As we continue to enjoy our reduced workloads over the summer, here is a summary of developments from elsewhere of interest to the Education Futures community.

1. NASA and Virtual Heroes (@NASAgames on Twitter) launched Moonbase Alpha, a game designed to spark youth interest in exploration beyond Earth. In the first ten days of release, over 105,000 people downloaded Moonbase Alpha. The game also placed in Steam’s top 30 most popular games out of more than 1,100 and was one of a handful of free games in the top hundred as well. The developers set up a NASA Games community on Steam where players can meet and discuss the Moonbase Alpha and other games. The community also includes a chat room and other features. Find it at http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nasagames
    
2. The Peter Drucker Society has launched an Essay Contest which, in the spirit of Druckerian duality of teaching and learning from the young generation, is organized as a contest for students, young managers and young entrepreneurs. All those aged 35 and under who are passionate about the future of management and society may submit their essay. More information is available at http://www.druckerchallenge.org
    
3. 3. Finally, we’ve followed Sir Ken Robinson a bit in the past, and here’s another –but excellent– video of him in action. WPSU-TV recently interviewed him Robinson in a series called “Conversations From Penn State” where he elaborated his views on the problems facing the education system and suggests ways to improve it (by promoting creativity):
    

Will Wright, the video-game designer responsible for some of the best-selling titles of all time, says that video games are better at inspiring students to learn than actually teaching them.

Starting with a limited scope, AMD Changing the Game will support the following non-profit partner organizations that serve their mission:

• Girlstart (Austin, TX): created to empower girls in the subjects of math, science, and technology
• Global Kids (Brooklyn, NY): seeks to transform urban youth into successful students and community leaders
• Institute for Urban Game Design (Washington DC): teaches science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills through the hands-on creation of digital games
• Science Buddies (Carmel, CA): offers a variety of web-based tools that help K-12 students explore science through research-based projects often done at Science Fairs and other school and community events
• 5th Annual Games for Change Festival (New York, NY): dedicated to creating and using digital games for positive social change

…and, it appears they’re welcoming additional grant applications.

1. Always with You: Experiment in Hand-held Philanthropy: The Always With You network will connect young African social entrepreneurs with young North American professionals. Using mobile phone technology, which is now widespread, this network will facilitate both micro-funding and the exchange of professional advice to projects in Africa that promote public benefit.
2. Black Cloud: Environmental Studies Gaming: Black Cloud is an environmental studies game that mixes the physical with the virtual to engage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo, Egypt.
3. Critical Commons: Critical Commons is a blogging, social networking and tagging platform specially designed to promote the “fair use” of copyrighted material in support of learning.
4. FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement: FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement, a project of the Institute on Money in State Politics, is an online interactive site and users’ guide that supports civics research by young people and promotes their understanding of — and engagement with — electoral politics and legislative activities.
5. Fractor: Act on Facts: Fractor is a web application that matches news stories with opportunities for social activism and community service.
6. HyperCities: Based on digital models of real cities, “HyperCities” is a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with stories of the people who live there and those who have lived there in the past.
7. Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop for Social Issue Game: The Let the Games Begin workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games.
8. Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE): Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies, a project to be conducted in rural India, promotes literacy through language-learning games on mobile phones: the “PCs of the developing world.”
9. Mobile Musical Networks: Mobile Musical Networks will build an expressive mobile musical laboratory for exploring new ways of making music with laptops and local-area-networks.
10. Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally: Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally, a project of the Global Fund for Children, is a new community and “information commons” that will include blogs, video clips, sound slides, podcasts, and photographs to help share innovative practices for helping marginalized and vulnerable children.
11. Ohmwork: Networking Homebrew Science: Ohmwork is a new social network and podcast site where young people can become inventive and passionate about science by sharing their do-it-yourself (DIY) science projects.
12. Self-Advocacy Online: Self-Advocacy Online is an educational and networking website for teens and adults with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, targeted at those who participate in organized self-advocacy groups.
13. Social Media Virtual Classroom: The Social Media Virtual Classroom will develop an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media.
14. Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab: The Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab project is a laboratory that allows people to turn digital models into real world constructions of plastic, metal, wood and more.
15. Virtual Conflict Resolution: Turning Swords to Ploughshares: Virtual Conflict Resolution is a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations.
16. The Virtual World Educators Network: The Virtual World Educators Network will be developed to serve as an online hub to promote the use of virtual worlds as rich learning environments.
17. YouthActionNet Marketplace: The YouthActionNet Marketplace is a dynamic digital networking platform for young leaders to engage in social entrepreneurship and address critical social problems.

