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My doctoral dissertation, A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education: A Delphi Study, is available for purchase online or for online preview:

• Click here to preview the first chapter
• Or, purchase a PDF download or hardcover copy of this document online at the Education Futures store

SPECIAL:

Download now and save! For the month of September, the PDF edition is available for download at the discounted price of $30.00 $15.00 (50% off)!
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The StarTribune ran a positive piece that raises awareness of David Shupe’s eLumen Collaborative, a Web-based, enterprise-level application for tracking student competencies. The project began as a response to a simple question that higher education institutions and graduates have a hard time answering: What, precisely, did graduating students learn, and what competencies have they developed?

The software allows for faculty-driven assessments via dynamically-generated rubrics, with the possibility of incorporating student-driven assessments as well. Will this signal a new trend in assessments for the 21st century? …or, do we need to push for something beyond rubrics? …beyond assessments?

The semantic web approaches!

Powerlabs, which will launch in early September, utilizes Powerset, a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search and takes advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language, according to the company. At the moment, they’re accepting sign-ups for pre-release experimentation.

One of the big ideas from 6.0 was that kids are not naturally good at complex games. They often have the time, resources, but they do not always have the guidance of a mentor. Many kids are playing games designed by adults for adults. This is good and bad. Good in that the adult games have some complex problems and require some really deep thinking; bad in that they may just be provocative on their content without having very good game play. The point is, kids learn through play and our games are often cultural tools to transfer knowledge, develop skills, and get them ready to become adults. What we try to do as educators is pretty much the same. So why have we stepped away from using games?

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Reader Arturo B. from Durango (Mexico) notes that Karen Littman posted an outstanding essay from 1992 in which she describes why she started Morphonix (creators of Neuromatrix, discussed in an earlier post):

Even young children will become researchers as they discover and explore new information at their own pace. New technology is multisensory. It allows a student to use his or her curiosity to learn and develop his or her own personal understanding of the world. Students can choose to express ideas with words, pictures, and music.

In the classroom of the future, students will work on individualized programs tailored to meet each child’s interests and needs. They will learn how to problem-solve and synthesize information. Creativity and personal exploration will be encouraged.

Fifteen years later, many of us are still talking about these same ideas as necessities for advancing education, but they still haven’t caught on. Eerie, huh?

Also, I’m pleased to announce Brock Dubbels will continue to post more often on Education Futures as a regular contributer! We’ve noticed a bit of a “Brock Effect” where site traffic quadruples when Brock posts his thoughts:

Somebody’s taking interest. Rock on, Brock!

Do kids just naturally get it? Are they just good at games, computers, phones, and all things digital?

My experience and common sense says no, although I wish it were a general truth.

Do kids need to learn about games in school?

Yes, if we want to guide them in optimal usage, and maybe learn something from them.

This post looks at formal and informal learning and begins to make connections between what is done in school: formal learning and what is done out of school: informal. The importance of this inquiry is to look at how we can recruit these informal processes to create leverage and development in formal learning situations. What is generally true for informal learning is that the learners are learning spontaneously and then moving to the next experience. This spontaneous learning is often thought to be tacit, or below the conscious awareness. One may be able to do a thing, but may not be able to describe the process they created, much less know a name for it. Conversely, in classroom, or formal learning experiences, we hope that students are being guided through learning experiences with structured reflection to give the process and elements of the process a formal name: like reading is a process.

There are four pieces to this post:

1. Are the kids just born with gaming skills?
2. Should we teach with them? Games as embodied informal models of scientific reasoning and the role of play.
3. Why we should recruit culturally relevant knowledge like games and other out of school experiences?
4. What happens when we honor the culture, language, and experience outside of the classroom by bringing it into the classroom to connect with formal academic culture, language, and experience?

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What was presented yesterday is how to embody and teach a lesson on Voice.

Trying to teach voice sounds pretty boring, especially when you tell them excitedly in your teacher nerd-talk that “you’ll like it, it’s fun! We’ll look at poetry and other fiction and examine tone, emphasis, word choice, syntax, volume, and all the things that make a great reading. Just think, diction is slang! We’ll study that too!”

Booooooorrrriing.

If they don’t heckle me for saying something like that, they should.

Now what happens when we embody that lesson in something that it is kind of fun and exciting?

Let’s try another voice:

How about cutting some tracks on garage band? You are going to do the voice on the song. Then we’ll put some music and a beat behind it.

What are you going to call your act? Are you going to be yourself, or make a character? What is their sound?

What are you going to rap about? How about this? Or maybe you can try rapping some one else’s words.

Well, we better think of a logo and begin to think about how we are going to promote you. Who do you like?

Okay, let’s think about doing a video, the cover art, and do some press kits and take some glam shots.

