Worth Sharing: Why pushing kids to learn too much too soon is counterproductive – The Washington Post

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1986-06-007-adam4_wmWhy are we in such a rush? It takes time to grow up and some things (perhaps even most things) need time to sink in. We need time to form new neural connections.

Curiously, at the same time we are pushing kids to be “little Einsteins”, we treat them like they can’t handle complexity, or be alone, or take care of anything. No wonder kids are having trouble – we are giving them all kinds of mixed messages.

Picture5Why pushing kids to learn too much too soon is counterproductive – The Washington Post.

  • Many schools force too much material onto the normally (and naturally) developing mind of young children and may inadvertently push children—especially boys—into looking like they have ADHD when they might not.
  • It is rare for a child to be precisely at “grade level: in every subject.

I think it’s time to worry less about competing for the “best” schools (including preschools) and more about the kinds of human beings we are developing.

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Proteus Effect threshold?

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ac-025Put simply, the Proteus Effect happens when an avatar behaves in line with the stereotype suggested by the appearance of that avatar. In other words players behave in the ways the appearance of their avatar suggests they should.

How realistic does an avatar need to be in order for the Proteus Effect to be significant?  What aspects of an avatar are important in creating the Proteus effect?  How much does my avatar have to look like me in order for me to feel it is me?

There’s probably some sort of continuum between an avatar that I can’t identify with at all and an avatar that is me.  So what is the threshold for useful application of the Proteus Effect?

ac-013Like most things, the answer depends of course. It depends not only on the capabilities of the game (and its designers), but it also depends on the purpose of the game as well as the players.

The Players:

I’m sure it is no coincidence that avatars in games for children are almost exclusively cartoonish. Kids like to customize their characters, but it seems to me that customization for kids is more about outfits, accessories (including ears, tails, hair, etc.) than it is about making the character look like the self. An adult audience is likely to be more interested in creating some reasonable facsimile, so for them the ability to create a character that is effectively a caricature of themselves would hold more appeal.

The Purpose:

Here I would suggest that the more ‘serious’ the message, the more realistic the avatar, as a general rule. At least, a more serious message should probably exclude silly kinds of customization. If you allow customization, then a game about obesity probably shouldn’t include something like clown makeup or clown clothes. It might work, but I would want to do some extensive user testing before I tried it. Most of the time our budgets are limited when we build serious games, so why take the risk?

The Technology:

2013-May-16There is an interesting article that came out some years ago that looked at what an effect called the “uncanny valley”. It talks about characters in general, but I’m sure the same ideas apply to avatars as well. The author observes that our association with various characters increases as the characters become more “human”. Pixar has done a fantastic job of that – they managed to create mother and child characters out of lamps – and they don’t even have faces, yet we still feel for them. Put eyes on almost anything and we find ways to identify with it. This connection increases as the character becomes more and more realistic, but as we get really close to ‘real’, something happens, and it suddenly becomes quite disturbing. The author postulates that this is why we are bothered by zombies. The author called this disconnection the ‘uncanny valley’. The same thing applies to avatars – I think it’s important to know about this effect and to make sure that avatar customization can’t create characters that fall into the uncanny valley or it will interfere with our ability to deliver on the message of the game.

Bryant, D. (2005). The Uncanny Valley:  Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating?  Retrieved Jan 1, 2005, from http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html

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Mail Merge with FormMule: EdTechTeam Google Summit Debrief, Part 2 of 2

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This past weekend I was at the EdTechTeam Google Summit. I went last year as well (I presented last year on gamification with Google).

I always learn interesting, useful, and inspiring things. This time I plan to share a few of them.

This second one is about FormMule.

This add-on allows you to set up automated messages from a Google Sheet that has gather information through a Form or a Spreadsheet.  It allows you to send automated mails or send them out at a set time. You can create a variety of templates based on specific values in the sheet. So, it could be used for creating personalized progress emails for your students.

 

p.s. Thanks to MRU‘s Academic Development Center for sending me!

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5 Cool Ways to Use Forms: EdTechTeam Google Summit Debrief, Part 1 of 2

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This past weekend I was at the EdTechTeam Google Summit. I went last year as well (I presented last year on gamification with Google).

I always learn interesting, useful, and inspiring things. This time I plan to share a few of them.

snap02039This first one is about Google Forms.

