Maybe so. But if you take all your courses online, you have more time to smoke weed instead of going to class.
Nonono, you've got it wrong: if you take all your courses online, you can smoke weed in class. By combining the rampant alcoholism and drug-taking with the study, you can replicate the full student experience part-time while still holding down a full-time job!
I agree in principle though that outside credit should count. A MSCE might not be fantastic but it has got to be equivalent to at least a few intro to OOP courses no? Building core infrastructure at a company has got to be worth a networking course or two, (and potentially requirements analysis part of a systems engineering degree, technology strategy in a management program etc). You might not learn everything in a text book but at least if you are competent enough to not get fired/be hired by the next guy you probably have a deeper understanding of the pieces you did deal with than you'd pick up on a 2 week module as part of a course.
My problem is that "deeper understanding" is a trade-off against a "narrower understanding". Before I left IT, I could see how real-world experience and vendor-specific training generally led to a fairly closed mindset, whereas a traditional university education aims at developing broad, open minds. The two are complementary, but not equivalent, and the modern trend to recognise "prior experiential learning" (as it is typically termed in the UK) devalues the degree by dismissing the importance of the open mind.
$600 is a lot if all they're doing is rubber-stamping other people's course certificates. And that's with their military discount too, I imagine. (I'm starting to get curious if I could get a US degree out of spare academic credit I've got kicking around, but it's an expensive option when I can just graduate from the Open University for free...)
I was a two time college dropout and had a lot of credit hours under my belt. But the third school I enrolled in would not accept all of the credits because i had to earn a certain amount at the school. I can understand since they only exist to make money but I couldn't afford to do that.
That's not fair. They have to guarantee the quality of their graduates, and you can only take so much on faith ("credit" comes from the French for belief/trust, after all). A university that doesn't test students sufficiently can't personally vouch for the abilities of their graduates.
The more levels of bureaucracy you add, the more you erode trust. Notice how the guy in TFA had courses from FEMA that he had to get accredited by a local community college to get onto an academic transcript in order to submit them as qualifying credit to Excelsior. So he has a degree from Excelsior including academic credit from another college that consists of professional training courses from third party suppliers. Where exactly does the buck stop? Who in that chain can actually give an academic reference for the guy? Who personally vouches for his degreeworthiness?
I can see that Excelsior's original intent was good, but if they're letting people take a bunch of CPD courses and a handful of AP and bundle them together as a degree harms their image. Excelsior college is already viewed by many people as a "mail-order degree factory" (I can't quantify that "many", but enough that I've already heard of them here in Europe) and this sort of thing getting too high a profile can only make things worse.
They've got a choice: short-term gain by exploiting the current bubble in freeform self-education or screw down the requirements and preserve as much of their reputation as possible.
The great masters of Tai Chi allow their students to train with them for as long as it takes to be ready. This isn't entirely altruistic: they don't want anyone going out and ruining their reputation by going out and being crappy teachers while telling people "I studied under Li Wan" or whoever...
Especially if they have been having to make things overly complex trying to retain backwards compatibility.
Now, see... if he'd just gone and written a microkernel in ther first place, we could support multiple processor architectures with a single codetree anyway....
Worse -- it appears he managed to find 18 credits of free stuff that needed accreditation by his local community college anyway. He then got another 43 credits that he presumably paid for. So he had around 30% of the degree for free. If he'd just transfered in the free stuff and then continued with the college that accepted it, he could probably have got his degree for less -- and it wouldn't be from Excelsior College. I know the name, and I'm not even from the US. If a guy from Scotland has heard of it, that means it's pretty famous, which in this case isn't a good thing. It doesn't have a great reputation....
For a couple of years, I'm sure there'll be plenty of employers who do value this as it shows "initiative, drive and determination", but the more it's pushed by the netniks, the more it'll lose its impact before finally being seen for what it is: a non-degree. A degree has to show depth, which is why associate degrees are only currently considered an academic "stepping stone", and not a full degree. A hacky degree like this is even less impressive than a community college associate degree, once you take away the novelty factor and the "initiative" angle.