You are going to take on a couple of roles: the talent, the publicist, designer, the manager, the producer.

Will you want to do a clothing line?

So what happens when we try out a high interest activity?

How about engaging the imagination to make something real?

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I sent an email out to a few folks with a short question:

Which trend will have the greatest impact on education in the 21st century?

[ ] Globalization
[ ] Rise of the knowledge society
[ ] Accelerating change
[ ] Other: _______

The results will be posted below as I receive them. If you did not receive an invitation, but would like to participate, please email me at moravec@umn.edu with your response.

I will update this response summary over the next couple evenings:

(64 responses recorded as of last update)

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Games as Expert Systems

It seems like common sense to assume that the best way to learn something is to work one-on-one with an expert. Unfortunately, many of these experts are busy using their expertise in important projects at the Louvre, saving lives, winning Nobel prizes, and putting out fires—and sometimes a great expert is not a great teacher!

Teachers have many specialties and interests, but are often not experienced with having been a physicist, psychiatrist, police officer, or an engineer. But they do have expertise in the developmental issues of children; they know how to build relationships, can motivate and engage, and know how to structure learning environments. These are key attributes if you are going to create a learning outcome with a stranger– unless you are paying them!

Many teachers believe that if they were able to work with just a few kids over a long period of time, they could create significant growth. Just imagine working with 32 students over a 55 minute period – how much time would you have with each student if they started and ended when the bell rang?

So what would happen if you to design a computer game based upon teachers’ knowledge of pedagogy and childhood development, with a designers ability to portray and depict complex ideas, a computer programmers ability to design a system, an assessment experts ability to create measure outcomes and performance, and that subject matter experts knowledge?

Perhaps you would have a game. . . A game that could work as an expert system to teach.

Here is one about the brain called Neuromatrix! A secret agent fixing brains. Sounds cool.

How about nano-technology?

Business Week just published a story related to their special report on gaming on theNanoScale game, which helps players visualize and understand thespatial relationships between objects at all scales, starting with a tiny blue hydrogen atom, shown here next to a buckyball (the name of amolecule of carbon atoms arranged in a pattern of hexagons andpentagons) and a colorful strand of DNA.

This is not the first serious game. Serious games and games in general, according to David Perry at Business Week:

Now games are a legitimate academic subject, with many university courses around the world offering degrees in video game design and development. And many game designers and researchers are seeing how games influence cognitive and other skills. This summer, the MacArthur Foundation board announced it will give a $1.1 million grant to fund the Institute of Play, a new middle/high school in New York City focused on making video games. Why? The foundation has found that games are an effective tool to teach information management and other critical skills.

So are we going to begin to make this happen in our own schools and universities? It seems odd that we would ignore this trend. Training and retaining people is the one of the most expensive things we do. In addition, when we lose young people in schools, it costs us more. So what can we do to retain our students?

It is my contention that many young people have checked out. Do they know what skills they will need for the work place? Maybe they see through our worksheets and have found us to be irrelevant, or are they tired of the point-and-talk teaching model that informs the work they do in their tidy rows of desks?

One of the current issues that may need to be addressed is how we bring in the new skills and interests to an older generation who do not know what a Super Monkey Ball is, or even Madden 2008.

In respect of this, I have begun to create a wiki resource for educators who would like to explore video games as a classroom topic. This wiki has been co-created by teachers who took the class “video games as learning tools”, taught at the University of Minnesota.

In this class, we are exploring games for use in the classroom. If you are interested in looking at the syllabus and the activities, as well as finding resources and student reflections on the readings, please go to http://videogamesaslearningtools.wikispaces.com/

This wiki was created to be a resource for teachers to have structure in the course, but to also co-create the course. Included are the lesson/unit plans I used to create a 6 week unit for middle school and high school students at the Minneapolis Public Schools. The role of the wiki was to create a communal platform where students in the class could have choice in creating content, process, and outcomes in the course. They were course designers too. This co-creation is a powerful method for teaching, and wikis can support it.

The class itself was not a glorification of video games. It was a practical look at how games can be integrated into the classroom as tools as well and models for designing instruction. Since games are representations of ideas, worlds, concepts, and life, we can have them stand as metaphor to embody any process experientially.

Playing games may not be as rich an experience as taking the kids to the Grand Canyon, but, a game about the Grand Canyon can give you the chance to walk around a well-modeled representation, and maybe even give opportunities being there couldn’t. How about the possibility of flying above the canyon, and then landing and kayaking the Colorado River? All of this could be done with games and interactive story telling technology. You could definitely see it all faster in a game.

Also, games can supply us with efficacious design elements. How about this game I designed for developing performance reading? You become part of a music act and create your own image and work through Garage Band. Students take on the role of: the talent, the producer, the publicist, the manager, the designer and create their complete band package—including a MySpace page for networking and sharing your work. This game is simple role playing and use of readily available technology.

