Here's an excerpt of what I've written about the Education Arcade conference:
I saw two camps of thought on the usefulness of games in education. On the one hand, the old school thought holds the belief that modeling educational software after computer and video games can be a way of getting kids interested, almost fooled, into interacting with the software. I saw this idea mostly among the attendees of the conference, and they held these ideas even after some of the sessions were over which is too bad since the other thought, and the one that I think was being stressed by the academics like Jim Gee, is that current commercial games are frought with learning opportunities. We just need to find out what they are and use them to best effect. Obviously, there were some ideas in between like all the projects coming from MIT which can been seen as a new breed of educational games based on constuctivist models rather than behaviorist models.
In other words, there seem to be a good deal of industry folks and educators making educational software who still believe that content is the most important quality of an educational game. It might be interesting to note that the majority of people who believed this were older, say in their 40s to 60s. I believe that games of this nature can only be suited for the classroom and only because schools can limit what kids have access to. As soon as you take away that limit, in other words look at kids at home or outside of the classroom, educational software fails miserably. There's just no possible way for something made primarily for education to compete for the attention of kids against something made for entertainment. In particular I keep thinking of the "attention economy" that Lankshear and Knobel talk about ("Do We Have Your Attention?"). I would say that the games MIT is making are still being targeted towards schools. Revolution looks awesome and it might be fun for outside of the classroom, but it sounded like they were definitely making it for a classroom setting and will be creating external documents, lesson plans, and curriculum to supplement and surround the game itself.
Another trend at the conference was that games can be used to address social issues and might be a way of redefining the school system in America. Brenda Laurel gave a relatively zealous rant (to an "Amen, sister!") on the problem with educational games and how they (don't) fit into the classroom setting. She made some good points and I almost agree with her. I do think, however, that games whether overtly educational, like The Oregon Trail, or not, like Civilization, can be used very successfully in the classroom so long as the teacher plays the role of guide and provides a framework for the games (see Kurt Squire's dissertation on Civ). This moves teachers away from being the source of knowledge to people who direct the flow of attention and who get kids to think critically about what they are engaging with. (Again, see Lankshear and Knobel.) That's the problem at the root, isn't it?-that people are not being taught how to think critically.
It was suggested at the conference that a major reformation of the American school system is in order. As far as I can tell, educators in academia have been saying this since the end of WW2. Actually, if you want to go farther back, need I mention Dewey? So why is it that nothing has changed? A lot of people at the conference seemed to think that the video game generation were bringing with them a new way of thinking (see new capitalism) and that this would eventually replace the old-schoolers' methodology and the schools would naturally reform. Some people felt that it was high time to embrace the new line of thought and it manifests itself by embracing games of all sorts in the classroom. I would argue, however (see above), that, now more than ever, teachers are needed to guide students as they participate in these new classrooms. (Participation is the key to everything, for it is through participation that people become literate in wh
Coincidentally, I just wrote a paper on how RPGs reflect the basic premise of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. I then go on to discuss Social Dilemmas in general and propose how games could be used to address them.
In short, Social Dilemmas explore why it is that people don't participate in their communities, that when given the choice, they would rather make the rational, self-interest decision. If, however, enough people made the unselfish, trustworthy decision (as in choose to contribute somehow) the whole group would benefit immensely.
Many CRPGs sort of have this idea built into them in that the PC is rewarded for completing quests and given incentive to continue to contribute in some fashion rather than betray the quest givers and ruining any sort of future relationship or possibility of future quests.
Hey, Other than the cool, if sparse, activities you may find on my employer's website, OMSI has a list of science resources targeted at just that age group.
http://www.omsi.edu and http://www.omsi.edu/explore/resources.cfm
Many science museums have great resources online; I'm thinking in particular of the Exploratorium's website (http://www.exploratorium.org)
I also used to get a lot of spam, mostly from Taiwan. This was like 5 years ago. At the time I was sure they spammed me because of my last name. Around the same time, Sprint, AT&T, and any number of other phone companies telephoned and sent me mailers in Chinese. I was infuriated and frustrated because I can't read Chinese nor the weird crap that was coming through because pine wasn't decoding the messages anyway.
