningful instructor feedback is what will truly propel the learner
forward.
“Gamification, by
contrast, doesn’t rely on internal motivation. Instead, it’s
using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous
feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of
progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn’t especially
motivated – at least at the beginning – and then provides barrels
of incentives to ramp up that motivation.” Elizabeth Corcoran
This is something that
true game designers would never do because the essence of a good
game, as pointed out by Bernard Suits in his analysis of what makes a
good game in 'The Grasshopper”, and echoed throughout “Reality
is Broken”, is that good games are AUTOTELIC ACTIVITIES (see pages
45 and 46 for a good definition of that term) that tap into our
INTRINSIC reward system. Gamers don't play games to earn points, or
money, or fame, or to get candy bars, though all those things may
occur. They play games because it is fun, because it feels good,
because they want to, and often they will continue even when they are
threatened or punished for playing. By contrast schools, no matter
how many extrinsic rewards are offered from the outside, are usually
places of compulsory attendance. The high truancy rates attest to
the deep structural flaws in their design.
So gamifying school
environments with more extrinsic rewards can not really tap into the
intrinsic motivations that make all mammals naturally want to play
and play and play, all the while preparing themselves through play
for the serious business of survival. A dog will chase a ball or a
stick whether you give him a treat or not because it is wired to find
it fun. Eventually the dog will use that skill to catch a rabbit, but
as a puppy it plays merely because it is fun. So in this sense pure
games, properly designed may be a better way to prepare humans for
gaining real survival educations than some school curriculum beefed
up with flashy point systems and 3D characters.
The subtitle of
McGonigal's book is “Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can
Change the World” and the essence of her argument is that games
themselves have the power to transform reality for the better. In
many cases games today “previsualize” what an alternative reality
might look like. The detailed fantasy landscapes are immersive and
interactive and whether they depict a utopian or a dystopian past or
future, a version of the world as it was, or is, or could be, they
give players a certain “agency”, and ability to interact with and
make changes to the reality around them. This is itself is more
empowering than the normal artforms and media that people used to
depict different versions of the world.
Also, when playing
MMORPGs or “massively multiplayer online role playing games”,
gamers are learning organically how to cooperate with strangers to
'level up'. McGonigal argues that far from being mere 'shoot 'em up'
competition, a wide variety of games today reveal to the players the
real-life advantages of working together and solving common problems.
McGonigal argues that
we could and should design more games that overtly concern making a
better world, such as her “urgent evoke” and “world without
oil” games, but she also argues that the rewards systems and
meaning systems of games, and their ability to keep people focused on
difficult challenges without punishing 'failure' stands in complete
contradistinction from the way schools and work environments are run.
In the latter there is constantly anxiety to succeed and one false
step can have terrible consequences. In the former, in the game
environment, we follow Thomas Edison's advice, “if you aren't
making at least 10 mistakes a day you aren't learning fast enough”
and honor Albert Einstein's comment “I failed my way to success”.
Game design inherently makes challenges fun and encourages
investment in that which is difficult. School and jobs seem too
often to do the opposite.
We can try to “gamify”
real schools and jobs with different incentive structures, but there
may be something deeper about these environments that prevents any
amount of reform from having real impact, and this is a point that
Gatto tries to hammer home.
Gatto, after 30 years
of teaching in some of the toughest schools in the nation, concludes
that schools were not created to help people succeed, they were
created to maintain the illusion of a democracy and meritocracy while
enslaving minds to a sinister Pavlovian conditioning of bells and
schedules that rewards only those who are obedient and confine their
thinking within narrow parameters proscribed by the elites in charge
of maintaining a hierarchical order. In Gatto's experience, any
school that really starts producing a majority of critical people who
can truly think for themselves and realize that they can learn far
more on their own than they could in an institution seals its own
doom.
And if this is so, then
trying to fix a school with gamification would be like changing the
hubcaps and tires on a car and giving it a new paint job without
replacing the faulty engine.