Those three didn't "get top offers", they founded businesses and invented stuff.
Paul Allen and Dean Kamen were on specific courses of study, and developed things in that field. Richard Linder's patchwork degree is the exact opposite of these guys: they focused on a field, and stuff the degree. He focused on a degree, and stuff the field.
Allen was lucky in that demand for programmers was vastly outstripping supply at the time, and I'm sure there are plenty of other individuals dropped out of university to take up programming jobs (in fact, stories like that convinced a lot of us to take up computer degrees in the 90s, and one of my classmates had to do a partial resit of one year, got work, resat the failed module but never went back), but that was unique to the computer field, and it's now much, much harder to do as there are plenty of
Kamen and Allen wouldn't have gotten anywhere if they hadn't started on a course of in-depth study of their chosen field.
Go and sort out the stereo separation on future vids, will you? I appreciate you've dedicated one mic to the interviewer and one to the interviewee, and then fed them into the left and right channels, but for those of us who watch videos with headphones on, it's really distracting to have one guy in your right ear and the other in your left. A mix-down to mono would do the trick quite nicely.
Thanks.
I think you're largely right, but I also suspect it's a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle. Edinburgh is good, so it attracts (1) good students, (2) good teachers, (3) money to pay the tutors; these three things help it remain good. A mediocre school attracts (1) more mediocre teachers, (2) more mediocre students, (3) less money; all of which help it stay mediocre.
Oh definitely -- I certainly wouldn't deny that. My point is simply that there's no point chasing a cure for the problems in higher education: we've already got one, if people were just willing to use it. Money may be a problem, but when it comes to tutorial sets, there's a hard upper limit, so even good universities like Edinburgh don't get any more money for their tutorials (cos fees are fixed by law in Scotland).
And even the achievement thing isn't that new either. I'm sure most of you will have heard of the scouts or the girl guides. "Merit badges" as the US calls them (they're just "badges" or "scout/guide badges" as far as I was concerned as a kid growing up in Scotland) motivate kids by giving them proof of their achievements... and that's where the games got the idea from.
But there's a big difference between scout badges and game achievements: the scout badges all are proof that a particular useful skill has been mastered by the learner, but many achievements in video games are frivolities. "Killed 1000 enemies with the rail gun" doesn't reward skill, just persistence. The Portal Steam achievements include falling a ridiculously long distance, which means falling between two portals multiple times. Difficult to do without drifting slightly and landing accidently. The level of control required to do it is very high, but it's not a genuinely useful game skill.
The Scottish education system attempted to build assessment based on the scout-like idea of unitary skills -- the ScotVEC modules built up to an NVQ or GNVQ. Guess what? It didn't work. Skills are interdependent and linked, and the school is still restricted by timetabling constraints.
But most gamification isn't even a rehash of the "module" system (which is still alive and well anyway and damning many educational establishments to mediocrity), it's the game achievements. It's frivolities and non-curricular goals, and the model presented on Penny Arcade is one of the worst I've seen.
And my dad's got two younger brothers. The youngest is very bald on top. The next youngest has always had very little hair. My dad kept most of his (only suffering a slowly receeding hairline) until he was near retirement age. So I'm with you -- someone else's personal anecdote will never override mine; only science will. I second your "citation needed".
Not to defend gamification, but I think you overly-simplified the issue of engagement in the classroom by making it a student-issue. Even for the most engrossing subjects, if you have a poor teacher it is not unreasonable to expect even exceptional students to become disengaged.
While I don't agree with you about gamification (I'm in the "assinine" camp and I've explained my reasons elsewhere in this thread), you're bang on here.
I've studied as an undergrad in 3 different universities, taking courses from 8 different departments in total. My first university is recognised as one of the best in the world -- Edinburgh. And I can tell you, the difference wasn't just down to the students (although I'm sure it helped that they could cream off the best and brightest). No, the place is an excellent university. The teaching was top class. The classes were academically rigorous and the tutorials built on each other progressively to ensure that any student that attended and remained attentive would have the required knowledge to pass the assessed tasks issued at the end of the unit.
