Turns Out, Play is Play, Even If It’s a Videogame

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Well that’s nice to hear. Children get the same value from playing videogames as they do from other forms of imaginative play.

A Surprising New Study On How Video Games Impact Children.

However, the findings do indicate “that electronic play has salutary functions similar to traditional forms of play; they present opportunities for identity development as well as cognitive and social challenges.” In other words, video games are comparable to other kinds of imaginative play. And play, most folks tend to agree, is of vital importance. Adults and children need more of it. However, the popular notion that somehow video games belong in a different category–such as ‘bad play’–is absurd

In fact, Dr. Przybylski’s study suggests that there’s little distinction between gaming and other favorable activities. “Compared with factors shown to have robust and enduring effects on child well-being such as family functioning, social dynamics at school, and material deprivations, the current study suggests the influences of electronic gaming, for good or ill, are not practically significant.”
That’s a pretty shocking finding. And I imagine many parents will accept that all of those whimsical Nintendo family games are fine, even potentially beneficial when played as a family. There have been a ton of studies that show the positive impact of family gaming. Still, what about age-inappropriate gaming? Surely conscientious parents will object that first person shooters, other violent games, and sexual imagery must be unhealthy for young kids. After all, these things are immoral; we must protect our children from these dangerous temptations, right? Not necessarily.

On the contrary, Dr. Przybylski’s study suggests that the ratings of games hardly correlate to typical conceptions we have of ‘healthy’ development of prosocial behaviors. Age-inappropriate gaming did not significantly impact the results (at least not when compared to movies and television). The study indicates that “the negative effects of age-inappropriate gaming on hostile thoughts, feelings, and real world behaviors are substantively smaller than those observed for passive forms of media entertainment.”

Still, don’t let your kids play games all day long. “Results from the current study also showed that children who spend more than half their daily free time [playing video games] showed more negative adjustment.” As long as the kids play three or less hours a day things are fine. But go over three hours and things change. “Compared with non-players, these players reported higher levels of both externalizing and internalizing problems and lower levels of prosocial behavior and life satisfaction.”

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What Wellesley learned when it stopped giving out so many A’s – Vox

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gradesI’m not defending grade inflation, but I also think it’s misguided to think every class contains a statistically normal range of abilities. If courses are focused on learning rather than sorting, then the idea of requiring professors to give out lower grades makes no sense.

What Wellesley learned when it stopped giving out so many A’s – Vox.

Wellesley College used to be one of the worst offenders. In 2000, the average course grade awarded was a 3.55, an A-minus. Then, in 2003, Wellesley decided enough was enough. The college created a new rule: average final grades in classes at the introductory or intermediate level (a 100-level or 200-level class, in college catalogue terminology) should be no higher than a B-plus.

Professors could exceed those limits, but they’d have to explain themselves in writing to the administration if they did. The change applied to about two-thirds of Wellesley’s academic departments, which were awarding grades that exceeded the cap.

  1. When you require professors to give lower grades, they give lower grades
  2. Students were more likely to major in economics and the sciences
  3. Students weren’t as happy with their professors(faculty become more lenient graders to curry favor with students)
  4. Black students were disproportionately affected
  5. Some students report that lower grades could hurt their job prospects

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-as-for-everyone/2014/08/11/b6bfe85a-218f-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html

I’ve heard some blame the students for focusing too much on the grade (What do I need to do to get an A?). First off, I think that’s a perfectly fair question for a student to ask, and one that all instructors should be able to answer, right up front, at the very start of the class – if not before.

Second, I think the instructors (and the system) need to accept responsibility for their role in this… we MAKE the grades important. Everything’s a competition where the one with the highest grades wins. So, of COURSE students want to know the rules of the game…. how else are they going to win?

On the other hand, I’ve come across far too many instructors (especially in education) who give out way too many A’s. In their classes it’s known that you really don’t have to try very hard to get an A; you just have to please the teacher.

The way I see it, there are two fundamental ways to approach grading:

  1. By subjective letter grade (i.e. A means exceptional, B means good, C means average,…).
  2. Numerically.

I have no problem with either, depending on how they’re implemented.

