Recent posts for David Williamson Shaffer
Modeling Learning Progressions in Epistemic Games with Epistemic Network Analysis
Rupp, A, Choi, Y, Gushta, M, Mislevy, R, Thies, MC, Bagley, E, Nash, P, Hatfield, D, Svarovsky, G, Shaffer DW. (2009). Modeling learning progressions in epistemic games with epistemic network analysis: Principles for data analysis and generation. Paper to be presented at the Learning Progressions in Science conference (LeaPS), Iowa City, IA, USA.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/leaps-learning-progressions-paper-rupp-et-al-2009-leaps-format1.pdf
Nielsen Report
For those who track such things, there is a recent Nielsen Company report out on game usage. A couple of key findings:
Nice to see it confirmed
A new study looks at one particular educational technology and finds, not surprisingly, that it can lead to improved outcomes… if the teacher knows what to do with it:
Integrating… a suite of educational technologies that includes an interactive whiteboard, teaching software, and student response systems… into instruction can raise student achievement by an average of 17 percentile points, according to new research that also confirms the experience, comfort, and skill level of teachers in using the technology has a huge impact on how effective they’ll be.
The study determined that student achievement can really soar if a teacher has 10 or more years of teaching experience, has been using the technology for two or more years, has high confidence in his or her ability to use [it].
I’ve written before (as have others) that it is absurd to expect that technology by itself will impact learning, which is why studies that test “the impact of technology” without considering how it is used make little sense.
What games around, comes around
I just got back from a very interesting meeting with one of the major game companies. We were talking about strengthening the positive outcomes of games by looking at educational games as models for more traditional game titles. But along the way one of the most interesting parts of the discussion was how to improve plain old action games using lessons from educational gaming.
It’s interesting to me, because of course so much of the discussion of the relationship between commercial games and learning has been framed by Jim Gee’s insightful commentary in What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy. Jim’s argument (rightly) is that games can provide a model for good learning practices.
But that sets up–or so far has set up–a one-way relationship between gaming and learning. What became apparent in my conversations with these makers of commercial games is how problematic a one-way relationship is, not least because, in fact, game makers could benefit from making their games easier to play, more fun for more people, and more accessible by borrowing ideas about learning from educational games.
This, of course, has always been one of the strengths of epistemic games, which are explicitly based on effective learning practices from the real world. But meeting with these folks made it clear that one reason game companies might want to invest in developing explicitly educational titles is because along the way they would learn how to make their other products better….
One more reason doing more of the same won’t work
From Matt Steinglass via Andrew Sullivan talking about a new Chinese version of the Blackberry that is cheaper and better than the original:
The example of the Chinese knockoff Blackberry suggests that maybe US innovators aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just that they’re now competing against Chinese innovators, where they weren’t 10 years ago. This may have happened for two reasons. The first is that lack of intellectual property protection, combined with the outsourcing of manufacturing for all those high-tech products to China, gradually destroyed the US’s technological edge. The second is that in 1998, China didn’t have very many top-flight engineers. But they’ve spent the last 10 years doing nothing but graduate engineers, and now, they do. And that changes everything.
And from an article in Business Week:
The US ran a $30 billion trade surplus in advanced tech in 1998. By 2007 it was a $53 billion deficit.
And yet I still routinely get asked whether we really need to do anything different in our schools to compete in foreign markets. Because even if what we were doing 10 years ago was enough–which clearly it wasn’t–the competition is getting harder every year, not easier.