How can we fund more of these projects?

SimCity Societies, the latest release in the SimCity franchise, is due for release on November 13. The game integrates a social and cultural modeling component. Characteristics of each user-run SimCity is determined by the user through development of six social, cultural, and economic factors: productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge.

From EA:

Featuring an all-new, revolutionary feature set, SimCity Societies allows you to create your own kinds of cities and shape their cultures and environments. Make your cities green or polluted, contemporary or futuristic, rural or urban. Create an artistic society or a police state, an industrial city or a spiritual community—or any society you want!

Jamais Cascio notes that the game is finding real world applications, including climate education –from an unlikely source:

British Petroleum initially approached EA Games about a specialized version of SimCity that dealt with energy and global warming; rather than undertake a one-off project, EA agreed to partner up with BP to integrate these ideas into SimCity Societies. While this has elements of crass product placement — all of the gas stations in your city are BP, for example — it also suggest an intriguing opportunity to look at not just how energy and environment affect economic results, but how they change social behaviors, too.

Also read Dan DiPasquo’s commentary on the role of energy companies in games…

Also, click here to read Education Futures posts by Brock on games in the classroom.

But not just any games. The kinds of games that require some flexibility in problem solving are the ones I am most interested in. By looking at these games we can consider some of the elements that might inform how we engage students in well-designed instruction.

Games have not changed much.

There are some different genres now, and computers take much of the computation out of the complex games that we would have played in small groups. You can now play Risk, Monopoly, D & D, and stat sheet baseball all on the computer.

But what makes games fun are the same some core elements that have always been there.

The reason I have them in this order is that the first games I have seen my toddlers engage in is imaginative play. Is imaginative play a game? The kids take the toys and do what they do. Making sounds and telling us stories about what is happening; they put pillows under the table and make a race car. This is really productive learning. It is modeling and practicing what they see in the world. So perhaps imaginative play is not a game from the perspective of a formal definition, but it is often at the root of games with narratives.

Games with narratives are important for passing on cultural and professional knowledge.

But some games do not always have narratives. Cribbage does not have a narrative, neither does kick ball.

The big idea is that some games have these elements and some do not. But games can be a model for developing culturally valued skills, or for entering worlds of story and preparing for the development of competencies. What would happen if you explained to your kids that chess was a model for practicing battlefield tactics? Games are often representative of some abstracted system. In chess, you don’t have all of the details that make war tedious, like supply lines, morale, weather. But what you do have is a formalized system that necessitates strategy, resource management, and creative tool use. In addition, one must use the imagination to visualize all of the potential moves your opponent might do to counter. This kind of predictive play is the same kind method Einstein used in his thought experiment for Special Relativity.

When we think of this first step, we need to remember that play and games are powerful tools that take the facts, often conveyed in a lecture of from a text, and ask us to interact with them as processes and contexts. This potentially offers opportunities to develop deeper and more flexible knowledge of the system being described, rather than just memorizing it. Science can be taught this way, and so can literature and any other content area that has methods of inquiry. What you are doing is when you create games is the creation of models of the world and then modifying them to explore, fantasize, escape, and maybe try on a new identity.

Einstein used this same tool for imagining special relativity! The point of this taxonomy is not to place value in the sequence, but I have noticed that each one seems to build into the next for adding complexity. Imaginative games seem to come early.

As kids imagine their play, they often begin to take on the roles and identities of who they are imitating. They eventually learn that there are rules that come with roles, i.e., white hat cowboys don’t rustle horses, or the rules are made up for new variations as they play—as in, “No, you can’t do that. You are the baby, I’m the mommy “, or “let’s turn the submarine into a spaceship.”

These possible worlds are powerful.

And as children progress with age, we start to see them playing more formalized games developed in our cultures, like board games, signifying, soccer, kick the can, rapping, and telephone. Games are beginning to gain structure here with rules, and from here they can become somewhat complicated when we add elements that create uncertainty like branching, new rules, and probability. These more advanced games may provide the kid of habits of mind that can deliver the kind of complex problem solving many of today’s careers demand. Life is not always as you would expect. This is what I am hoping we begin to embrace in our lesson designs.

