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Youth Futures: Projecting the Roles of Disruptive Technologies, Anticipatory Knowledge, and Continuous Innovation

Summary: This session highlights the Global Youth Policy and Leadership Program at the University of Minnesota where faculty and students of all ages (kindergarten through graduate school) crafted scenarios, composed alternative futures, and explored other various futures methodologies. In this session, particular emphasis will be placed on the construction of future histories that can be used as alternative visions and maps to help youth of different backgrounds and experiences visualize and discuss the future. This session is conducted ‘salon style’ with audience development of the ensuing future-histories. Session feedback will be provided via Education Futures to all audience participants shortly following the conference.

Twenty years ago, playing games over a distance might have meant that you played turn-taking games like chess over email, and you were cutting edge. I remember people playing chess through snail mail! You would make your move and wait for a reply.

What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments that are interactive and look better than many films. Decisions, actions, and communications happen like they would in a face-to-face conversation, but they are done through a proxy, that is first and second-person perspectives with an avatar: a graphical representation of yourself in the game space.

Here is my avatar in Second Life.

He is a mix of Yoda, Pei Mei, Zatoichi, Master Po, and Real Ultimate Power. I would have liked to have made him old, but this is only possible if you learn to use some tools outside of the game to create more specialized characters. There are many who do this custom avatar creation, and the cool thing is that you could make your avatar something other than a person. Maybe a virus or a mailbox.

In fact, many people are already creating a comfortable living creating products for in game use. If you have not seen it yet, there are already success stories of people capitalizing on the new economies that virtual worlds have created.

In this Business Week article, one school teacher in Germany has made substantial gains flipping virtual property!

Imagine that you have the tools and access to build in these environments. In Second Life you do. You can visit models of the Sistine Chapel, Yankee Stadium, or even visit government agencies like the Center for Disease Control. You can build what you like on your virtual land.

What make this kind of play appealing is the ability to play and communicate when you want, and the possibility of meeting people from all over the planet. The prospect of building models and interacting in this environments should be very appealing to educators. This is an extension of the diorama. (Tomorrow I will talk about a project using these ideas in the classroom).

(Read more …)

To do is to be

To be is to do

So Do We?

It is just good teaching

Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn.

Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is you.

Gibson talked about environment and context, with affordances and constraints. What the world gives you for advice, warning, limitation, and opportunity.

These ideas are present in embodiment and how we might contextualize our curriculum as an activity system.

One of the big lessons from games is design. Good learning is by design. A teacher, like a game designer creates the environment where we learn.

(Read more …)

Video Games in the Classroom?

I am a gamer. I am also a teacher for the Minneapolis Public Schools, and have been working with students on issues of Language Arts, Reading, and Video Games. I also offer a class called “Video games as learning tools.” This course is for teachers and people who are interested in games and education.

You are probably asking yourself, “Do these things go together?”

Isn’t that like drinking paint thinner to become a physicist?

There is a general buzz that video games are causes for illiteracy and bad behavior. And I am hoping that I can shed some light on this, because the idea that games are the root of our problems couldn’t be further from my experience teaching reading and writing. In fact, using video games is what helped me to engage and extend the learning of my students in middle school and high school, and to connect my classroom with my students’ lives outside of the classroom.

I am sure you can imagine what happened when I told the kids we would be doing a six-week unit on video games. They flipped. You probably would have too.

But wait. Step back a moment. Would you have?

These are not the games your father bought you.

Are you my age? Have you have ever used a type writer for writing a paper?

If so, we missed the whole video games experience together. I am not talking about Pong®, PacMan®, Frogger®, Asteroids®, or Space Invaders®. I am not talking about your old Atari. Kids are playing new worlds of games that we could have only imagined from reading science fiction. It is more like playing in a rich movie environment that reacts, responds, and waits for you to talk, build, and act. And many kids today have this capability with game systems and computers at home. Many young people play Halo and other games on Xbox Live in their living rooms; they play and learn with kids from all over. This kind of mediated play over a distance has not been seen before.

We have tried to mediate in the classroom, using tools like radio, filmstrips, pictures, television, books on tape, conversation, print, and video. We use media to bring the experience of places and things into the classroom so that our students can get closer and have a more tangible experience. In the best of worlds, we would take them on field trips to see the ancient cave paintings in Lascaux, to view the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius, and to experience the richness of the Amazon Basin—to see and feel the things that are the basis of our science and stories –to embody the learning experience.

But since money, travel, and signed release forms are significant barriers to direct learning experience, we might consider games. Games can provide much more interactivity and experience with objects, places, people, and ideas by providing process, performance, and context.

They can help us with Time, Space, and Experience, which are still considerable barriers for the classroom; with game environments we can begin bridging the gap with the potential embodiment that current game technology provides our narratives. Imagine that you can have students interact in visually rich and interactive environments where they can communicate with voice and text, as well as non-verbal communication with avatar actions and facial expression! I know it is hard, but just try to visualize it. It is possible now.

I hope you keep reading. The next few entries are going to explore how they can be used, how I have used them, and what outcomes I have observed.

For more information on games in the classroom, you can contact me:

Email: dubbe003@umn.edu

Phone: 612.747.0346

Website: http://brockdubbels.efoliomn2.com

Here is a start for what I am building on my website

Brock Dubbels, a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota is joining Education Futures for the next week or so as a guest blogger. Brock brings nearly two decades of experience in education and instructional design, exploring new technologies for assessment, delivering content, creating engagement with learners, and investigating ways people approach learning.