Google Forms are a way to create questionnaire-type forms that can be shared online. The answers that are submitted are saved into a Google Spreadsheet, one row per submit.

I’ve used them for the usual questionnaires, but I have also used them to:

  1. Create peer review forms that students can fill out during class while their peers are doing their presentations.
  2. Create game or required reading review or reflection forms. This allows the teacher to gather all of the responses in one place for easy assessment.
  3. snap02040Create simple quizzes. They can even be automatically graded if you add formulas in the columns to the right of the last question that use the values entered from the form.
  4. Create a Critical Incident Questionnaire to gather feedback from you students on how things are going in the class.
  5. Create sign-up sheets for things like class resources, projects, and presentation times. By using the Choice Eliminator Add-On you can even make choices disappear when they are full.

They have made some things much easier to handle, thereby reducing the amount of time I have to spend doing admin stuff, which in turn gives me more time to help my students.

p.s. Thanks to MRU‘s Academic Development Center for sending me!

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Worth Sharing: grmr.me

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This past weekend I was at the EdTechTeam Google Summit. I learned about a number of tools that I think are worth sharing. This is one:

grmr.me is a resource created by an English teacher for English teachers. It provides short videos explaining some of the more common grammar errors. When editing or correcting your students’ writing, you can link to the appropriate error, rather than having to explain it yourself (over and over).

 

p.s. Thanks to MRU‘s Academic Development Center for sending me!

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Is it appropriate to make educational games for girls?

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CT06I don’t like fighting. As a result, there are a whole pile of video games that I don’t really like playing. I’ve always thought of shooters and fighting games as the low-hanging fruit of game design. It’s fairly easy to do.

When I watched Avatar for the first time I thought the Navi’s connectedness with their planet had some really interesting possibilities for how to do a final conflict/challenge. When it became clear that the final challenge was simply going to be another epic war battle, I was sooo disappointed. It was all so utterly predictable. (I still like the film, it just could have been so much more).

I see videogames that require me to fight someone or something much the same way. Even Pokémon makes you battle, though for some reason the violence in Mario seems OK to me. I’ve never really known if I feel this way because I am a girl, or because I am German, or because I am a pacifist. Whatever the reason, I would be really irritated if I had to play a game for school that required fighting. With the same token though, I’d be equally irritated if I had to play a game where I had to buy stuff, or dress up, or do anything I saw as particularly ‘girlish’.

There’s a part of me that thinks it is just as bad to make games for girls as it is to make games for boys – at least so long as the game is one that both (all?) genders will have to play, as happens in educational games. What about GLBT games? Can we do that?

Should we? If we are going to make a game to be used in a formal educational setting and make everyone play, should we not be trying to figure out how to do that in a way that works for people instead of boys/girls/….?

 

To me that is one of the key challenges of building educational games. Entertainment games have a specific audience but in the end, the people who play them choose to play them. That’s not the case in educational games.

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Worth a Read: Can an Immersive Video Game Teach the Nuances of American History? | MindShift | KQED News

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Can an Immersive Video Game Teach the Nuances of American History? | MindShift | KQED News.

“The most encouraging to see is the games being launchpads for really in-depth conversations in which kids at varying academic levels feel equipped to participate and draw on their experiences with the game and the learning materials,” said Leah Potter, an instructional designer with Electric Funstuff.  Farber says they are great for inculcating his students with the idea that everything is connected and that changes in one arena of life affect what happens everywhere.

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Is More Choice Always Better?

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Picture1No.

Too much choice often interferes with learning; just like creating a simulated environment that is too real becomes counter-productive, especially with novices. Giving the learner too many things to think about too soon makes it much harder for them to navigate their way through to the destination you want them to find. There’s even a theory of choice overload: “The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option.” (Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, & Peter M. Todd, 2010)

On the other hand, insufficient choice is also a problem. Clearly there is a sweet spot for how much choice to offer at any given moment, but I suspect the right amount will depend not only on what it is you are trying to teach, but also on who your learners are, and what they already know. Even worse, it is unlikely that your target audience will be uniform enough to allow you to set up exactly the right amount of choice in any serious game or other learning application.

 

Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, & Peter M. Todd. (2010). Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta?Analytic Review of Choice Overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409-425.

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