This is where games like D & D and other adventure and role playing games come in. They are built on the idea that given a certain situation, rules and roles will create certain contexts, and there might be a variety of solutions. Oddly enough, games develop this complexity very early on for kids. Just recall Chutes and Ladders®. In it there was a board squares and you moved in the squares in a linear or straightforward process. You probably know that the spinner brings luck in, but what makes the game more than just a horse race is the fact that are rules built into the board too. If you land on a chute, you might be sent back; if you land on a ladder, you might accelerate forward several levels on the path.

The importance of this is that there are many ways through a game. The elements of branching and probability demand this variable experience. When you add other elements like the way Monopoly has squares on the game board where you have to take a card like Chance or Community Cents, or you have to pay rent on some one’s land or hotel, or you decide to buy it, you have to adapt and act.

What this is leading to is games and designing classroom instruction can be very similar in their approach. A key to making it playful is allowing for non-linearity—that is uncertainty. Knowing that people may experience and play in different ways, and that people like this.

Do you have a lesson where the kids can make it different but just as good? The assessments can reflect the way games guide play through criteria and structure. The key is creating some latitude in how you evaluate the final product.

Things teacher should think about:

Games and lesson plans can be designed with the same elements.

Uncertainty can be stressful, but the right amount can be exciting.

Complex games have complex problems. You may have to have do overs.

Complex games often utilize all of the elements of listed in the taxonomy in different combinations and permutations, thus demanding the player to understand the problem and react on the spot. If they don’t get it, they can try again. If they are good problems, kids will persist and seek solutions.

There can be many solutions to a problem. It is good to allow for many approaches, even if this takes more time. These alternative explanations allow for greater variety of solutions, creativity, and flexible thinking.

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?

Are the kids just born with gaming skills?

Kids today are not born with digital code imprinted in their DNA. They have to learn the language of technology, just like adults.

There is a digital divide between kids that have the new technologies and those that do not, and there is also a divide between those that have the games, and those that have the games and the people to help them understand how to use them.

I have documented this with video after spending many hours in a video game after school program in Hopkins, Minnesota. What I discovered is that most of the kids did not know what to do when they were stuck in a complex game. We were playing Metroid Prime, and until Darius came, none of the boys could figure out how to get into the first air lock. Metroid Prime is kind of a complicated game. But that is what makes it worthwhile. It is an open environment game that demands that you make sense of the world and find your way. There is a hint system in the game, but for some reason, it was turned off. That was very convenient for me to watch and see what they would do—not that I had anything to do with that. The cool thing is that there are many ways that a person can get through each problem. This allows for expression through play—an aesthetic. This open-ended approach to game play was discussed in my talk at the Professionalism in Practice conference. In the slides from that conference, I described the idea of non-linearity in game design. That is, you cannot necessarily predict the steps in a progression in a game. Even a simple one like Chutes and Ladders. Because of all of the chutes and ladders being dictated by the spinner, probability makes strategizing futile. Kids can begin to estimate and hope for the spinner to land on six, but they cannot plan for it either. This might be a difficult pill to swallow for educators, but when you assess for nice and tidy answers, are you assuming that life is full of nice and tidy answers? This is the challenge, there are many similarities in life, experience, and people, but it is variation that allows us to prosper and adapt. If we did not allow for variation, we would have no innovation. We would be living on rails from start to finish.

Back to Metroid Prime

They turned on the game and mashed the buttons on the controller; each taking turns trying to make Samus (the character) do something. It seemed clear to them, in the video footage I recorded, that there must be a way to get into the space station. They figured out how to shoot things, but that was about it besides walking around.

This was different from the genre of game that these kids played regularly. It demanded that they go through the process of elimination in pressing buttons, as well as finding different combinations, and then to do the same thing by pressing things in the game environment. It took patience and a methodical approach to trial and error. But none of the boys had this patience or persistence.

Should we teach with them? Games as informal models of scientific reasoning and the role of play

Well, what is formal scientific reasoning?

Isn’t it hypothesis testing? Isn’t it reduction then looking at different combinations of the reduced elements together working as a system? It is observation, modeling, and testing in and out of context.