The other two... not so much. The biggest difference was the tutorials. There was no offer or opportunity to have a tutor assess and monitor your work during the unit. You were thrown into the end-of-unit assignment with unconfirmed assumptions about the task. A large part of your mark was blind luck -- did I understand the teacher's intended task? And worse: once you got that bad mark back, you weren't expected to do anything with it -- you weren't going to be assessed again, so there was no motivation to go back and actually learn from it.
In both those universities, I complained that they weren't providing motivation to learn -- in both cases they said that this wasn't their job; they provide the opportunities, not the motivation, and the motivation has to come from the student.
I pointed out the differences between these universities and Edinburgh. The response? Edinburgh can do that because they're one of the best universities in the world. No; Edinburgh is one of the best universities in the world because they do this.
We already have models of good teaching in academia -- why faff around with unproven fads when we have methods that have been tried, tested and proven effective over generations that we could implement instead?
You apparently didn't watch the video. One of the biggest points, and easiest to pull off with minimal cash money... simply count scores UP instead of DOWN.
That's part of what makes video games fun/addictive. You see a goal, and every step you make works towards that goal.
Positive/additive marking as opposed to negative/subtractive marking is not a new idea -- it has been proposed many times before. In fact, it is the core principle behind most language aptitude rating now. This is not what gamification is about.
It is one element of gamification, and as with all educational philosophies, one or two good points are held up to champion the entire philosophy.
The key defining factor in gamification isn't the additive marking, though: the key factor is the "achievements" -- that crack-like substance that people add to mindless, boring games to convince us to stick at them long enough for us to generate useful advertiser income. Think about it -- we've probably all played tons of games that aren't "fun", but we just need to finish it. What does that say about teaching? It implies that learning is boring -- it is not "Learning" is fun -- what is not fun is "not learning". So the core principle of gamification is to that the content is far less important than the presentation, and that is extremely dangerous.
It feeds directly into teachers' ego-saving strategies -- "it's not me, it's the student", "it's not me, it's the uncomfortable chairs", "it's not me, it's the colour of the paint" (yes, as soon as a study suggests that green aids concentration, you'll have teachers calling for the school to be repainted) -- and ultimately distracts teachers from looking critically at their material and their classroom skills. The best teachers are constantly refining their lessons based on classroom reactions.
The worst teachers don't refine -- they simply blame an external factor, such as teaching methodology. They jump on the next bandwagon that rolls past and discover it hasn't solved their problems at all. So they blame the system and wait for the next bandwagon. (ad nauseum -- or should that be "ad pension-um"?)
The last thing that education needs is a fad that actively pulls teachers away from thinking about the learning content and diverts their attention to the "paintjob".
The Penny Arcade version is an exercise in naive frivolity: "you can fly" as an alternative to a grade? What ever happened to teaching kids to appreciate knowledge for its own sake and for its own applications? The example task ( finding the quickest path between two subjects ) was of very little pedagogical value. Yes, it is of some pedagogical value, but the idea of bonus points for the "winner" hyperinflates its importance to the student. In effect, you end up marking for students' time, not for what they've learned. Furthermore, the notion of having a winner at all goes against the notion of grading the student as an individual.
And it is not a truism that competition motivates. Those kids lacking agency? They have a pessimistic outlook. They don't expect to win. So they don't take part in the race. I've personally found myself in the "not taking part" category -- mostly when it comes to selling raffle tickets or the like. The person who sells the most raffle tickets gets a gift voucher or something. I know I'm not going to win (others have large church groups, book groups, lots of friends and family locally etc) -- so what happens? I don't even bother taking a single book of tickets. If there had been no incentive, I would have sold one or two. But what's the point of entering the competition if you're not going to win? So what they're proposing is not a cure for alienation, but yet another cause for it. OK, it's alienation for different people, but it's not a cure-all -- it's simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.
"how are you going to continually assess students to make sure the class is learning, and not just following patterns or playing a game."
What do you know about learning? "Those who can't, teach." Teachers try to validate themselves by requiring students to pay attention to them, or else!