To counter all the spam, I researched blocking any messages that were not in English. Unfortunately, I couldn't do much since it was my college account and I was just using pine and I wouldn't exactly call myself technically great in unix. Eventually, I gave up and told my alma mater to delete my account. On my new accounts I've never gotten Asian spam!
To counter the phone calls, I asked my mom to tell me how to say "Please remove me from your phone list" in Mandarin. It was written on a notepad near our phone so everyone in the household (only I could understand spoken Mandarin) could tell the phone people. Unfortunately, the people they hire are less than intelligent (the stereotype of telemarketers outweighs the stereotype of Asians I guess), and as soon as it was clear you didn't speak Mandarin very well they just hung up, so we were never sure if we got them to take any action on their part. Eventually, we got rid of our land line and got a cell phone for home use. On our cell phone we've never gotten any solicitors, but we did once get a text message telling us to vote for American Idol (what the f*ck?!...bastards!).
As for the mailers, I don't know why but they stopped about 3 years ago...
What pissed me off the most about this was that I felt like I was getting more than my fair share of junk mail, spam, and phone solicitors simply because of my last name. I was angry that the greatest act of prejudice due to my ethnic heritage came from people of my ethnic heritage. And I was really, really exasperated at my parents who, I found out while staying with them for the holidays one year, actually liked getting the phone calls in Mandarin and would talk to the phone people as if they were relatives!
On a side note, I do also speak Spanish, but I doubt the spam I get in Spanish has anything to do with their knowledge of that.
I remember he came to visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with lil kids (I'm guessing nephews or nieces) when he was on location in Portland a few years ago. (And he said we have one of the best science museums in the world!)
So, we can guess he is sincere in his interest in science and giving scientists more limelight.
mark -- Mark Chen | Web Developer | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
Remember when Marvel decided that Spiderman's web stuff decomposes in hours?
What about this stuff? Or will there be semi-truck-tanker spills on the freeway; instead of black oil covered mussed up birds, we'll have green goo covered mussed up birds...?
Nope didn't preview. Saw the bad formatting. Didn't care.
Is this better?
They did not use us as a testbed, we purchased the software, and there was talk about using us to test their next version.
Your inferences to my statements do not make them invalid. I mentioned the beer company to point out that they are not a company to come out of the blue but have been around for a while and have some large clients other than AOL. I do not think I said anything as subjective as "they are bad."
Please flame me by email rather than spread negative energy around slashdot.
mark
--
Mark Chen | Webmaster | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
ditched it.
I'm the webmaster at OMSI but I'm not in the IS department who were the main implementors. Rulespace is a local company and was thinking of using OMSI as a testbed for beta versions of their software. They told us about their AOL deal and about some of their other clients including a huge beer company. This was about 1.5 years ago. We ran the software for about 9 months ending in September 2000 or so.
We got rid of Rulespace for three main reasons:
1. At the time, their software did not feature different types of users - some people need to see certain sites while others should be blocked.
2. We found that the added overhead was unacceptable. Hopefully AOL has some extremely fast servers.
3. The number of false positives was unacceptable. They claim neural net software, but the way it was implemented at OMSI resembled a keyword search with an exception list of urls. I was incorrectly blocked at least once a day (although I do use the web a lot more than most other staff members). Also, there were some sites that definitely should have been blocked but were not.
mark
--
Mark Chen | Webmaster | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
Here's another site which is being launched tomorrow on genetic privacy and policy in conjunction with a radio call-in show on Oregon Public Broadcasting at 1pm.
I'm the webmaster for Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. Here's the canned response I send out to anyone inquiring about Fantasia 2000.
Unfortunately, OMSI will not be showing Fantasia 2000. There are three main reasons for this:
1. Disney won't allow us to show other movies during the same time frame as Fantasia (not even special requests made by school groups), which means we would've had to break some existing contracts. 2. Disney won't allow us to charge our regular price for the movie (they wanted us to charge $10 instead of $6.50). 3. Disney won't allow us to show the movie after this Spring.
If you would like to see OMSI show Disney movies in the future (if they make anymore Imax movies) then please write them and let them know. In the meantime, you can see Fantasia 2000 at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.
