The Game Plan

The Right Name

I remember one morning during my student teaching. My fourth bell, a particularly lively group of ninth-graders, was just about to begin. I was turning students' attention to the warm-up when I approached two young males in the thick of a passionate conversation. Before redirecting them, I stopped to eavesdrop. Let me summarize some of the elements of discourse I overheard:

• Stating arguments
• Defending arguments using specific examples
• Providing counter-arguments to those examples
• Citing sources of bias 
• Using personal experience, story, and anecdotes as evidence
• Incorporating evidence based on outside knowledge

We were in an English-language arts (ELA) classroom. I couldn't believe my ears. These two boys who I struggled to motivate and keep engaged in and out of class were employing powerful techniques of rhetoric and exemplifying the best of argumentation. 

And oh, they were talking about video games. 

One was arguing for the superiority of Playstation 3. The other, Xbox 360. I didn't make them do the warm-up that day. I just asked them to lower their voices to respect the other students penciling down their responses to the prompt. They were already doing English, although we might not call it that. 

When it comes digital games in the classroom, we need to heed the old Chinese proverb: The first step towards wisdom is getting things by their right names.  

If I told a colleague or parent that I planned on incorporating a digital game in my secondary ELA classroom, I venture that many would raise their eyebrows at me skeptically. Why? I think "digital games" evokes very specific images, ideas, and images for many adults, including, primarily, violent video games involving guns and fighting and general idleness and time-wasting. In other words, I think skeptics fear that incorporating games into classrooms translates to a bunch of boys twiddling their thumbs as their eyes glaze over at a screen of a soldier shooting some kind of monster. And, once we start, that this is all that will ever go on in the classroom.

False.

Sure, these games exist, but these aren't the only games that exist. These games are popular for students' gaming at home, but we must remember that there is an extensive class of legitimately educational games. 

So, we need to get things by their right names. 

On the one hand, as educators, we face a problem of ignorance: we lack information and knowledge of what kinds of digital educational games are out there. On the other hand, as educators, we face a problem of confusion: we are still trying to properly theorize and conceptualize the outcomes of digital gaming in the classroom.

To Game or Not to Game?

Given the concerns about games, this is the question. 

My answer? Game. Here are my arguments for the use of digital games in the classroom:

• Research supports the ability of games to motivate and engage students in learning activities and promote higher-level cognitive, affective, and psychomotor abilities ((see Sardone & Devlin-Scherer, 2010; Hong, Cheng, Hwang, Lee, & Cheng, 2009) 
• Motivation and engagement are some of the greatest challenges teachers face 
• Critical and creative thinking are top educational priorities, and are at risk in an educational culture where standardized assessment often addresses lower-level cognition
• Games connect to students' experiences and interests, in form and function
• Effective instructors value students' backgrounds and incorporate their lives into the classroom
• Effective instruction needs to be relevant to students' lives
• They can be the subject of conversation/discussion/career exploration/debate, as highlighted above, not just something students play
• Games promote a constructivist classroom
• Digital games put learning in students' hands, controlled by their interactions and their pace
• Digital games rely on discovery, trial and error, mistake-making, risk-taking, self-evaluation, metacognition, and problem-solving
• Students make meaning out of and interpret their experiences with games
• Games facilitate natural learning
• Learning takes place even when it does not conventionally look like learning is taking place
• Pleasure and fun have a place in the classroom and can improve students' perceptions of schooling
• Games encourage professional growth
• When tried, teachers tend to revert to the way they were taught, which, traditionally,is objectivistic; games challenges teachers to expand their pedagogy
• Games represent another powerful technology teachers can employ and opportunity they can seize

Try out this digital game for size: The Blood Typing Game, posted on the official Nobel Prize website as the 2012 winner of the Best Game category for the Swedish Learning Awards. I played it and learned about blood types, blood transfusions, and the challenges of emergency medical situations. 

And oh yeah, I had fun. Learning is not the enemy of fun.

Game Responsibly

As educators, we must attend to the very real concerns that digital games do raise. We need to listen to voices of dissent and respect their opinions. However, we also need to be advocates for providing our students with the best tools available for their learning. We need be agents for change, and not succumb to fears, nostalgia, or orthodoxies ("There are bad games out there, so we shouldn't even bother with them..." or "When I was in school, we..." or "If they are not reading, they are not learning...") 

That's why I propose a few guidelines for gaming responsibly in the classroom:

1. Anchor the use of digital games in clear, measurable learning objectives and a specific rationale: games should never be for their own sake
2. Review digital games to ensure appropriateness of content
3. Inform colleagues and parents of the use of digital games, including rationale/objectives
4. Exercise variety: games are just one technology in the digital toolkit
5. Provide alternative means of engagement: games do not motivate all students
6. Allow students to play educational digital games during free time or downtime 
7. Facilitate exploration and discussion of the nature of games and humans' relationships to games
• Games raise important existential questions about why humans like to play that merit consideration
• Games raise important social questions about violence in games and addiction to games that merit discussion
• Games involve complex, interdisciplinary elements, from story to computer science that merit exploration

Read. Write. Present. Discuss. Solve. Game. It's not one and only, it's one of many. 

Blog Log

Public(s)

Welcome to Technoblogistics, a forum for considerations and concerns about the roles and responsibilities  of technology in teaching and learning. Call me John, soon-to-be licensed in secondary English-language arts and conferred a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction. 