And those who can't teach criticise those who can. I'm an English professor in a European university and the reason I want my students to pay attention to me is that I really don't want to have to fail students at the end of the year. I'm trying to teach them useful things, and I've got to select what to teach based on a broad variety in levels (the ones into online games are pretty capable, but many of the others have next-to-no ability) so that I can test them all to see if they are capable of surviving in the next guy's class, based on what he's going to teach them.
However much we would like to measure each student's progress against themselves (and almost every teacher would like to do this) the reality is that we cannot teach every student individually, so we need to get them to a shared level so that they can continue to be taught together. If 15 of my first-years manage to learn 15 different subsets of the grammar and vocabulary of English, and I pass them all based on their individual knowledge and not on gaps in the knowledge we would want them to have, there will be no single lesson that the second-year professor can give that will be useful to all of them.
Anything that can improve education is a good thing. If the lecture is boring and without any interaction then the students wont remember any of it.
But does it improve education? Any "next big thing" gets good results from a few dedicated teachers, but their results fail to be replicable for other teachers. This happens again and again and again. I can't find the link, but there was an article posted to/. earlier in the year about a former champion of social networking in the classroom that had stopped preaching it because it worked for him, but not for other people. He came to the same conclusion as most people eventually do: a good teacher is a good teacher, but we don't know and can't define what makes them one.
As for gamification specifically, I remember reading an article (on Gamasutra, I think) back when the word was still so new that most people hadn't heard of it. It was about a study into why people enjoy games, and the results of brain scans showed that the enjoyment was triggered by those areas of the brain involved in learning..
One developer noted that he wasn't surprised by the results. When asked if this was justification for the gamification of education he was strongly against it. Why?
Think about it: games are fun because you're learning. The leads us to the conclusion from that any course that isn't fun is just badly taught. But "gamification" ignores this conclusion and instead focuses on "achievement addiction" -- something which is independent from the actual quality of learning. Gamification is a distraction from good teaching.
And besides, isn't the biggest criticism of modern education that it's too exam focused? What are achievements if not more exams, marks, grades....
Actually, the royal family gets revenue from holdings and possessions that used to be owned by the state, not the crown. Technically, most of their wealth has been stolen from the people. There's also a long history of monarchs selling the crown jewels which are owned by the state, and the state having to pay for replacements....
That's not what you said before, though, is it? What you said was that it was a contractual matter. It's not. It's just a matter of inertia -- the recipients have no motivation to release the source, but they still have the right to do so if they want....
If somone bought that $3.99 app, demanded and received the source code, am I right in thinking that they would then under the terms of the GPL, be able to post that source code on the web for free to anyone who wanted a copy, thus enabling people to compile the app for free, with no one ever again having to buy the binary in order to access the source code?
Yes. But this introduces a fork danger, because who's going to roll all the changes from the main DOSbox codetree into the Android DOSbox? The guy who's currently selling it isn't likely to put as much time into updating it if it's not bringing him any cash.
The price for DOSbox Turbo isn't unreasonable, the guy doesn't seem malicious (heck, all of his other apps are free), he's just failed to adhere strictly to the letter of the GPL. Given the number of people who've explained why, and the fact that he himself has read and commented on this thread, I fully expect that he'll build the "written offer" into his next version, and we can all go back to arguing about the number of slashvertisements we've been seeing lately....
Exactly. Fishtix claim to have optimised the code for the platform, not simply recompiled it. That's valuable work in my book, and 3.99 is fair enough -- it's the price of one GOG.com DOS game, and you're going to be buying your games from GOG.com anyway, aren't you?
OK, so now you can contact the author through the app store, demand the source code, recompile it, and upload it to every Android app store going as a free app, and the world will be at peace.
The 3.99 and the 0.99 DOSboxes will disappear as your free one cleans up the market. Problem solved.
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Maybe so. But if you take all your courses online, you have more time to smoke weed instead of going to class.
