Recent posts for David Williamson Shaffer
Teach your children well
On the epistemic games blog we’ve posted before about the dangers of games and new technology more generally (for example here, here, and here).
In a recent interview, Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, who is a pediatrician and the author of Cybersafe: Protecting and Empowering Digital Kids in the World of Texting, Gaming and Social Media, makes an important–and somewhat harrowing–point about the potential downsides of technology for kids:
Typically, cybervictims tend to feel more vulnerable once they’ve been cyberbullied compared with kids who have been bullied without technology. This may be due to their inability to see and often know the bully or to know how many people have read about the incident or if it will occur again. Bullying online seems to create much more anxiety than in a schoolyard setting, which feels much more contained and controlled.
But her answer to the problem is a reasonable and important lesson for parents–and one of the same things parents and teachers need to know about how to guide their children in choosing good games and playing them well:
Part of the problem is that we don’t teach our kids how to use technology correctly. We have to teach them to be good digital citizens, just like we teach them how to drive a car safely, or walk across the street, or cook. We don’t take such care with their lives online, and digital accidents are happening and increasing. We need to teach them digital social etiquette just as we have with other forms of communication.
Looking Where the Light is Bad: Video Games and the Future of Assessment
Gee, J. P., & Shaffer, D. W. (September/October 2010). Looking Where the Light is Bad: Video Games and the Future of Assessment. Phi Delta Kappa International EDge, 6(1).
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Light-is-Bad.pdf
The Right Kind of GATE: Computer games and the future of assessment
Shaffer, D.W. & Gee, J. P. (in press). The Right Kind of GATE: Computer games and the future of assessment. In M. Mayrath, D. Robinson, & J. Clarke-Midura (Eds.), Technology-Based Assessments for 21st Century Skills: Theoretical and Practical Implications from Modern Research: Information Age Publications.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Comp-Games-and-Future-of-Assess-Chapter1.pdf
Self reports–NOT!
Hardly a new result, but a recent article in the American Education Research Journal shows that there is basically no relationship at all between what students learn (as measured on tests) and what they think they’ve learned:
Many higher education studies use self-reported gains as indicators of college student learning and development. However, the evidence regarding the validity of these indicators is quite mixed. It is proposed that the temporal nature of the assessment—whether students are asked to report their current attributes or how their attributes have changed over time—best accounts for students’ (in)ability to make accurate judgments. Using a longitudinal sample of over 3,000 first-year college students, this study compares self-reported gains and longitudinal gains that are measured either objectively or subjectively. Across several cognitive and noncognitive outcomes, the correlations between self-reported and longitudinal gains are small or virtually zero, and regression analyses using these two forms of assessment yield divergent results.
The implications for how we measure learning are clear–although what is less clear is how we deal with the fact that usually learning something but thinking you haven’t is a problem. Whether you think you’ve learned something matters too.
But this also makes me wonder if there isn’t a gap between self report and objective measures in terms of motivation, enjoyment, and other subjective experiences–like the perennial question of whether games have to be “fun.”
It seems to me that it is quite possible that players might report that something is not “fun” even if by objective measures of engagement they were having fun while playing.
In fact, come to think of it, that seems even more likely when something is what Seymour Papert called hard fun, where the enjoyment comes from taking on a significant challenge.
From the blogs of babes…
This from an email one of my daughter’s friends sent to her:
So you know how every adult tells you that you should never put information online? So then what’s the point of blogs?
It is a brave new world, indeed….
