Week 6: Class Reflection

The (rather heated) discussion in class about gaming made me think about the fact that, while I'm thoroughly convinced that gaming skills have a transferable merit in other areas of life, I can't justify that out of my own experience. Because I'm not a gamer. I just know a lot of them, and I have watched their interactions and culture like a sneaky anthropologist hiding in the bushes. Except I was mostly reading Anna Karenina while sprawled on someone's dorm room bed, or nagging my brother to please please get off the damn headset because it's dinner time, or sitting at the bar in the middle of my undergrad campus while people played Rock Band and Call of Duty and Magic: the Gathering around me (my school was fantastically odd), or snarling at my roommates for hijacking the wifi so they could have a LAN party. So... I know some things about gamer culture, and I sort of know how the games work. But I've never had any particular interest in playing them. To delve into just why, then, I find McGonigal's assertions so convincing, I asked those same friends who gave me glimpses into the games.

So... anecdotal evidence, but still evidence. If the gamers are convinced things are transferring, I'm inclined to believe them. Besides... at one point my little brother was making as much money winning Halo tournaments as I was working (part-time, admittedly) at an actual job. As a final anecdote, here's his response to me asking whether he feels like his gaming skills transfer to other parts of life (he is too cool to answer Facebook posts):

On whether it impacts his "real world" interactions:

"Definitely hinders my academics, mainly because of the time wasted. Socially I would say it helped me, I mean I have made some pretty memorable friends I would not have met otherwise. And I would say I am more open and expressive when I talk online also but that doesn't translate into real life too much."

On how the game skills changed his approach to other things*:

"Well a big part of my skill was how strategic I was. And I used to play with a timer to time different things on the maps that would benefit the team and whatnot. So basically I was more efficient than anybody else even if they were just better in terms of raw skill or whatever. when playing halo was pretty much the only time I would be like the leader of something, or in control to be able to affect the outcome of a game, that is the only time I had to learn any real leadership skills. So I think I still have many habits that stemmed from that. I am always trying to do things more efficiently and improve timing or whatever there is to improve.

Since it consumed so much of my life from age 13-18 I would say that is where I picked these things up from."

*This is the longest text message he has ever sent me, and probably more words than I have heard/seen him produce at once in about ten years. Some punctuation has been added for clarity. Also: my brother is the best.

Week 6: Reading Reflection

The two Library Journal articles assigned this week, by Barbara Hoffert and Beth Dempsey, both focus on the new types of book club culture that center around libraries. One of the key ideas is that libraries do well to provide some sort of book club kit, or being able to provide a selection of thematically/topically related books for a club that does not all want to read the same thing. The Ann Arbor District Library provides Book Club to Go kits, which include ten copies of a book, a copy of the DVD (if available), and some supplementary materials in relation to the author and material. They also include evaluation forms, which allow readers to give the library feedback on the kit. I haven't looked into these kits very closely, but now I'm intrigued--I haven't seen them circulate very much, but I bet they do, since Ann Arbor is exactly the sort of community the Dempsey article mentions as being enthusiastic about book clubs (educated, well-off, et cetera). The titles are predictable, Water for Elephants, The Kite Runner, and easy classics like The Great Gatsby. Good books, but ones that people are likely to have read before, either in school or picked up off a bestseller list. Most of the books mentioned in the two articles are more ambitious, or more obscure. I imagine this works best when there's one person, a librarian or other type of leader, selecting the material and giving a rationale for that selection.

I'm not particularly familiar with book clubs, but I imagine them (at their best) to be pretty much like all the literature classes I took in college. Without anyone actually trying to teach anything directly--since literature classes are always a combined effort to situate the historical fact of a given writer/text and further the critical reading and writing skills of students (literature studies is all about transfer)--but with pretty much the same result. At their worst, they would probably make me tear my hair out--but I've had classes like that too. It's all about the people who are there. I'm up for trying one.

Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching reading: beyond the plot." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.

"Reading is invisible," writes Metzger. There aren't drafts to check, and no ability to command a student, "show your work," like in a math class. As soon as I read that statement, I thought, "that's what's wrong with reading education! That's why it doesn't work!" 
 

To bring in our discussions about data-retention and test-based teaching (and employ some of Metzger's conclusions along with my own speculation): those "bad" methods aren't the greatest way to teach most things, but they're also better than nothing. When it comes to reading, though... reading is purely skill, not factual knowledge (you can argue that knowing the alphabet and having some command of phonetics works this way, but knowing those things doesn't necessarily mean you can read in a meaningful sense). The institution of reading comprehension tests is a way to gauge whether people can read, but they don't (unless they're really, really craftily written) reveal anything about how they read--so unless a teacher is particularly intuitive, how are they supposed to know where things have gone wrong?