Nonono, you've got it wrong: if you take all your courses online, you can smoke weed in class. By combining the rampant alcoholism and drug-taking with the study, you can replicate the full student experience part-time while still holding down a full-time job!
I agree in principle though that outside credit should count. A MSCE might not be fantastic but it has got to be equivalent to at least a few intro to OOP courses no? Building core infrastructure at a company has got to be worth a networking course or two, (and potentially requirements analysis part of a systems engineering degree, technology strategy in a management program etc). You might not learn everything in a text book but at least if you are competent enough to not get fired/be hired by the next guy you probably have a deeper understanding of the pieces you did deal with than you'd pick up on a 2 week module as part of a course.
My problem is that "deeper understanding" is a trade-off against a "narrower understanding". Before I left IT, I could see how real-world experience and vendor-specific training generally led to a fairly closed mindset, whereas a traditional university education aims at developing broad, open minds. The two are complementary, but not equivalent, and the modern trend to recognise "prior experiential learning" (as it is typically termed in the UK) devalues the degree by dismissing the importance of the open mind.
$600 is a lot if all they're doing is rubber-stamping other people's course certificates. And that's with their military discount too, I imagine. (I'm starting to get curious if I could get a US degree out of spare academic credit I've got kicking around, but it's an expensive option when I can just graduate from the Open University for free...)
I was a two time college dropout and had a lot of credit hours under my belt. But the third school I enrolled in would not accept all of the credits because i had to earn a certain amount at the school. I can understand since they only exist to make money but I couldn't afford to do that.
That's not fair. They have to guarantee the quality of their graduates, and you can only take so much on faith ("credit" comes from the French for belief/trust, after all). A university that doesn't test students sufficiently can't personally vouch for the abilities of their graduates.
The more levels of bureaucracy you add, the more you erode trust. Notice how the guy in TFA had courses from FEMA that he had to get accredited by a local community college to get onto an academic transcript in order to submit them as qualifying credit to Excelsior. So he has a degree from Excelsior including academic credit from another college that consists of professional training courses from third party suppliers. Where exactly does the buck stop? Who in that chain can actually give an academic reference for the guy? Who personally vouches for his degreeworthiness?
I can see that Excelsior's original intent was good, but if they're letting people take a bunch of CPD courses and a handful of AP and bundle them together as a degree harms their image. Excelsior college is already viewed by many people as a "mail-order degree factory" (I can't quantify that "many", but enough that I've already heard of them here in Europe) and this sort of thing getting too high a profile can only make things worse.
They've got a choice: short-term gain by exploiting the current bubble in freeform self-education or screw down the requirements and preserve as much of their reputation as possible.
The great masters of Tai Chi allow their students to train with them for as long as it takes to be ready. This isn't entirely altruistic: they don't want anyone going out and ruining their reputation by going out and being crappy teachers while telling people "I studied under Li Wan" or whoever...
Especially if they have been having to make things overly complex trying to retain backwards compatibility.
Now, see... if he'd just gone and written a microkernel in ther first place, we could support multiple processor architectures with a single codetree anyway....
Nope, he should have used a colon: he expanded and explained the point.
A currently-employed English professor.
Thunderwood College is free for everyone!
Dr Half-pint HAL BA MSc
Worse -- it appears he managed to find 18 credits of free stuff that needed accreditation by his local community college anyway. He then got another 43 credits that he presumably paid for. So he had around 30% of the degree for free. If he'd just transfered in the free stuff and then continued with the college that accepted it, he could probably have got his degree for less -- and it wouldn't be from Excelsior College. I know the name, and I'm not even from the US. If a guy from Scotland has heard of it, that means it's pretty famous, which in this case isn't a good thing. It doesn't have a great reputation....
For a couple of years, I'm sure there'll be plenty of employers who do value this as it shows "initiative, drive and determination", but the more it's pushed by the netniks, the more it'll lose its impact before finally being seen for what it is: a non-degree. A degree has to show depth, which is why associate degrees are only currently considered an academic "stepping stone", and not a full degree. A hacky degree like this is even less impressive than a community college associate degree, once you take away the novelty factor and the "initiative" angle.