Many artists are being discovered through social networking tools. Why not have your students do it at their computer? Here is the slideshow that I presented at

Games structure interaction, they demand mastery, the performance is the assessment, and if they are well-designed, they are fun. Your lesson plans can be this way too. Why not offer work that is really fun and inspires play? It will change your teaching experience.

So this game is in the tradition of Guitar Hero & Karaoke. I call it found objects, because all the elements necessary come in many of the computers we currently purchase in schools. In this case, our school had imacs. Often as teachers, we do not have the resources to purchase some of the great games available, but we can use our eyes, ears, and creativity to use the design elements that some of the great games are built upon to build units that might be more fun, playful, and rewarding while building important competencies. I am hoping that teachers think about this and design units that allow them to participate rather than broadcast

The student basically designs a band franchise– producing an album using off the shelf Imacs and the iLife bundle of software. I looked around and Karaoke software can be just as effective if not more interesting for the fact that the lyrics can be created with it for performance and the creation of that lyric sheet represents an opportunity to think about how they might structure and format a song. We listen to a song to get the lyrics and discuss the qualities. These qualities are used to create a framework for voice and flow.

We have other mini-games in the unit like clapping academy, where we evaluate clapping and make a rubric. This act of co-creation instills buy-in and understanding by the students and is then extended when we co-create the rubrics for the songs and image elements.

The kids look for and create lyrics from poetry, prose, want ads– whatever—and read into garage band.

They record their chosen text, and then they comment on their performance reading. We use a fluency scale designed for continuous improvement that we co-create. It is meant as a model to create descriptions for different reading situations and what mastery may look, feel, and sound like with reading.

After they have talked about their track, they put music behind it, then reflecting upon why they mixed it the way they did.

This unit is intended to teach performance reading – beyond fluency, provide high interest activity, and integrate reflection on reading and emphasize comprehension through a discourse processing model and explore aspects like voice and other literary elements. The intention was to show that games that come prepackaged are great, but that teachers can design games that are effective and use existing technologies and software already available to teach traditional subjects that are relevant to current cultural values and interests.

Yes, it improved reading performance.

I am developing the following ideas with George Kubik and John Moravec. We welcome any feedback you might have.

To date, divisions of past, present, and future have been a necessary condition for a paradigm of futures research. We assert that the futures research field must progress beyond traditional assumptions and categories of past, present and future to the recognition that 1) these concepts are largely byproducts of industrial time, and 2) Newtonian/Cartesian thinking with precepts of control, determinism, and linearity. The construction of alternative pasts, presents, and futures offers a new mode for sense-making, design, and choice in human affairs. It treats futures research as an activity that involves the re-conceptualization, redesign and reconstruction of the present into alternative presents.

The futures field is built upon traditional understandings of time and the partitioning of time into past, present, and future. However, we assert that this historical understanding of time, as partitioned into past, present, and future, has become too limited for sense making in a more complex world. The futures field must now expand into the new frontier of alternative presents, thereby permitting new sense making, knowledge creation, and decision options.

We define alternative presents as distinctive existential states of continuous novelty and emergent complexity. Comparison is the mechanism whereby one present state can be differentiated from others. Shortly we will demonstrate the use of simtime in the creation and application of alternative presents.

As previously noted, humans are time-bound. Concepts of past, present, and future events are bound together to provide continuity and a framework for sense making, knowledge production, and decision making. The process of simtime suggests a new methodology for harnessing the continuous emergence of novelty, invention, and design in the scope of human time binding.

Simtime methods address historical and anticipated states in terms of time-binding and time-transcendence. They advance the concepts of imported pasts and imported futures that are continuously invented and re-invented within alternative presents. The ongoing construction and deconstruction of imported pasts and imported presents within alternative presents provides frameworks for new formats of time association. Thus, alternative presents are treated as continuously created and emergent resources rather than single points with the passage of chronological time.

The field of futures research is defined largely through its methodologies, or philosophies of method. Scientific futurists assert that discoveries of past, present, and future relationships (e.g., cycles, bifurcations, trajectories, and discontinuities) are best determined by methodological properties rather than objective observations of phenomenological properties. From this point of view, the futures field is already concerned with the invention rather than the discovery of temporal patterns and processes in phenomenological events. A central tenet of simtime is that different depictions of presents are, indeed, artifacts of human observation, categorization, and methodological choice.

We assert that the concept of alternative presents affords the possibility to develop new soft technologies of great importance. Rapid change and complexification have mutated time to become more than an interval measure; it has become a critical resource in the generation of new sense making, knowledge construction, and decision alternatives. The conceptualization of time has migrated from a value-free phenomenon to be studied to a value-rich resource to be developed.