The description of the Socratic Seminar seems clever to me, and like something that would work really well to engage a group of non-proficient readers... but like something that would have people already comfortable with literature chomping at the bit (well, that's my feeling, anyway), and so should be not be used as a panacea teaching method. So I'll leave this article with one hysterically true fact: "Cinderella is not about foot fetishes or love throughout the universe."
 

The other article on Socratic Seminars, by Lynda Tredway, seems to focus on using them to compare different texts, rather than to excavate a single excerpt (Can I add here that I hate when teachers use excerpts instead of whole novels or stories? Sure, you can learn analytic skills from them, but you're cheating the text out of true criticism and the students out of a comprehensive understanding of what they're reading. What works for nonfiction does not always apply to fiction.), which starts off in a good place by assuming that making connections between two texts is the point of the lesson, rather than something to be done later once one has honed one's skills on a single piece of writing. I'm not sure that being able to solve ethical quandaries is what I'd list as the main goal of education, but I'm willing to consider it as a serious aim.

Last but not least... Mark Prensky's proposition that a school lead the wave of the future by getting rid of all its paper books, and forcing students to do likewise. This is the third or fourth time I've read it, and it still makes me want to laugh myself sick. Not just because he very deliberately misunderstands both the idea of hypertext and the complications of producing digital texts, but because he is just so. darn. proud. of. himself. So I'll save my snark for class.

Week 5: Reading Reflection

In the article "Put Understanding First," Wiggins and McTighe argue (correctly, I believe) that high schools teach skills too much "in isolation," and without providing a context either for using the skills or for appreciating that they are important. As I read, I was thinking about the (many, many, many) instances of this facts-without-application problem that I've encountered, as well as situations where a teacher managed to circumvent it, whether intentionally or by accident. The one that most stuck in my mind is actually a case where I don't think the authors of the article would have, at first glance, thought anything good was happening--but to me it suggests that there are more factors to be considered than just changing the way we give tests.

The article uses history classes as examples several times, and the subject seems to present an unusually thorny issue for educators. I think much of the problem comes from teachers and schools not wanting to appear to be pushing an agenda. The examples Wiggins and McTighe give of how to be a better history teacher would have to be followed very carefully, with lots of emphasis on the students forming their own conclusions, or run the risk of biasing the lesson. I'm not for censoring teachers, really (the teacher I describe below definitely had an agenda, even if it was mostly just to poke fun at any historical personage who took his or her own ideology too seriously), but there's enough of a battle going to keep creationism out of science classrooms that I don't fancy giving prejudiced or highly religious teachers an open license to revise history. We have required curricula for a reason. We just need to figure out a better way to teach them.

More than once, the article references the history class scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I only vaguely remember the film (despite having seen it about fifteen times--why did all my high school teachers think that was the one movie they should show the day before Christmas or after AP exams? Did they think it made them seem edgy to show a movie about skipping school?), but I get the reference: monotone teacher drones on and on, answering his own questions.

Weirdly enough, I had a history teacher like that, but he was anything but dull. He was such an odd man (he'd come back from Vietnam a bit shell-shocked, looked like a cross between between Lurch from The Addams Family and Henry Blake on M*A*S*H, and was known for spending any time he wasn't teaching napping in his hard wooden desk chair), and his teaching method--a detailed outline of the day's material on the board, with blanks where names, dates, and figures would be filled in as he lectured--was so clever (the need to know what went into the blanks was irresistible), nobody ever zoned out in his class. He'd been using the same outlines and the same exams for decades. When the Emperor of Japan died in 1989, he simply crossed out 'Hirohito' and wrote in 'Akihito' on the typescript of the test (I hope nobody got that question wrong)... and was still handing it out with the Scantron sheets in 2001. He rarely asked questions of the class, and when he did they were more or less rhetorical. But it worked. He told stories as he lectured, some of them about his own (absurdly-exciting-for-a-suburban-teacher) life, some quirky, non-textbook side notes to the historical data (I distinctly remember him raising his eyebrows and making a crack about the dubious paternity of Genghis Khan's oldest child), and some that I'm pretty sure were just made up. It was riveting. And by being so clearly fascinated with his subject, and so unapologetically confident that it was of utmost importance to living in the real world, he made us believe it too.