Those three didn't "get top offers", they founded businesses and invented stuff.
Paul Allen and Dean Kamen were on specific courses of study, and developed things in that field. Richard Linder's patchwork degree is the exact opposite of these guys: they focused on a field, and stuff the degree. He focused on a degree, and stuff the field.
Allen was lucky in that demand for programmers was vastly outstripping supply at the time, and I'm sure there are plenty of other individuals dropped out of university to take up programming jobs (in fact, stories like that convinced a lot of us to take up computer degrees in the 90s, and one of my classmates had to do a partial resit of one year, got work, resat the failed module but never went back), but that was unique to the computer field, and it's now much, much harder to do as there are plenty of
Kamen and Allen wouldn't have gotten anywhere if they hadn't started on a course of in-depth study of their chosen field.
Go and sort out the stereo separation on future vids, will you? I appreciate you've dedicated one mic to the interviewer and one to the interviewee, and then fed them into the left and right channels, but for those of us who watch videos with headphones on, it's really distracting to have one guy in your right ear and the other in your left. A mix-down to mono would do the trick quite nicely. Thanks.
I think you're largely right, but I also suspect it's a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle. Edinburgh is good, so it attracts (1) good students, (2) good teachers, (3) money to pay the tutors; these three things help it remain good. A mediocre school attracts (1) more mediocre teachers, (2) more mediocre students, (3) less money; all of which help it stay mediocre.
Oh definitely -- I certainly wouldn't deny that. My point is simply that there's no point chasing a cure for the problems in higher education: we've already got one, if people were just willing to use it. Money may be a problem, but when it comes to tutorial sets, there's a hard upper limit, so even good universities like Edinburgh don't get any more money for their tutorials (cos fees are fixed by law in Scotland).
And even the achievement thing isn't that new either. I'm sure most of you will have heard of the scouts or the girl guides. "Merit badges" as the US calls them (they're just "badges" or "scout/guide badges" as far as I was concerned as a kid growing up in Scotland) motivate kids by giving them proof of their achievements... and that's where the games got the idea from.
But there's a big difference between scout badges and game achievements: the scout badges all are proof that a particular useful skill has been mastered by the learner, but many achievements in video games are frivolities. "Killed 1000 enemies with the rail gun" doesn't reward skill, just persistence. The Portal Steam achievements include falling a ridiculously long distance, which means falling between two portals multiple times. Difficult to do without drifting slightly and landing accidently. The level of control required to do it is very high, but it's not a genuinely useful game skill.
The Scottish education system attempted to build assessment based on the scout-like idea of unitary skills -- the ScotVEC modules built up to an NVQ or GNVQ. Guess what? It didn't work. Skills are interdependent and linked, and the school is still restricted by timetabling constraints.
But most gamification isn't even a rehash of the "module" system (which is still alive and well anyway and damning many educational establishments to mediocrity), it's the game achievements. It's frivolities and non-curricular goals, and the model presented on Penny Arcade is one of the worst I've seen.
And my dad's got two younger brothers. The youngest is very bald on top. The next youngest has always had very little hair. My dad kept most of his (only suffering a slowly receeding hairline) until he was near retirement age. So I'm with you -- someone else's personal anecdote will never override mine; only science will. I second your "citation needed".
Not to defend gamification, but I think you overly-simplified the issue of engagement in the classroom by making it a student-issue. Even for the most engrossing subjects, if you have a poor teacher it is not unreasonable to expect even exceptional students to become disengaged.
While I don't agree with you about gamification (I'm in the "assinine" camp and I've explained my reasons elsewhere in this thread), you're bang on here.
I've studied as an undergrad in 3 different universities, taking courses from 8 different departments in total. My first university is recognised as one of the best in the world -- Edinburgh. And I can tell you, the difference wasn't just down to the students (although I'm sure it helped that they could cream off the best and brightest). No, the place is an excellent university. The teaching was top class. The classes were academically rigorous and the tutorials built on each other progressively to ensure that any student that attended and remained attentive would have the required knowledge to pass the assessed tasks issued at the end of the unit.
