Recent posts for How Computer Games Help Children Learn
David Williamson Shaffer at the VLOS Research Meeting: ‘Epistemic Games and Learning’
David Williamson Shaffer, in a talk he gave at the VLOS Research Meeting, Utrecht University, called ‘Epistemic Games and Learning,’ argues that the needs of students today are not the same as they were 50 years ago. His presentation describes epistemic gaming and epistemic network analysis as examples of how teaching and assessment might change to better suit the needs of 21st century students. He concludes by arguing that we need to be more purposeful about how we design educational experiences for youth, suggesting that
“whatever choice [of education style] we make, we have to make it based on some understanding of what it is we want students to accomplish, and what it is we as educators need to do to get them there.”
The importance of IP
A recent report by the British Government argues that, as in the US:
Intellectual Property is a critical component of our present and future success in the global economy. The UK’s economic competitiveness is increasingly driven by knowledge-based industries, especially in manufacturing, science-based sectors and the creative industries.
According to some sources, nearly half of the GDP of the United States is based on intellectual property.
The report focuses on copyright issues, and clearly and appropriate policy for protection of intellectual proprety (that also doesn’t constrain the development of new intellectual property!) is critical in a knowledge economy. But so are the processes that lead to the generation of new ideas: innovation and creativity.
Further reading
If you’ve read How Computer Games Help Children Learn and want to learn more about thinking and learning in the digital age you can…
Read papers about epistemic games and the future of learning
Browse a list of related books at amazon.com
Read a bibliographic essay on related readings on amazon.com
Additional suggestions welcome in the comments….
Gesture and Math
An interesting study by Susan Goldin-Meadow asks:
Why do people gesture when they talk? Perhaps people gesture for their listeners. After all, listeners can glean information from the gestures speakers produce. However, people also gesture when no one is watching and even when talking to blind individuals. So, perhaps people gesture for themselves. Indeed, children who produce gestures modeled by the teacher during a lesson are more likely to profit from the lesson than children who do not produce the gestures . Gesturing may not only identify children as ready to learn, it may actually help them learn.
The study looked at children learning arithmetic, and showed (basically) that if students do a simple arithmetic problem and point at the relevant parts of the equation, they do better than if they just point, and better still than if they don’t point at all.
Now we always have to be careful making broad generalizations from a small study like this. But it does suggest, as Merlin Donald argues in the Origins of the Modern Mind, and as I talk about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, that the mind is really a palimpsest, with newer forms of thinking–new abilities–written on top of the old. When we solve math problems (a theoretic and literate activity) or tell stories (a linguistic activity), the older systems of communication, gesture and mime, play a role as well.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that video games (a computational activity) use older forms of thinking, particularly storytelling, to communicate their meanings.
The study also highlights an important process in learning. As I wrote in HCGHCL:
Vygotsky argued…. that the way we learn is by doing things with help and then progressively internalizing the process. We take what is first an external, social, and explicit process of solving a problem and gradually we do it on our own…. First we may do it individually but still need to “talk through it”—and surely we all know what it is like to suddenly feel a little foolish talking to ourselves out loud while trying to figure something out. As an undergraduate I spent hours in the library pacing through the stacks and talking to myself while writing term papers, and my daughter still needs to talk out loud to add two-digit numbers. Later we talk through the steps but silently in our heads, which I can see my daughter doing when she adds a single-digit number to a two-digit number. And at some point, when we get really good at solving a problem, we aren’t even aware of how we did it.
Goldin-Meadow’s study shows that we don’t just talk to ourselves in words as we learn to solve complex problems. We use even older and more fundamental forms of communication to solve complex, abstract problems.
The test fails the test
A couple of months ago a study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (article here) reported:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent
That was even lower that the score of 49 percent for Americans overall who took the test.
So, being a curious fellow, I took the test myself, and got a score of 93.94 percent, and I was told that the monthly average when I took it was 78.1 percent. Apparently, Americans got 59.3 percent smarter since the test came out. Hmmm.
This got me thinking: Is my civic literacy really twice that of the average elected official in the US? That seems like a pretty odd thing to conclude, since I’m almost certain sure that I would be pretty lousy as a dog catcher, much less a high elected official. If a test that shows that I am more qualified to be an elected official than many elected officials, then surely there is something wrong with the test, right?