It is patience, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to withhold judgment until a proposition is disqualified through the process of elimination. It is critical thinking. These are elements of complex games as well as scientific reasoning

It seems weird, but in games, kids have to go through scientific process where they tacitly use abductive, inductive, deductive, and analogical reasoning. In essence, they were using informal scientific reasoning. But by tacit and informal I mean that they were making it up as they went and sometimes, they could replicate what they did, and sometimes they just got lucky; and in times past the game held their hand to get them through and made them practice until they got it. Not this time though.

The point is, games are complex and dynamic interactive systems that demand decisions and thinking on your feet. And although games require this, and some kids do enact these formal processes, I am telling you now that this language is not generally viewed in the wild folks. It is taught. And the knowledge is either tacit, in that you can do it but you can’t explain it, or it is explicit, where you have a name for it and you know how it works.

These kids were at an afterschool remedial reading program. And honestly, these kids did not have the informal skills described. They were stuck outside the space station on Metroid Prime. There were no hints to follow and imitate. As much as they all tried , they were getting very frustrated.

It wasn’t until Darius came that they were able to get into the space station. And Darius is the product of the mentorship and modeling his dad provides and the texts he reads to help him

This does not mean that Darius has formal skills. He has tacit skills where he can tell what to do, but does not have a name for the process.

In school, language is important. It is our ability to make a concept or process formalized. That is, something that can be observed and replicated. Learning this kind of language can be arduous. The key to doing this seems to be connecting to the things kids already know and give them hook a to hang it on. In essence, you can think of the experience of school as kind of a cognitive hat rack, where we create terminology and methods that are transparent, generally accepted, and not necessarily descriptive. Ontogeny anyone?

An example of tacit knowledge of a process is reading.

How many of you can define reading right now right here?

Not many, and it is not because you can’t do it, you are doing it, right now as you read. You have to reflect and think about what you are doing. You are decoding symbols and having ideas that are represented by words that you have learned, and in some cases, you are learning new ideas in the context of what you already know. You are formalizing tacit knowledge to explicit, conscious knowledge. Reading is thinking cued by text. The letters tell you what to see and hear in your mind from our common language. You are building a model that is mediated by your memories and experience. In some cases you are creating new ideas through comparison, combination, and reduction, and also making predictions and analogy.

But this is not guaranteed.

How do I know you do this when you read?

We generalize through scientific method, the methods generate this theory of what we do when we read.

Language is how we share formalized systems, and how we create them from tacit experience. A group of people get together, decide what it is and give it a name.

There are a lot of names in school. Just think of how you use academic language. Do you use the word base? How many meanings does it have through the school day?

Kids are consistently asked to develop language from content registers, which are specialized languages from fields and professions in school. The trick is to connect it to what they know—(abduction). They connect through seeing a pattern, such as A created B (deduction), or guessing that a,b,c,d are all connected to some single cause (induction). Do they do this naturally? It seems to be the case in some instances. But it is rare to see it formalized anywhere outside of school. Formalized means that it is a named, observable, replicable, conscious (explicit) process. School is that process of socialization where we negotiate and sometimes learn a new language, and with it, new competencies and new ways of interacting with the world.

Should we teach with games?

I wrote about this a week ago, Yes, games whether they be video games or instruction designed like a game, the learning principles in games provide embodied experience that can be reflected upon and formalized with our monopoly on naming. L earning is really not a big mystery, and games understand play. Play is powerful learning. We know what it looks like, and we tend to create taxonomies and hierarchies. Here is one I made. (Observed stages of play).

After my children were born, I watched both of them become conscious of their limbs, learn how to grasp, learn to manipulate the things they grasped through the motor skills they had developed through trial and error, and then to use tactics to figure out how to make the stuffed dog bark; eventually they began just watch to mom and dad do it; and they became quick studies as they sought mastery of the tools that made mom and dad seem super-powered and oh-so-independent. So they began to develop agency through activity. Ryan & Deci’s self-determination theory complements this with the idea that we seek to belong, to be competent, and have autonomy. This is often created through the ability to act in the world and be respected for what you can do. There is plenty to support this if you read Brian Sutton Smith, you will find him connecting play to Stephen Jay Gould’s evolutionary theory. He makes the case that play and learning go hand in hand, and play has been a necessary part of evolution, as it has created the variation necessary for adaptation.