The other two... not so much. The biggest difference was the tutorials. There was no offer or opportunity to have a tutor assess and monitor your work during the unit. You were thrown into the end-of-unit assignment with unconfirmed assumptions about the task. A large part of your mark was blind luck -- did I understand the teacher's intended task? And worse: once you got that bad mark back, you weren't expected to do anything with it -- you weren't going to be assessed again, so there was no motivation to go back and actually learn from it.
In both those universities, I complained that they weren't providing motivation to learn -- in both cases they said that this wasn't their job; they provide the opportunities, not the motivation, and the motivation has to come from the student.
I pointed out the differences between these universities and Edinburgh. The response? Edinburgh can do that because they're one of the best universities in the world. No; Edinburgh is one of the best universities in the world because they do this.
We already have models of good teaching in academia -- why faff around with unproven fads when we have methods that have been tried, tested and proven effective over generations that we could implement instead?
You apparently didn't watch the video. One of the biggest points, and easiest to pull off with minimal cash money ... simply count scores UP instead of DOWN.
That's part of what makes video games fun/addictive. You see a goal, and every step you make works towards that goal.
Positive/additive marking as opposed to negative/subtractive marking is not a new idea -- it has been proposed many times before. In fact, it is the core principle behind most language aptitude rating now. This is not what gamification is about.
It is one element of gamification, and as with all educational philosophies, one or two good points are held up to champion the entire philosophy.
The key defining factor in gamification isn't the additive marking, though: the key factor is the "achievements" -- that crack-like substance that people add to mindless, boring games to convince us to stick at them long enough for us to generate useful advertiser income. Think about it -- we've probably all played tons of games that aren't "fun", but we just need to finish it. What does that say about teaching? It implies that learning is boring -- it is not "Learning" is fun -- what is not fun is "not learning". So the core principle of gamification is to that the content is far less important than the presentation, and that is extremely dangerous.
It feeds directly into teachers' ego-saving strategies -- "it's not me, it's the student", "it's not me, it's the uncomfortable chairs", "it's not me, it's the colour of the paint" (yes, as soon as a study suggests that green aids concentration, you'll have teachers calling for the school to be repainted) -- and ultimately distracts teachers from looking critically at their material and their classroom skills. The best teachers are constantly refining their lessons based on classroom reactions.
The worst teachers don't refine -- they simply blame an external factor, such as teaching methodology. They jump on the next bandwagon that rolls past and discover it hasn't solved their problems at all. So they blame the system and wait for the next bandwagon. (ad nauseum -- or should that be "ad pension-um"?)
The last thing that education needs is a fad that actively pulls teachers away from thinking about the learning content and diverts their attention to the "paintjob".
The Penny Arcade version is an exercise in naive frivolity: "you can fly" as an alternative to a grade? What ever happened to teaching kids to appreciate knowledge for its own sake and for its own applications? The example task ( finding the quickest path between two subjects ) was of very little pedagogical value. Yes, it is of some pedagogical value, but the idea of bonus points for the "winner" hyperinflates its importance to the student. In effect, you end up marking for students' time, not for what they've learned. Furthermore, the notion of having a winner at all goes against the notion of grading the student as an individual.
And it is not a truism that competition motivates. Those kids lacking agency? They have a pessimistic outlook. They don't expect to win. So they don't take part in the race. I've personally found myself in the "not taking part" category -- mostly when it comes to selling raffle tickets or the like. The person who sells the most raffle tickets gets a gift voucher or something. I know I'm not going to win (others have large church groups, book groups, lots of friends and family locally etc) -- so what happens? I don't even bother taking a single book of tickets. If there had been no incentive, I would have sold one or two. But what's the point of entering the competition if you're not going to win? So what they're proposing is not a cure for alienation, but yet another cause for it. OK, it's alienation for different people, but it's not a cure-all -- it's simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.
"how are you going to continually assess students to make sure the class is learning, and not just following patterns or playing a game."
What do you know about learning? "Those who can't, teach." Teachers try to validate themselves by requiring students to pay attention to them, or else!