I'm not sure how to address the issue of "transfer" with Mr. Gillespie's classes--the teaching and testing were at first glance exactly what Wiggins and McTighe take issue with. But there's something to be said for being able to capture the unwavering attention of a two dozen fifteen-year-olds for an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year. In some cases, really good, retention-building teaching is just about being a good teacher. And just because we've realized that we need some new methods of teaching doesn't mean the old ones never worked.

Week 5: Class Reflection

In class this week we watched Jane McGonigal's totally awesome TED Talk on using gaming culture and game design to solve real-world problems. I've embedded it above in case you missed it.

The big connection to our class is that McGonigal sees the thousands of hours that gamers spend playing as building virtuoso skill--the same way that academic experts build skills within their fields. And she's right, I think. I'm not a gamer... I'd much rather read an epic fantasy novel than play one out in World of Warcraft. But maybe just because WoW is more about action than character development, and that's not my priority. As far as I can tell from my plethora of gamer friends, there's a huge amount of knowledge and strategy that goes into the games they play. McGonigal is definitely right, they're working hard. And there's no reason why those skills shouldn't transfer to goals beyond completing a mission that's only beneficial within the game. As she said, one of the reasons gamers are willing to work hard in the game is because it's gratifying... and one of the reasons it's hard to get people involved in humanitarian and ecological causes is because results tend to be subtle and abstract, and there isn't a lot of direct gratification for participants. People don't want to put their leisure hours to hard work unless they get some sort of payoff for that work.

Assuming that the world-saving games McGonigal previews at the end of the talk are as much fun as games like WoW, they're probably some of the coolest tools ever invented in the name of global change. Especially if the people playing the games are aware of what they're accomplishing. If they're not, this is basically tricking people into doing something by disguising it as "fun." Like in Ender's Game (great book, gut-wrenching twist). Or like baking one of those chocolate cakes that's made with beets to trick a kid into eating vegetables. That latter example is pretty clever, but it doesn't address the actual problem... so the method probably won't solve either humanitarian apathy or a distaste for healthy food.

The better version, and the one I think McGonigal is advocating, is that this sort of gaming provides a totally revolutionary new interface for performing these humanitarian/environmental actions. A good version would take into account everything she mentioned--fulfilling the gamer's desire to be part of something grand and rewarding, and taking advantage of their prodigious skills--in a context where there is a clear understanding of the real world goal of the game as well as immediate, visible feedback and at least a simulation of their successful results. No matter how much of a traditionalist one is, that's a heck of a lot more instantly gratifying than signing a petition (unless it's the anti-SOPA/PIPA petition... that was awesome) and it takes advantage of time that's already being spent in a similar manner.

Week 4 Class Reflection

I loved seeing everyone's screencasts in class... even though they made mine look sort of drab. I've never really used this technology before, but I'm really excited to have it now, as long as I can have someone else narrate the next time I have to make one! My voice does not record well, and I'm apparently not particularly capable of using a trackpad and talking at the same time.

So, for the most part, I learn by reading things. Every time I'm presented with a video tutorial I whine and look for a written version. Maybe an illustrated one, but one that doesn't move or have audio or require me to turn off Nick Cave and listen to someone talk very very slowly through steps that I can mostly figure out on my own. BUT apparently I like screencasts. I even used Naomi's to figure out how to use Zotero for another class! Somehow these feel like something to follow along with, rather than something to watch and then go imitate. I'm not sure what the difference is, but there seems to be something much more personable and less patronizing about screencasts. I'm sold.

(Sorry this is late again, I left it as a draft... again. Setting a reminder in my calendar to post class reflections when I write the reading ones.) 

Week 4 Reading Reflection

This post (and others in the future) consists of reflections on sections of the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, which can be found here. This post deals with Chapter 6.


 Everything seems to come back to networks, everywhere I look. In this case, I really like the metaphor--teaching students to navigate interconnected systems is the baseline for all good education. This is true when we're talking about helping library patrons use databases, and it's true when it comes to teaching them how to make social connections that lead to a job. I find education models that emphasize this sort of learning really appealing, especially when they break down the barriers between subjects. Our current system puts so much space between different topics that they can seem utterly unconnected--chemistry and literature may not have all that much directly in common, but when they're connected by biology, history, and cultural studies they're part of a whole. By splitting up subjects (admittedly pragmatically), we divide them in the minds of students, and students who excel in one may be encouraged to focus on it to the exclusion of others, or to consider the one in which they succeed to be more important than others (fixed learning model!) With the connection of different subjects within school can also come an advantaged discussed later in the chapter--linking a student's daily life to their classroom experience.