Sadly, have moved away from play in education, even though we are a play culture. It seems like during the push to have efficient methods for delivering information, we only considered the efficiency of the teacher, and made the teacher the focus rather than being student centered. To be student centered, we might have to move out of the direct instruction model and allow kids to get their hands dirty and have great ideas. And kids do have great ideas. Look at research by Piaget. Look at and read Duckworth’s book called, The Having of Wonderful Ideas, where she found kids able to have great ideas. Ideas that are being consistently rediscovered and are the roots of formal scientific reasoning; The ones we teach as methods for inquiry in most, if not all of our content areas. It is through school and culture we hope to speed up the process. But we have done through using these formal systems that must be memorized abstracted from experience, rather than through discovery and reflection.

What I have found through reading, watching, and reflecting is a process of learning that looks something like these observed stages of play.

This model makes a case for a different kind of instruction in the classroom–one that begins to resemble games rather than someone lecturing at a podium. Students have to be highly motivated to learn in a lecture, unless of course they are learning they don’t like lectures. I am not against lectures, but how am I going to get a real sense of all of the kids learning if I am always talking? The structured interactions and performance as assessment aspects of games allow mastery learning and feedback, and thus much more interaction; interaction is the basis for improvement and self-measure. In trial and error, don’t we act and look for the result? That is the basis of trial and error and until we have some knowledge of the object in context – or systems knowledge. So what if we look at play and how people play as culturally relevant, not only as a teaching method, but as experience we can give to embody and share formalized concepts? That is making what we are doing conscious – moving into the realm of purposeful use of strategies.

People begin with an interest in what a thing is and what it can do. If you recall the film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, indigenous bush people living by older tribal means found a coke bottle that was thrown from a small aircraft. It was used for anything and everything the villagers could think of: carrying water, mashing things into meal, and eventually, even as a weapon.

Without guided instruction, an object may not tell how you may use it, or what you may use it for. In essence, you can shape the tool, and the tool can shape you. It is through culture that our knowledge is transmitted—language, tools, rules, relations, and objects. So what seems basic to all of us, using induction here, is to assume that we are all curious tinkerers. Looking for interesting things to do, and we begin with trial and error based upon prior experience and our ability to reason with analogy—it looks like a hammer, it must be a hammer, thus used like a hammer.

Games understand this, but they are also aware that giving people what they see and experience in everyday life is not an escape. So in order to help us find easy and early success in the game – they do want us to play and buy the sequel, as well as tell others to play it—they build in hints and guides, and simplified training stages, where the game aids you in your tasks so that you feel like you are getting it right away and becoming the king of the thing.

Metroid Prime will lead you through with hints, but as I mentioned, not this time. Darius had experience with this game and was immediately adept at telling the kid with the controller – Chris—what to do next. Where previously the boys had taken the controller back and forth trying out their ideas; the one who had the success would move forward while the others watched and learned—waiting for a turn. Darius was okay with telling them what to do, but he eventually got bored and went to the computers in the back of the room. I let the camera do the recording on the boys playing and followed Darius; he had started looking around with a browser on a computer.

What I found out was that Darius played with his dad when they had weekends together, and that he practiced playing during the week (maybe this was why he was in this remedial reading program). His dad was really into games, and he showed Darius how to get information online as well as how to prepare and apply the information in the text into action. Kind of like reading instructions to that grill, those shelves, or that workbench you bought with all those parts that require assembly. Reading to act is complex–especially when the game or object demands mastery.

Just an aside here, but, do you read the instructions first?

Do you learn about the people and company where you are interviewing before you go in?

Do you Google people before you go on a blind date?

Is that cheating, or being prepared?

How about in a classroom?

Darius used computers and magazines to find walk-throughs, cheats, and other tips on how to get through the games with ease and give him freedom to play with some flair because he had prior knowledge. Thus, he played with an aesthetic: Play worthy of other people viewing it. Play as performance. He had created ideas of what getting through a game should look like. This was probably from watching other players, as well as his dad’s values and excellence—evidently his dad is very good at games.

Darius was supported by his parents through subscriptions to magazines like Game Informer. He had modeled play from his dad as well as through what he read in magazines and on the WWW.

In addition to Darius, I also interviewed a middle school student from Stillwater. He told me he watched g4TV and met regularly with his gamer friends to play multiplayer and single payer games together. They all watched these programs and read the magazines so they would know what were the good games, they also had the chance to see other people playing games, and this showed them what to do, and then practiced so that when they met, they would be able to show what they could do. There was a lot of “lemme try that!”