If you choose to go the subjective route, then you need to be really honest about how you define exceptional. I think this is where the Education courses I’ve seen fail. To my mind, while most (though not all) of the students I’ve taught in Ed programs were good, very few were in fact exceptional. For what it’s worth, it really annoys the ones who truly are exceptional (most of them know who they are), when *everyone* is told they’re a genius and given an A. Sure it may seem to make your school look good, but the reality is that the people who come through it know the truth.

The numerical approach to grading is probably the more common in universities still. Often, but not always it ends up being a combination of subjectively assessed assignments and one or more exams. The numeric approach tends to give both the teachers and the students the false notion that 100% actually means perfection – i.e. that 100% means they know it all. The problem is that’s not true. 100% on a test only means you know the particular bits that were tested – and even then it may not be a perfect understanding.

I’ve been using a different approach to the traditional numerical grading we’ve come to accept as the standard. I’m using the kind of numerical scoring that is more common in videogames……

wecome-to-classStudents often see themselves as starting off with an A (or 100%) and then they lose marks through mistakes. If they get an A- the question is, “What did you do wrong to lose the A?”

This is backwards. Upside down. Also, counterproductive.

Instead, remind your students that they come into class with no marks (zero), and then the things they do will add to their score cumulatively.

I’m done with punitive grading. BUT, unless the class is pass/fail, i.e. as long as I am required to assign a letter grade to each of my students, I am going to give each and every one an opportunity to actually EARN an A.

In my current class, my students have 20 different kinds of assignments (quests), most of which can be repeated for points, some of which are worth a lot (250 XP) and some only a little (10 XP); most of which have no deadlines. There are a number of quests that they need to attempt at least once. If the students did everything they could do there would be 60 different things, and if they got a perfect score on all of them, they would end up with 1529 points. Since an A+ at my school is 95% or better, in order to earn an A+, they need 950+ points (this keeps the math simple). This means they have a great deal of choice over what to do to demonstrate mastery of the material. They all start with 0, and everything they do adds to their total. If they screw something up, they can fix it and resubmit, or they can choose to do something else to make up the points. This frees them to take risks on things they wouldn’t normally try, and it frees me to be critical in ways I could never justify before. Win-win. Some students have trouble with this much choice, and others keep on working even after they have earned their A+. This shifts the focus off of the grade because there is always a way to recover from a bad score on something.

This does, of course make it impossible to force grades into some sort of standard distribution, and it is possible to end up with a class where everyone earns an A, or where no-one does. Usually, I end up with a clean bimodal distribution.

And I’m OK with that.

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The Learning Myth: Anyone can Be/Learn Anything

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Overloaded - I'm sorry to say I do not know the original source of this image. The copy I have was downloaded in July 2004.

Overloaded – I’m sorry to say I do not know the original source of this image. The copy I have was downloaded in July 2004.

When you say that all you need to do to succeed is to try, and they fail, the implication is they simply aren’t trying hard enough. That’s not good.

Not everyone is a genius. Really. And there is no evidence that the oft-repeated quote about tree-climbing and fish attributed to Einstein was ever said by Einstein. The first known reference to this quote comes from a self-help book (and we all know how careful self-help books are when it comes to making sure all their information is true and valid).

There is some value in the idea that we should praise effort – but note that this should not be conflated with grades in courses. Unless you are explicitly looking to assess effort rather than achievement, do NOT give marks for effort. But by all means, let them try more than once (one of the many reasons why tests are usually misguided).

I agree with Sal Khan that encouraging a growth mindset is a good idea. It’s a part of what I facilitate with my gamified course design. BUT, while it is true that intelligence is not fixed, I do not believe that there is no ceiling. There really is. We absolutely should be encouraging everyone to develop their thinking skills (as well as all other talents), but to imply that everyone can reach the same level of greatness in anything they set their minds to is just plain mean.

It’s the same kind of mindset that ends up assuming people who are down on their luck must simply not be trying hard enough.

The Learning Myth: Why I’ll Never Tell My Son He’s Smart | Khan Academy.