What I don't add, but maybe should, is that Disney wanted 50% of the ticket sales. In the end, the movie probably would've brought a lot of money to the museum, but I, for one, am glad we didn't succumb to the lure of money over priciple.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an excerpt of what I've written about the Education Arcade conference:
I saw two camps of thought on the usefulness of games in education. On the one hand, the old school thought holds the belief that modeling educational software after computer and video games can be a way of getting kids interested, almost fooled, into interacting with the software. I saw this idea mostly among the attendees of the conference, and they held these ideas even after some of the sessions were over which is too bad since the other thought, and the one that I think was being stressed by the academics like Jim Gee, is that current commercial games are frought with learning opportunities. We just need to find out what they are and use them to best effect. Obviously, there were some ideas in between like all the projects coming from MIT which can been seen as a new breed of educational games based on constuctivist models rather than behaviorist models.
In other words, there seem to be a good deal of industry folks and educators making educational software who still believe that content is the most important quality of an educational game. It might be interesting to note that the majority of people who believed this were older, say in their 40s to 60s. I believe that games of this nature can only be suited for the classroom and only because schools can limit what kids have access to. As soon as you take away that limit, in other words look at kids at home or outside of the classroom, educational software fails miserably. There's just no possible way for something made primarily for education to compete for the attention of kids against something made for entertainment. In particular I keep thinking of the "attention economy" that Lankshear and Knobel talk about ("Do We Have Your Attention?"). I would say that the games MIT is making are still being targeted towards schools. Revolution looks awesome and it might be fun for outside of the classroom, but it sounded like they were definitely making it for a classroom setting and will be creating external documents, lesson plans, and curriculum to supplement and surround the game itself.
Another trend at the conference was that games can be used to address social issues and might be a way of redefining the school system in America. Brenda Laurel gave a relatively zealous rant (to an "Amen, sister!") on the problem with educational games and how they (don't) fit into the classroom setting. She made some good points and I almost agree with her. I do think, however, that games whether overtly educational, like The Oregon Trail, or not, like Civilization, can be used very successfully in the classroom so long as the teacher plays the role of guide and provides a framework for the games (see Kurt Squire's dissertation on Civ). This moves teachers away from being the source of knowledge to people who direct the flow of attention and who get kids to think critically about what they are engaging with. (Again, see Lankshear and Knobel.) That's the problem at the root, isn't it?-that people are not being taught how to think critically.
It was suggested at the conference that a major reformation of the American school system is in order. As far as I can tell, educators in academia have been saying this since the end of WW2. Actually, if you want to go farther back, need I mention Dewey? So why is it that nothing has changed? A lot of people at the conference seemed to think that the video game generation were bringing with them a new way of thinking (see new capitalism) and that this would eventually replace the old-schoolers' methodology and the schools would naturally reform. Some people felt that it was high time to embrace the new line of thought and it manifests itself by embracing games of all sorts in the classroom. I would argue, however (see above), that, now more than ever, teachers are needed to guide students as they participate in these new classrooms. (Participation is the key to everything, for it is through participation that people become literate in wh
Coincidentally, I just wrote a paper on how RPGs reflect the basic premise of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. I then go on to discuss Social Dilemmas in general and propose how games could be used to address them.
In short, Social Dilemmas explore why it is that people don't participate in their communities, that when given the choice, they would rather make the rational, self-interest decision. If, however, enough people made the unselfish, trustworthy decision (as in choose to contribute somehow) the whole group would benefit immensely.
Many CRPGs sort of have this idea built into them in that the PC is rewarded for completing quests and given incentive to continue to contribute in some fashion rather than betray the quest givers and ruining any sort of future relationship or possibility of future quests.
To see the paper, which also addresses the option of playing "evil" in a lot of games and the general idea that games should be fun rather than educational, go to Addressing Social Dilemmas Through Role-playing Identities in Computer Games
Hey,
Other than the cool, if sparse, activities you may find on my employer's website, OMSI has a list of science resources targeted at just that age group.
http://www.omsi.edu and http://www.omsi.edu/explore/resources.cfm
Many science museums have great resources online; I'm thinking in particular of the Exploratorium's website (http://www.exploratorium.org)
mark
I also used to get a lot of spam, mostly from Taiwan. This was like 5 years ago. At the time I was sure they spammed me because of my last name. Around the same time, Sprint, AT&T, and any number of other phone companies telephoned and sent me mailers in Chinese. I was infuriated and frustrated because I can't read Chinese nor the weird crap that was coming through because pine wasn't decoding the messages anyway.