In a phenomenological study I did, I found that the young woman that was my informant played DDR because it was great fun with her friends, and that she practiced at home so that she could improve each time she met with her group. This was in addition to being in traveling band, International Baccalaureate, track, and soccer! She even shared that she brought the game on a trip to play against other kids in the band in the hotel. She described the way she figured it out as watching, trying, and practicing, and then more of the same.

The big question is, are we tapping into this at school? Can we recruit these experiences to make what we teach more accessible? Can we do it in a similar way?

We can tap into and develop teaching based upon our knowledge of what kids do and like.

And we can learn something from them. And as teachers, learning is something we should enjoy and constantly model. A natural curiosity and inquisitiveness that allows for the formal methods we have been trained with as subject matter experts in all of the content areas.

All we need to do is study, ask, and connect. And what we should be studying are our kids.

Why should we recruit culturally relevant knowledge and experience that can be connected to make tacit knowledge explicit?

There are many studies of people outside of school doing the things we learn in school, but better. I must admit, I have been intrigued by the studies of brazilin street children doing complex mathematics. As I have been reading Carol Lee’s new book, she has been using this research, as well as parallel and complementary research to build a curricular approach she calls Cultural Modeling.
In cultural modeling, we need to see that actions and behaviors outside of school can be just as deep and complex as what we do in school. It is a matter of the teacher deeply understanding their content area facts, processes, and creating contexts for connecting with cultural practices outside of school.

She argues for educators having cultural understanding of knowledge, and asks that we consider structures that encourage participation and connection.

Lee asks, “are we giving poor kids direct instruction because we are convinced this is the only way they can catch up and learn?”

Lee asserts that we must establish routines to get students to persist; students may need help discovering relationships between facts that are memorized and patterns. On page 33, she says that “direct instruction and basic skills instruction are totally insufficient”, and that “a profound lack of understanding of the cultural displays of knowledge in the everyday practices of minority and low income students . . . has led to a pervasive culture of low expectations, to deficit models of student capacities, and to a myriad of misunderstandings within classrooms.”

One of the examples she makes along with the computational abilities of Brazilian street children is called signifying, which is a practice in African American English. You know what that is right? Let me model one that I heard that thought was funny: “your momma so fat, her blood type rocky road!” This is a rapid analogical exchange where insults and ideas are traded based upon representation and quick and clever turns of wit – where the person receiving has to quickly identify what is being signified, use the representation and turn it back on the originator. Lee suggests that this and many other cultural acts could support the most difficult things we do in Language Arts classrooms – identifying patterns and imagery in narrative and interpreting and extending them. Can we analogize this kind of analogical reasoning with our kids in class for books that might reflect their experiences? Can we use games which are even closer to what we do in school?

What Lee seems to be saying, is the same thing I have been trying to say—can’t we learn what the kids like, bring it in, and connect it to traditional academic reasoning structures. Isn’t there a place for new culture in the old canons? What we’re talking about here is good old transfer. Connecting skills from one experience to leverage something new quickly. This seems a much more efficient method than teaching formalized systems and then asking kids to make the connections themselves. They would have to think there is relevance to want to do this.

And why is what we are teaching more important than what kids are doing now? The question has been asked by Michael Apple –Whose knowledge is it?

Who decides what is complex and what is not. There is complexity everywhere. Simplicity is really only in our mind’s ability to abstract and reduce. According to Lauren Resnick (1978, in Lee, pg. 36), complex problems are ones for which the solution path cannot be fully specified in advance and for which there might not be simple right or wrong answers. Isn’t this what I described as a complex game? There are many paths built upon different reasons and experience?

This brings up issues of designing instruction: can it be different, but just as good?

On Friday, I was with a group of teachers and we were going through a mathematics activity where we were asked to give the perimeter of hexagons that were placed in three different series.

The math people created a table, showing how many sides:

1 = 6, 2= 10, 3 = 14 and then predict 6 connected hexagons.

I looked at them and noticed that there were six sides and that each time two were connected, you would add all the sides and subtract the two since they were no longer on the perimeter, so I just blurted an answer without showing my work.

They were a little taken aback, but I explained what I had done. They liked it, but it did not fit with the lesson. If we really worked on connecting it, we would have discovered a nice little equation underneath it (post a comment if you can figure it out)

It was not that they didn’t like it; they wanted to teach a formalized methodology. Because mine was emergent, it caught them off guard. I am an English teacher, what would I be doing with an algorithm anyway?