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

image

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

Here’s the rub: Individuals do indeed have limits to their abilities, but we have no way of determining what those limits are. That means that the idea of a growth mindset is a good one and should be embraced, but we also need to acknowledge that we may reach the limits of our growth in any given endeavor, and it’s important to be OK with that. The really hard part is figuring out when that limit has been reached. How can we know that we’re at our limit; that no new approach is going to help us advance our abilities? Well, I don’t think we ever can.

So then the question becomes, how long do we keep encouraging learners to try when they are making no more progress?

That’s a tough one.

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The 2014 ESA Essential Facts is Out

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http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf

HACKR118A few of the highlights that stood out for me:

  • Women and men are roughly equal in terms of who plays (though they do tend to play different games).
  • Gameplay on smartphones and mobile devices is on the rise.
  • The average age of gamers is marching right along with the time: it is now 31, with a fairly even split between the under 18s, the 18-35s, and the over 35s.
  • About 2/5 say they get better value for their money from games than other media (DVD, music, movies).
  • The most popular online games are casual and puzzle games  (58%).
  • These are also the most popular mobile games (77%).
  • Parental involvement is high, with >85% parents reporting that they are aware of the ESRB rating system, and that they oversee and control what their kids play, as well as how much they play.
  • Not surprisingly, action and shooter games are still the most popular console genres, but strategy and casual games are the most popular computer game genres.

As for which games were most popular? It’s nice to see the number of E-rated games is still high, and amusing to note that the Sims remains the most popular computer game franchise.

snap01605

snap01606

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Help Joy help you. On the unusability of internal systems. – disambiguity

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Yup. No-one wants to use your software – they merely want to get their work done. When will software designers realize, that they are NOT the experts when it comes to design? Usability is one of the few areas where the customer is indeed always right. Granted, a few seem to get it, but most still seem to think that since they are the tech experts, they somehow know how to do everyone’s job – and they never seem to tire of telling them they’re doing it wrong.

And yet, all the time, we say ‘It does’t matter, we’ll sort that out with training’, ‘Call the tech writers, we’ll make a manual for this system’, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll inflict this piece of crap on our employees, unlike our customers they’re stuck with us’.

via Help Joy help you. On the unusability of internal systems. – disambiguity.

 

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition – this applies in any kind of UX design:

The Lessons

  1. Usability Means…

    Usability means making sure something works well, and that a person of average ability or experience can use it for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

  2. Web applications should explain themselves.

    As far as humanly possible, when I look at a web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.

  3. Don’t Make Me Think

    As a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. If people who build a site don’t care enough to make things obvious it can erode confidence in the site and its publishers.

  4. Don’t waste my time

    Much of our web use is motivated by the desire to save time. As a result, web users tend to act like sharks. They have to keep moving or they’ll die.

  5. Users still cling to their back buttons

    There’s not much of a penalty for guessing wrong. Unlike firefighting, the penalty for guessing wrong on a website is just a click or two of the back button. The back button is the most-used feature of web browsers.

  6. We’re creatures of habit

    If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works — no matter how badly — we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

  7. No Time for Small Talk

    Happy talk is like small talk – content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can – and should – eliminate as much happy talk as possible.

  8. Don’t lose search

    Some people (search-dominant users), will almost always look for a search box as they enter a site. These may be the same people who look for the nearest clerk as soon as they enter a store.

  9. We form mental site-maps

    When we return to something on a Web site, instead of replying on a physical sense of where it is, we have to remember where it is in the conceptual hierarchy and retrace our steps.

  10. Make it easy to go home

    Having a home button in sight at all times offers reassurance that no matter how lost I may get, I can always start over, like pressing a Reset button or using a “Get out of Jail free” card.

 

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Creative Random Word Generator

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OK, now this has some fun applications…..

2009-09-24_07-55-58Creative Random Word Generator

Click a button above to generate a set of random words.

Use the random word generator to generate between 1 and 8 random words. Use the idea visualisation features to inspire creative thinking.

Join the growing number of people using this awesome tool to :

Brainstorm (use the words as stimulus for ideas)
Play creativity games similar to those you’ll find in our Games Section
Cure for writer’s block
Creative writing prompts
Play Pictionary and other word based games
Anything else you can think of …

I think we should use it to add chaff to social sites (like FaceBook) who routinely mine what we say in order to serve us advertising.