Brock is a former Fulbright Scholar and has been a recipient of a National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. In the past he has worked for Xerox PARC, Oracle, Americorps, and as a raft guide for the Yellowstone Raft Company. Dubbels currently teaches for the Minneapolis Public Schools and in is licensed for k12 Media, k12 reading, and 7-12 Language Arts, and also serves on the District Technology Advisory Committee. He is currently working to complete a doctorate with David O’Brien in Learning and Literacy at the University of Minnesota, where he designed and currently delivers a course for the university called Video Games as Learning Tools as well as courses for reading acceleration for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.

Especially important to us at Education Futures: His current work involves the use of video game technology and activities to develop reading comprehension and increase engagement to help students accelerate beyond benchmarks and minimum learning standards.

Watch this profile from WCCO-TV’s News At 10 (Spring 2006 — also noted by Education Futures).

Brock’s Website: http://brockdubbels.efoliomn2.com/

Okay, okay...!! I've been getting lots of emails from Wordpress bloggers looking for a copy of my widgetized adaptation of the Leia theme. I'll try to get a sanitized edition (with EF-specific stuff removed) available for download sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can insert this code snippit into your theme's sidebar.php file, replacing both left (izquierda) and right (derecha) sidebar content blocks:

<div id="izquierda">

<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

<li><h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>' ); ?>
</ul>

<?php endif; ?>


</div>

<div id="derecha">
<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
<?php get_links_list(); ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

</div>

AND-- make sure to enter this into your theme's functions.php file (you might have to create the file if it doesn't exist already):

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') ) register_sidebars(2);
?>

That's it! You should be widgetized!

Will Richardson asks, “is anyone else a bit interested in the fact that one 21,000 student district in the UK has decided to close all of its high schools and open learning centers instead:

In the words of rock legend Alice Cooper’s most famous song, “school’s out forever”. Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which - for years - has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word to describe secondary education in the borough. It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft - which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring.

The schools are moving from a deficit model of learning (”students can’t do…”) to a “can do” approach that the article claims will create creative students that will be valued by future employers. Operating 24 hours a day, the centers will allow students to explore problems that interest them at their own pace, rather than steering them through inflexible curricula.

This is an important change, as Knowsley Council seems to have figured out that students can get their information from anywhere (electronically, from social interactions, etc.). What’s important is the construction of information into knowledge and the creative use of new knowledge.

Microsoft has so far struck out in its attempts to reform education. Has it finally crafted a hit? This is worth watching…

(Thanks to Scott McLeod for the tip.)

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Arthur Harkins is teaming with me at Education Futures as a regular blogger.

A short bio: Arthur is an associate professor in international development education at the University of Minnesota and faculty director of the University’s graduate certificate in Innovation Studies. Arthur’s major interests lie in converging technologies and their effects on 1) education, 2) workforce requirements, and 3) civic life. Arthur and I are working together on Leapfrog education futures projects in:

• North America: projected educational and social effects of Vinge’s and Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity;
• Eastern Europe: development of Sustainable Innovation supported by knowledge-producing education;
• China: projected uses of handheld, Internet-enabled devices for “ethical cheating” in classes and tests; And,
• Latin America: deployment, with FLACSO Mexico, of a laboratory to act as a launchpad for developing systems-based educational futures.

With George Kubik, Arthur recently authored StoryTech: A Personalized Guidebook to the 21st Century. He has published numerous articles in On The Horizon, a refereed UK journal of educational futures. With George and me, he is writing an article that explores “tempogenesis” (intentional convergences of virtual time travel, proximal futures, grounded futures, and alternative presents).

Famous for changing the color of their skin, chameleons are more like mood rings,
with their color changes reflecting mood, temperature, light, and other stimuli.

Based in the analysis of Hatano (1982), Brophy, Hodge, Bransford (2004) wrote a short and interesting work in progress where they analyzed the idea of adaptive expertise as the “ability to process information quickly and identify solutions to common problems as a display of competency in a particular skill and/or depth of domain knowledge”.

Considering the accelerating changes of the present and the unpredictable chaotic up coming future, the authors describe the importance of empower “learners to have flexible knowledge that allows them to invent ways to solve familiar problems and innovative skills to identify new problems. We suggest that the more desirable definition of expertise relates to students ‘adaptive-ness’ to identifying and solving novel problem”.

This adaptive expertise is based in the idea that “without a fluent and flexible use of knowledge a person will not be able to identify and expand on that creative idea”, that’s why the “life long learning and adapting to new situations is a critical component to succeeding in the workplace and in personal affairs”.

With pedagogic models established in the 19th century, teachers who were born during the 20th century and students from the 21st century the society (schools, enterprises, governments) demands citizens able to develop “innovation skills that will assist in their abilities to solve routine problems and identify new problems”. This kind of expertise will allow “the ability to identify new opportunities in this continuously transforming environment for change that make them more productive and profitable”.

Instead of routine experts our Learning Society requires citizens “who begin by identify what they know about the problem and what more they need to define in order to solve the challenge. The learner expands on these thought first by comparing them with their peers, then comparing them with experts familiar with aspects of the initial challenge”.

References:

1. Work in Progress - Adaptive Expertise: Beyond Apply Academic Knowledge (Sean Brophy, Lynn Hodge, and John Bransford).
2. Hatano, G. Cognitive consequences of practice in culture specific procedural skills. The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 4, 1982, 15–18.

Images Source: © 1996-2007 National Geographic.

Dr. Cristóbal Cobo, professor and director of communications at FLACSO-México is joining Education Futures over the next week or so as a guest blogger. He is no stranger to blogging, and is the author of e-rgonomic, which explores human-web interactions.

Cristóbal studied his Ph.D. in the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. In addition he has been teacher of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and Universidad de Colima. In Flacso he manages projects related to innovation, distance education and knowledge management supported in the information and communications technologies. Recently, he’s been researching knowledge, “collective intelligence,” the “architecture of participation,” and the phenomenon of “wisdom of crowds” and its application in the learning environment.