This was a teachable moment, and our kids are rich with valuable experiences that we can build off of.

So back to games.

They fit Resnick’s definition of complexity.

In fact, they are considered to be complex and dynamic systems.

They demand strategic thinking and planning. To win, and win with an aesthetic, one must build layered strategies, tolerating the ambiguity of each level to apply an appropriate strategy, rather than using the same tactic with every challenge.

This does not seem to come naturally. Kids need to have this modeled and imitate it. And it is. Kids play with adults and other kids who share and learn from each other.

Find out how many of your underachieving boys play video games and ask them to demonstrate them. When I did this with high school seniors, we got a clinic on Madden and NBA. You want complex dynamic games? Try one!

So are the kids digital natives? Not by birth. But they are surrounded by cultural opportunity to learn and use these devices if they are available.

What I have seen is that if kids have any of those digital devices, they must have time and have access to people who use them so that they can participate together. In this way kids become very proficient. But so do adults.

Are these two very different approaches?

It is called leveraging everyday knowledge and tapping into high interest activities like games.

We can use games to build and leverage complex problem solving. We can connect with cultural values, knowledge, and experience that kids bring with them to school, and we can relate them to the formalized systems that we attempt to teach as abstraction.

Making the connection to experience is powerful, and we can do this from multiple perspectives.

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?

I hope to find out from you.

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?

When we have them create a page at MySpace it becomes real. Many of the music tracks making big money are being found through social networking and web-presence in spaces like MySpace. Here is a link to a group some of my kids were always trying to watch. If you are not able to see it, perhaps you have been cut off from the world like most students behind the firewalls. Most of the kids learn about proxy servers and go there anyway — and then we take away their computer usage! Way to reward initiative huh!

What happens if people like what they are doing?

Will there be initiative?

Do you think kids will expect and work for excellence? I am betting they will. This is what I have seen whne they perform to an audience beyond the teacher’s eyes and a red pen.

They are putting their work out there>>>>>>>>>>>>>>in the world>>>where people can see them!

We can deliver this, and all of the things that I mentioned in the first boring lesson. But in this one, the kids will engage. And they will own the lesson because it supports their quest for excellence.

And while we are at it, I can subtly add writing, visual imagery, structure analysis, media and information literacy, as well as design because it furthers their success and it is purposeful and relevant.

School relevant?

I can give them roles to play, we can design our own outcomes based upon my teacher knowledge which has been aligned with their interest and purpose to support them and help them deconstruct the process of performance with the elements of voice.

You might be saying to yourself, “what we are going to use rap music as a text book?”

And I say, “Yes, among other things.”

Why not use words from the world?

Do you think what we consider high culture now was always high culture? How about Shakespeare? He was a bit bawdy and cleverly lewd if you really try to understand the original language. And Chaucer? Don’t get me started.

Okay, so we are not going to go there. But what if we can find tracks that are G-rated? — and I don’t mean G like gangsta.

If there is profanity, shouldn’t we ask the kids what they think of that? Maybe profanity expresses some social commentary? Is it appropriate or just pushing the boundaries to be provocative?

Would you play it for grandma?

I have always been amazed at the strong morals kids have that seemingly support their efforts to be provocative, sometimes profane, and always seeking to be unique. They really do know better. And when it comes to their younger brothers and sisters, they are quite protective of their innocence.

So this unit is built to teach young people how to read, write, express themselves through language, and develop multimedia production skills usually only taught in specialized technical schools, art school, and through apprenticeships. And this is what many of the kids are interested in. Should we consider motivation and engagement? 20 years of socio-cognitive work has only led us to oversimplification of assessment until our tools are assessable, but also decontextualized and irrelevant activities. How many tests have you taken lately? There are four rhetorical modes I can think of: to entertain, to inform, to persuade, and to test.

The fourth only happens in school

To test or not to test.

Are we smart enough to design curriculum that allows for authentic assessment?

Yes, we are.

If we want to look at how to embody learning, we should look at games. Games are designed the same way that research and simulation are designed. Those are respectable activities right? And isn’t a well-structured lesson plan designed for validity and reliability, just like research and simulation? Just like games?