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Course Design is Scholarly Work and Deserves Attribution

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My course websites used to be public, but I got tired of others taking my design work w/o permission or attribution. Now most of my courses are password protected. examples I hadn’t really thought about my syllabi until last year when I designed and taught a particularly novel course. It’s a gamified design and is largely a culmination of my own 35 years of experience in teaching as well as the kind of design that Charles Reigeluth talks about when he talks about a paradigm change in education. I started thinking about my syllabi and the course designs they describe as scholarly work worthy of attribution. I have a growing number of publications that come from the novel aspects of the design of this course. I was annoyed when I discovered that the person who taught the course after me took many aspects of my design without any mention of where they came from. I have long included attributions on my syllabi and assignment specifications to credit those whose ideas I built upon. Apparently, this is not common, and that’s wrong. It’s especially annoying when faculty in Education fail to acknowledge the colleagues and scholars upon whose work they are building, yet I’ve seen that done more times than I can count. I’ve had elements of my own designs “borrowed” without either permission or attribution. You’d think that professors of education of all people should recognize that course design is scholarly work. These are the same people who insist on proper reference style on almost everything their students submit, claiming that proper attribution is an important part of ethical professional practice. Apparently, ethical professional practice only applies to *some* people and *some* scholarly work. getting-a-degreeOnce again, it’s reassuring to know that I’m not the only one who thinks this is an issue: Citing Syllabi – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I thinkDerek Bruff puts it very well in a comment on George’s posting: “The acknowledgement issue is a delicate one. We have standard ways to acknowledge the research and scholarship done by others (citations and such), but we don’t have any standards or norms around attribution of teaching materials or methodologies. I kind of wish we did, since giving credit where credit is due (a) is generally an ethical thing to do and (b) might result in better institutional recognition of contributions to the teaching profession.” A similar discussion is found in the comments to Brian’s post on Forking your Syllabus. Katherine D. Harris has discussed the issue of Acknowledgments on Syllabi in a nice posting which also highlights the many different ways we can learn from these pedagogical gold nuggets. As she points out, with examples, a growing number of online syllabi do include an acknowledgements section. I will be adding some to my own courses as I revise and create new ones this year.

Here are a few of Konrad Lawson‘s suggestions:

  • When you write your syllabus, include the year and semester it was taught. This can serve as a version number, and will allow different versions to be acknowledged accordingly.
  • Consider uploading your syllabus somewhere relatively stable online, to reduce the chances of link rot or keep versions alive online where search engines can find them. Upload, for example, to archive.org or to github.com, or somewhere your university it unlikely to take it down. Remember LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).
  • Consider adding a Creative Commons or other open license to your syllabus somewhere explicitly so that, beyond “fair use” and the un-copyrightable nature of ideas, others can feel comfortable adopting and modifying (with attribution) larger chunks of, say, your assignment descriptions or class policies.
  • Consider putting the above info in a convenient meta-data section at the bottom of your syllabus so that it can be easily found, or as an additional file alongside it if it is in a repository (for example, on github). Hopefully, if this catches on, it might further facilitate the kind of larger scale work by projects such as the Open Syllabus Project. Other useful metadata to include there might be some keywords related to your course, its level of difficulty, the expected size of the class, whether it is a lecture, seminar, etc. course, and other basic info that might found elsewhere throughout the syllabus such as the instructor, university, course title, and version.
  • As sharing of syllabi becomes more common, we will be more conscious of “other readers” beyond our students of the document. One question those readers will often ask themselves, as they decide whether they want to adopt some of your readings, policies, or assignment types, or other material is: did it work? What worked well, and what needed more refinement? The answer to these questions can sometimes be detected in the changes from one syllabus to the next when multiple years are available, but a “changelog” of some kind indicating what bugs were fixed and new features added can be useful, even if, like the “changelog” of computer code, it is just a quick list of bullet points.
  • When acknowledging other syllabi, be specific, and if a digital version of your syllabi exists, include a link (but also enough words from the title and year to enable a targeted search if the link no longer works).
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Students drop a bomb at the #gafesummit Vancouver: “We don’t like rubrics.” | A Stick in the Sand

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Do students really like rubrics? Are YOU using them right?