And those who can't teach criticise those who can. I'm an English professor in a European university and the reason I want my students to pay attention to me is that I really don't want to have to fail students at the end of the year. I'm trying to teach them useful things, and I've got to select what to teach based on a broad variety in levels (the ones into online games are pretty capable, but many of the others have next-to-no ability) so that I can test them all to see if they are capable of surviving in the next guy's class, based on what he's going to teach them.
However much we would like to measure each student's progress against themselves (and almost every teacher would like to do this) the reality is that we cannot teach every student individually, so we need to get them to a shared level so that they can continue to be taught together. If 15 of my first-years manage to learn 15 different subsets of the grammar and vocabulary of English, and I pass them all based on their individual knowledge and not on gaps in the knowledge we would want them to have, there will be no single lesson that the second-year professor can give that will be useful to all of them.
Its just you.
Anything that can improve education is a good thing. If the lecture is boring and without any interaction then the students wont remember any of it.
But does it improve education? Any "next big thing" gets good results from a few dedicated teachers, but their results fail to be replicable for other teachers. This happens again and again and again. I can't find the link, but there was an article posted to /. earlier in the year about a former champion of social networking in the classroom that had stopped preaching it because it worked for him, but not for other people. He came to the same conclusion as most people eventually do: a good teacher is a good teacher, but we don't know and can't define what makes them one.
As for gamification specifically, I remember reading an article (on Gamasutra, I think) back when the word was still so new that most people hadn't heard of it. It was about a study into why people enjoy games, and the results of brain scans showed that the enjoyment was triggered by those areas of the brain involved in learning..
One developer noted that he wasn't surprised by the results. When asked if this was justification for the gamification of education he was strongly against it. Why?
Think about it: games are fun because you're learning. The leads us to the conclusion from that any course that isn't fun is just badly taught. But "gamification" ignores this conclusion and instead focuses on "achievement addiction" -- something which is independent from the actual quality of learning. Gamification is a distraction from good teaching.
And besides, isn't the biggest criticism of modern education that it's too exam focused? What are achievements if not more exams, marks, grades....
The kind of plans some of receive from our employers that they now want to tax as income (at upwards of $5000/year in some cases).
Lots of countries consider private medical insurance to be a taxable benefit. It is a form of remuneration, after all.
Actually, the royal family gets revenue from holdings and possessions that used to be owned by the state, not the crown. Technically, most of their wealth has been stolen from the people. There's also a long history of monarchs selling the crown jewels which are owned by the state, and the state having to pay for replacements....
That's not what you said before, though, is it? What you said was that it was a contractual matter. It's not. It's just a matter of inertia -- the recipients have no motivation to release the source, but they still have the right to do so if they want....
If somone bought that $3.99 app, demanded and received the source code, am I right in thinking that they would then under the terms of the GPL, be able to post that source code on the web for free to anyone who wanted a copy, thus enabling people to compile the app for free, with no one ever again having to buy the binary in order to access the source code?
Yes. But this introduces a fork danger, because who's going to roll all the changes from the main DOSbox codetree into the Android DOSbox? The guy who's currently selling it isn't likely to put as much time into updating it if it's not bringing him any cash.
The price for DOSbox Turbo isn't unreasonable, the guy doesn't seem malicious (heck, all of his other apps are free), he's just failed to adhere strictly to the letter of the GPL. Given the number of people who've explained why, and the fact that he himself has read and commented on this thread, I fully expect that he'll build the "written offer" into his next version, and we can all go back to arguing about the number of slashvertisements we've been seeing lately....
Exactly. Fishtix claim to have optimised the code for the platform, not simply recompiled it. That's valuable work in my book, and 3.99 is fair enough -- it's the price of one GOG.com DOS game, and you're going to be buying your games from GOG.com anyway, aren't you?
OK, so now you can contact the author through the app store, demand the source code, recompile it, and upload it to every Android app store going as a free app, and the world will be at peace. The 3.99 and the 0.99 DOSboxes will disappear as your free one cleans up the market. Problem solved.