So what if we designed our lessons like games? If the fidelity of the simulation/ model that we are designing reflects the context and learning principles we are trying to introduce and teach; then we will likely have the interactions that we want, but with outcomes that may not be simple, clean, and convenient. This is not one-size-fits all.

So can we live in a world where different is just as good. That might mean creativity and innovation – ownership.

Pride in work? Doesn’t that come from putting your mark on it? Putting yourself into it?

Maybe we need some of that in our schools. Especially schools that have a high incidence of poverty, and assembly-line instruction fueled by tests Anyon (1980). Standardized tests seek mediocrity in most cases. How many tests stretched you to greatness? What kind of work should our kids be doing? In the Anyon article I cited, she found that wealthy kids generally evaluated and supported their positions. Even Bloom thought that was complex.

Test reading is superficial reading, Gee (2006), where you must fill in the blanks, but really don’t require much depth of thought; Allington (2006) describes this as continual testing rather than instruction—where the students are given a task that does not instruct, but assesses and tracks, and likely reduces student expectation and experience with reading complexity.

Moving on

Regular and quality feedback are essential to learning. How much feedback to improve do you get in a test? How do they adjust to your performance

We are moving closer to this with computer assisted tests. Interestingly, those tests are designed with branching—just like many games.

There is nothing wrong with tests. Life is full of tests for entitlement.

But what if the tests are not valid measures?

If you read the RAND report and the National Reading Panel’s report, along with many of the leading figures in reading, you will find healthy skepticism as well as contempt for the way we test for comprehension. I would recommend reading this book if you want smarter people than me to tell you–just read the chapter by Sweet. One of the major reservations expressed is that the tests are not built upon a theory of comprehension. It is for this reason that tests and item difficulty have to be negotiated in committees to create inter-rater reliability. Too bad inter-rater reliability does not translate to the classroom. What do we do when we want to teach these skills sets in the tests? How do we prepare the kids? What is their model? There is no model, the items are negotiated for complexity.

They tell us – Oh, use Blooms taxonomy.

Was this meant as a measure of complexity? I think not. Is recall a less complex process than synthesis? Can you even identify the process in context? When I gave a test defining bloom’s terms, the test makers and academics are stretched to identify them in context. Please write me if you would like to take this quiz.

So, if you are told to recall the process of internal combustion, is that less difficult than synthesizing yellow and blue? The answer to the latter is green. You learn that pretty early in school right. I know this is not a fair comparison, but you get my meaning right? It is not a hierarchy, it is meant as a framework for lesson design.

Readability is the same can of worms.

So, is this a difficult sentence: “to be or not to be”? The readability is high (very accessible and easy to decode).

But do you know the answer?

Can you comprehend it? There really is no easy answer to that question is there?

Complexity and readability could have a metric based upon psycholinguistic research using discourse processing models. If we are going to make a fair game, let’s make fair rules and fair play with our tests.

And aren’t we all just a little tired of shooting for mediocrity?

Are we content with passing a test that really signals nothing but a minimum standard?

Maybe it is time we began looking at things with a little more complexity and raise our standards in the meantime.

It is all about context and embodying the skills and competencies in something meaningful and fun.

Games create challenge, purpose, skill implementation, and reading and acting with purpose. If it is a good game, they will play it. And the actions are the assessments. Games assess and evaluate by their very nature. If you do not have mastery, you do not move forward. But the game will also give you help if you need it—no one designs a game that is too hard. So, maybe we should be thinking about games and how we might begin to design and structure instruction and content. We are at risk of losing our kids to disinterest because we are becoming irrelevant in teaching to the minimum standard.

We can do better for them.

We can take the classroom back. We can make it fun and relevant. We can make work feel like play. And maybe we can make work playful. Kindergarten teachers get this!

We can teach openness to creativity, innovation, and celebrate individuals rather than aggregated scores for AYP. It is my prediction that teaching from this perspective would eliminate AYP and make the tests easily passed.

Thank you for enduring this read if you have gotten this far. If you want to look at the model of comprehension I use for Rhythm & Flow: Star Maker, go here and learn about situation models. Also, there is a slide show that you can view here that describes the project here.

So, teaching reading and writing with Rap, Hip-Hop, Country, and Rock?

I am hopeful that this kind of content and instructional design can be embraced again. We need to embody learning. Teaching abstraction and conceptualization is like eating pure protein – sure it is good for you, but wouldn’t you rather have that protein in something you enjoy?