If Reality is indeed
broken, meaning that there are structural problems with our society,
with our environments and even with our own human nature that make
life more difficult and unfair than we would like it to be, then mere
gamification might be likened to cosmetic changes when the only way
to solve these problems for sure would be to create new structures
and test them out. But because of the inherent risks in replacing
one reality with another, the tests, or experiments, can't easily be
done in the real world.
They need to and can be
done in games.
But if we can try out
alternate realities in games, with low risk, low transaction costs,
no threats of social disruption or harm to the player, the community
or society, and if these alternative realities turn out to be
superior to what we see in reality, then the argument would be “why
do we need the practices and institutions in reality to stay the way
they are?”
Why couldn't games
replace school? Why couldn't games replace work?
If we can show that
through gaming people can learn better and faster, if we can show for
example that playing Green Globs with your friends can give you a
better understanding of quadratic equations and cartesian coordinate
space and graphs, why would you go back to using a textbook? Why
would you get up early and go through the sleet and snow on a cold
winters day to catch a bus to arrive in a room before a bell rings
risking getting “in trouble”, just to have a person stand in
front of you with an ancient technology like chalk and a chalkboard,
writing incomprehensible symbols on the board, where you may feel
embarrassed to ask a question lest you lose face or social rank, when
you could sit home in a warm bed with a cup of tea and your laptop
playing green globs, or when you could go to the community center or
public library and join a gaming group cooperating to save the world
from space aliens using mathematical formulas?
If we can show that
through gaming you can do your job better and more efficiently, if we
can show, for example, that playing SimCity Societies you can balance
a budget better and improve roads and transportation while keeping
your citizens happy, or that by participating in the game “Fold-It”
you can help solve protein configuration problems that have been
stumping biochemists for centuries and with friends from around the
world “design new protein shapes and actively help cure diseases”,
why would you be content going to a job where part of your energy and
time and much of your salary was wasted in the commute, another large
portion wasted in on-job politics and conformance to dress codes and
other social norms, and even more wasted through the inefficiencies
created by fiefdom obsession over secrecy and proprietary
information? Why wouldn't you develop and sell your skills to
cutting edge firms who see the win-win value of crowd sourcing and
collective intelligence in a new global on-line marketplace that uses
virtual reality as an integral part of its work skill portfolio?
The fact is that the
military and the scientific and engineering communities, as well as
economists, have been using computer simulations and various game
theories and approaches to do serious work for decades. Real
soldiers use combat simulations – games – to learn serious
techniques and strategies at almost no cost and without the risk of
injury or death, pilots of course use flight simulators to learn how
to fly real aircraft, Astronauts train in simulators before going
into space, and even doctors today train in virtual reality before
refining their skills on real patients.
And while simulations
get ever more faithful to reality as we model the physical, chemical,
biological and social interactions with greater accuracy, we also
learn from games and our ability to distort physics and defy the laws
of the real universe how we might change things to make the outside
world a little more to our liking.
Games like Spore enable
the public to participate in nurturing the evolution of imaginary
life forms (and in the process learn quite a bit about natural
selection, artificial selection and evolutionary processes) but
genetic engineers are also using simulations to see if they can
improve upon the designs found in nature without threatening our
natural systems while the kinks are being worked out.
And that is the
greatest advantage of games – in them failure has few costs and has
overwhelming advantages, so gamers are encouraged to fail. This
acceleration this provides for learning and improving can not be
overemphasized.
For if there is one
thing that is truly broken about reality, about our schools, our
jobs, our social life, our policies and planning and our
international relations – if there is one thing that is truly
broken about nature itself on this planet or any other in our
universe, it is that failure creates fear. And when we fear to fail,
we cannot truly learn. Trial without error leads nowhere.
So the simplest fix for
all of reality and its woes is to create environments where we can
control the consequences of failure, and make it safe for each
individual to learn by making their own mistakes and level up at
their own pace.
We now have designs and
technologies that enable us to do that, and that is much of what this
course is about.
(The full lecture with graphics, 45 minutes long, for review, is below)
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