In the digital and information age, I believe we are all teachers and learners. Web 2.0 has pervaded our lives, such that it has become a taken-for-granted fabric of our existences. It is our fishbowl. We use it and consume it to connect, communicate, and collaborate. We use it and consume it to discover, disseminate, and discuss. And its value and possibility for education are only burgeoning. However, such powerful technologies demand that we, both instructors and pupils, examine and reflect on our relationship to the technology.

 I would like to start here for my inaugural post by sharing my own "blog log." Consider this a meta-blog. Yes, a blog, as the word itself suggests, encourages wordplay. 

I submit: I have a leg-up when it comes to blogging, or, rather, thinking about blogging. In years past, I have authored my own blog, The Space between Three Violins, where I posted poetry, essays, and other musings. I did gain some followers, especially by sharing my posts on Facebook and Twitter (whose status updates, I have learned, are forms of what is called "microblogging"). This blog allowed me to publish material that I would otherwise have never attempted to publish. It also provided me, at a time when I was writing creatively much more regularly, a user-friendly structure that ensured I both kept up with writing, and sharing it, on a frequent basis. The blog, it stands, is a wonderful vehicle for self-expression. 

Blogs are a medium of and for the public. We can all speak. We can all listen.

I also co-authored a blog with a few friends called The Cincinnati Labyrinth Project. In this blog, we parodied certain corners of academia by fabricating a fake field, called labyrinthology, and fleshed out its history, theorists and theory, current state, terminology, and navigation. I admit: it is pretty nerdy and abstruse. But this precisely illustrates the second great value blogs: interaction and community. We carved out an obscure, focused niche, that, although comedic, brought us together digitally in thought and friendship.  

Blogs are medium of and for identities and subcultures. We can discover and locate one another based on specific concerns and interests.

Blogs make public and make publics. However, blogs take time. 

An effective blogger posts regularly but not too much. An effective blogger posts different media and in different media. An effective blogger has to put in the effort to keep the blog relevant. This is why I no longer am active on either of the blogs I authored. Life became busy, and, without steam, the blogs became artifacts. And, without a consistent audience, they feel too self-serving. 

Reaching a real audience is both a great advantage and challenge of blogging. 

Right now, I do not read any blogs on regular basis outside of Krulwich Wonders and The Stone. This, I contend, is a matter of time and information overload. (I stay busy enough keeping up with online news, though these often direct me to blogs, such as the two provided above.) Speaking of information, however, an additional value of blogs is its democracy and journalistic value. Blogs reclaim the first-person in a sea of anonymous information. Blogs reclaim the citizen as a source, maker, and sharer of news and information in a society of media conglomerates. 

Blogito Ergo Sum

To be the blogger behind the curtain is both empowering and humbling. It gives me voice, especially in a milieu that favors a more naturalistic, colloquial register. Yet it also gives me pause to think about my own voice. One of the main reasons I retired my personal blog was due to concerns about self-refereeing. It was exciting to see my personal writing "out there," with people encountering it, commenting on it. Yet, I was also saying to the writing community that I felt my writing did not need another's review to be deemed publishable. Blogs raise a perennial issue: What are the criteria for good writing and who gets to be the gatekeeper for assessing it? To what extent is writing a personal and a collaborative endeavor? These are indeed some of the puzzles that authoring blogs raise for me, but these are precisely the puzzles we need to be talking about, especially with our students at a time when media literacy is more important than ever.

The other concern I have when authoring blogs is less abstract and more personal: Do I have something worthwhile to say? Do people want to read this? I, myself, have come across many a personal blog whose content I found questionable. Not all blogs are created equal, of course. Some blogs are better than others; there are criteria for good blogs. 

Yet, I think these concern miss the ultimate point: Blogs remind us that we all do have something to say. 

If the digital age has taught me anything, it is that Web 2.0 does help level the playing field. How many viral videos have shone the spotlight on the "little guy"? Think of all the sociopolitical causes that received epic (a word whose currency was made possible by Web 2.0) attention because of it. 

The key, for me, is finding one's specific niche, whether it be photographs of tortoises or using technology in the classroom. 

Recently, I have done just that. I have proposed a blog concept to some concerned stakeholders, a concept which, I hope, will give voice where there is none. I will keep you, pardon the pun, posted.

The Classroom 2.0

As part of an educational technology class, I crafted an online textbook page about, of all things, blogs. (Mind the draft.) My research enlightened me in many ways. The power of blogs in the classroom is that they break down old notions of the classroom. A good blog post is not too long, which this one is becoming, so, instead of repeating my textbook page, here's how I feel about blogs with my students. 

Blogs:

• Organize, create, extend learning opportunities (e.g., a classroom blog as resource, a unit blog for collaborative writing and reflection, a student-made blog as an independent project)
• Tell students they have a voice and place to express it (e.g., democratic and critical pedagogy)
• Are diverse for diverse learners (e.g., photo-blogs, video blogs, link blogs)
• Build relationships not limited to the classroom (e.g., social networking, connecting to communities of interest)
• Promote traditional and new literacies (e.g., media literacy)
• Capitalize on the assets students bring to the classroom as well as their interests (e.g., digital natives)
• Demand that we take the time to model for students how to read, create, write on, share, and update blogs
• Require we educate students about privacy, netiquette, fair use, and cyberbullying

Yet, as the title of my blog suggests, I have never implemented blogs in my own classroom. So, I have much to learn about, ahem, their blogistics.