CH043082Students drop a bomb at the #gafesummit Vancouver: “We don’t like rubrics.” | A Stick in the Sand.

For my part I quite like rubrics, but I also think many, if not most teachers create unrealistic rubrics.

Grant Wiggins (of Understanding by Design fame, among other things) has written some must-read posts about rubrics.

Consider how a valid rubric is born. It summarizes what a range of concrete works looks like as reflections of a complex performance goal. Note two key words: complex and summarizes. All complex performance evaluation requires a judgment of quality in terms of one or more criteria, whether we are considering essays, diving, or wine. The rubric is a summary that generalizes from lots and lots of samples (sometimes called models, exemplars, or anchors) across the range of quality, in response to a performance demand. The rubric thus serves as a quick reminder of what all the specific samples of work look like across a range of quality.

The place where I see many (if not most) rubrics falling down is that they don’t actually summarize lots and lots of samples.

Now, I can create a pretty good rubric for a programming assignment, but that’s because I’ve seen 1000’s of programming assignments. In order to be able to describe the various levels of achievement in a piece of work, you have to have seen a very large number of samples of that particular work.

I can’t speak for K-12, but I can say that education faculties LOVE rubrics, and when I teach a course in an education faculty, I am usually to produce rubrics for every single “learning task” I create – even if it’s a brand new task. To me this reveals a lack of understanding of what rubrics are and how they should be used. How can I possibly know what exemplary looks like if I have never seen any examples? Well, the answer is I can’t. What I can do (which is what most teachers do when they are creating rubrics) is to invent a wish list of things we want to see. That’s not a rubric. That’s a wish list.

Here’s an example of what I do now:

COMP1103 Player Stats 2014 2.10

While this has many of the same ideas as are intended with a rubric, it allows for a great deal more flexibility – especially since I add comments on each of the categories.

Update: April 26, 2019

The original webpage that prompted this post appears to be gone, so i have taken the liberty of repeating it here (thanks to the WayBack Machine)

Students drop a bomb at the #gafesummit Vancouver: “We don’t like rubrics.”

On May 8, 2014 by Braddo With 11 Comments – Education

Update: Here’s a Storify story with as much of the conversation on Twitter as I can capture:

rubrics

student’s note from the panel discussion

This year we assembled a panel of students at the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) Vancouver Summit we hosted at Mulgrave School. The thinking was, it’s about time we talked to our customers, so to speak.

We had 5 high school students students from three local schools sitting round the table blue-sky-ing the future school. I’ll be posting more of their thoughts later but I thought I’d start with this bomb: the students hate rubrics!

Rubrics are the bread and butter of assessment these days. The IB Diploma program, for example, depends on them. One student did say that on the upside, rubrics provide some security against teacher bias (real or perceived.) But, all of the kids said, rubrics feel too standardized: “We want something more personal than a number or letter that refers to some canned comment.”

Good rubrics are built by students and teachers, collaboratively, so this comment from the kids might mean we’re not doing a good enough job consulting the major stakeholders in the assessment. My sense was, however, that this was not the problem and that students were touching on something much deeper. As Yong Zhao said in the summit keynote, so long as outcomes–whether employable skills or university entrance requirements–are prescribed by an external body, schooling becomes an exercise in squeezing all students through the “sausage-making machine.” It’s an impersonal activity, by definition, because in this structure we are not cultivating personal talents but rather bending and shaping people to meet some externally determined standard.

Zhao keynote

 

For an outstanding example of what cultivating talent looks like, watch this video of Benjamin Zander teaching a 15-year old student to play cello. It remains the best teaching I’ve  seen. “You can give an “A” to anybody,” says Zander. Listen to him explain what great teaching and assessment look like at about 5:45 on.

I recall reading somewhere of a study that suggested that rubrics did not actual provide any more objectivity or consistency that good teacher judgement: the same student essays were given to two different groups of teachers with one group using a rubric and the second, their good judgement. The study reported no statistically significant difference in the scoring. If anyone can get their hands on this or similar research I’d be grateful.

Also, five students are admittedly a ridiculous small sample size. I think I need to at least send out a quick poll to increase the numbers and draw on a more representative sample.

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