To counter all the spam, I researched blocking any messages that were not in English. Unfortunately, I couldn't do much since it was my college account and I was just using pine and I wouldn't exactly call myself technically great in unix. Eventually, I gave up and told my alma mater to delete my account. On my new accounts I've never gotten Asian spam!
To counter the phone calls, I asked my mom to tell me how to say "Please remove me from your phone list" in Mandarin. It was written on a notepad near our phone so everyone in the household (only I could understand spoken Mandarin) could tell the phone people. Unfortunately, the people they hire are less than intelligent (the stereotype of telemarketers outweighs the stereotype of Asians I guess), and as soon as it was clear you didn't speak Mandarin very well they just hung up, so we were never sure if we got them to take any action on their part. Eventually, we got rid of our land line and got a cell phone for home use. On our cell phone we've never gotten any solicitors, but we did once get a text message telling us to vote for American Idol (what the f*ck?!...bastards!).
As for the mailers, I don't know why but they stopped about 3 years ago...
What pissed me off the most about this was that I felt like I was getting more than my fair share of junk mail, spam, and phone solicitors simply because of my last name. I was angry that the greatest act of prejudice due to my ethnic heritage came from people of my ethnic heritage. And I was really, really exasperated at my parents who, I found out while staying with them for the holidays one year, actually liked getting the phone calls in Mandarin and would talk to the phone people as if they were relatives!
On a side note, I do also speak Spanish, but I doubt the spam I get in Spanish has anything to do with their knowledge of that.
mark
I remember he came to visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with lil kids (I'm guessing nephews or nieces) when he was on location in Portland a few years ago. (And he said we have one of the best science museums in the world!)
So, we can guess he is sincere in his interest in science and giving scientists more limelight.
mark
--
Mark Chen | Web Developer | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
Remember when Marvel decided that Spiderman's web stuff decomposes in hours?
What about this stuff? Or will there be semi-truck-tanker spills on the freeway; instead of black oil covered mussed up birds, we'll have green goo covered mussed up birds...?
mark
pretty much all philosophy, english, or art majors?? :)
mark
Nope didn't preview. Saw the bad formatting. Didn't care.
Is this better?
They did not use us as a testbed, we purchased the software, and there was talk about using us to test their next version.
Your inferences to my statements do not make them invalid. I mentioned the beer company to point out that they are not a company to come out of the blue but have been around for a while and have some large clients other than AOL.
I do not think I said anything as subjective as "they are bad."
Please flame me by email rather than spread negative energy around slashdot.
mark
--
Mark Chen | Webmaster | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
ditched it. I'm the webmaster at OMSI but I'm not in the IS department who were the main implementors. Rulespace is a local company and was thinking of using OMSI as a testbed for beta versions of their software. They told us about their AOL deal and about some of their other clients including a huge beer company. This was about 1.5 years ago. We ran the software for about 9 months ending in September 2000 or so. We got rid of Rulespace for three main reasons: 1. At the time, their software did not feature different types of users - some people need to see certain sites while others should be blocked. 2. We found that the added overhead was unacceptable. Hopefully AOL has some extremely fast servers. 3. The number of false positives was unacceptable. They claim neural net software, but the way it was implemented at OMSI resembled a keyword search with an exception list of urls. I was incorrectly blocked at least once a day (although I do use the web a lot more than most other staff members). Also, there were some sites that definitely should have been blocked but were not. mark -- Mark Chen | Webmaster | Oregon Museum of Science and Industry | www.omsi.edu
Here's another site which is being launched tomorrow on genetic privacy and policy in conjunction with a radio call-in show on Oregon Public Broadcasting at 1pm.
I'm the webmaster for Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. Here's the canned response I send out to anyone inquiring about Fantasia 2000.
What I don't add, but maybe should, is that Disney wanted 50% of the ticket sales. In the end, the movie probably would've brought a lot of money to the museum, but I, for one, am glad we didn't succumb to the lure of money over priciple.
mark