New book coming out Games learning and Society.
I'm sorry that this is disjointed. I got totally engaged and couldn't write and listen.
Meaningful Play is in fact a way of learning.
Learning isn't about just "education." Her topic is about massively multiplayer online games and learning.
Work
- World of Warcraft
- Lineage II
- Star Wars Galaxies
2+ year ethnography
Socailly & materially distributed cognition
coordination of people, virtual tools, artifacts, & text
collective problem solving, multiple problem spaces
digital literacy practices in constellations online
scientific habits of mind and dispostions toward inquiry
computational litearcy
pop csomopolitanishm
...
We decided for 2 years we would pilot an "after learning lab" as a gateway into academic practics. (the casual learning lab)--but we won't talk about that today.
Players were using scientific methods to "cheat the game".
Science is built up of facts, as a house AAAS stadards for scientific habits of mind.
We went into the World of Warcraft Forums on three areas:
Scientific discursive practices
- Socail knowledge construction
- build on others' ideas
- use of counter arguments
- use of data/evidence
- alternative explanations of data
- references outside resources
model based reasoning
- systems based reasoning
- understanding feedback
- model passed reasoning
- model testing and prediction
- mathematical modeling
- mathematical computation
tacit epistemology
- absolutist
- relativist
- evaluative
86% of the talk was social knowledge construction (3X what was expected)
- question
- Explanation A
- Discussion
- Explanation B
- Discussion
- ...
6% uncodable
In the online environment (forums) when the topic trails off, the general consensus is that the issue has been worked out.
Scientific discursive practices
build on others' ideas 37%
Use of Counterarguments 37%
Speaker moves very quickly through all the data. It's hard to keep up, so I'll try to summarize (probably terribly).
On Tacit epistemology
65% are evaluative
30% absolutist
5% relativist
Kuhn (1992) found 15% were evaluative, 50 % absolutist, and 35% relativist in the general public.
1 in 5 Americans are Scientifically literate (missed reference)
Standard inquiry activities engender epistemological beliefs contrary to science (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002)
Science doesn't just work like the science classroom lab. Science is not keep doing your experiment over and over until you get the answer that is "correct". (Thought: Should be using the competencies as a community, excercising the competencies, as a scientific community.)
What is developing around MMO's is a collective intelligence, not a hive mind. It's more efficient to distribute knowledge over a social network than it is to store the complete body of knowledge repeated over and over in individual minds.
Digital literacy Practices
At first there was a real scare that kids weren't reading, and they were losing their literacy because they were playing games. Speaker wanted to refute this by showing that literacy is enhanced by the games. How can we
reading level of the posts in WOW forums is right about HS graduation level reading level.
20% of words used in the discourse are academic words. words that are used in academic tests, and the types of discourse that occurs in college/academic settings (think ACT/SAT).
How does reading game texts compare to reading school texts?
All the men in the sample read at or below grade level (We should be worried about young boys and men about their reading) Average Grade level was 10, reading level was 7.
What happens if the boys choose the game topic? Their reading level on these topics was about 13, or 4.5 grade levels above what they should be able to manage. (Interesting...if you engage the student in a topic they are interested in, they can outperform their general skill level) When allowed to choose the text, they read up to 8 grades above their head. The struggleing readers performed at almost the same level as the non-struggling readers.
When you care about what your reading, you persist over challenges (tend to work
We should worry that reading assessments are collapsing together interest and performance.
Most struggling reading summed up Do you like reading? "I dunno,no, it matters what I'm reading."
meaningful play is learning
learning is meaningful play (learning needs to meaningful to the learner...this ties in with pretty much everything that we talk about regarding engagement).
When you let kids do what they want to do, they
Talked a bit about Flow States (in games? in neuroscience?)
The crisis in education is not a crisis of content, but a crisis of ARGH! I missed...
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