Comments on Bartle: ‘Current Social Games Are Not Fun’

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Gamasutra – News – Gamelab 2011: MUD Creator Bartle: ‘Current Social Games Are Not Fun’. (June 30, 2011)

Mostly, I agree.

Most games on Facebook, “despite being called social, are basically solo games, with a veneer, just a simple layer on top where you ask your friends to do something for you in the game,” says Bartle. “You’re not going to make new friends, you’re not going to form alliances, or do anything like that playing FarmVille.”

Personally, I’m not really into actual social games, so this suits me just fine.

Sometimes these games do have things mixed in which are actually fun to play. “The difference is, social games rely on the extrinsic rewards so as to be compelling,” he says. “People keep playing the game because it keeps giving them things – rewards.” This has led to gamification.

Are people really that easily satisfied? All it takes is a sticker or a badge? What ever happened to feeling a sense of accomplishment for, oh, I dunno, actually accomplishing something?

“In the hands of designers, this has a great deal of potential, but unfortunately it’s not in the hands of designers, it’s in the hands of marketers.

And, folks, THAT’S what most of the so-called social games are all about.

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.” Andrew Lewis

Try it. http://collusion.toolness.org/ Install the add-on and look at how many people are watching what you are doing on the web.

 

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Blame the messenger: Why Do People Think the problem is PowerPoint?

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What would you rather do than sit through a PowerPoint presentation? – National presentation skills | Examiner.com.

It seems that blaming PowerPoint for boring or outright bad presentations is still popular. That’s bad enough. What’s worse, is that people think that using some other tool will make things better.

You know what? It’s NOT the tool. Sure there are some newer tools that offer more, or at least different bells and whistles. Part of the problem with that is that people seem to think the bells and whistles, in and of themselves, make things better. These are the same people who practically had to be threatened with bodily harm before they would stop using that “whoosh” sound for their slide transitions. They are also the same people who still use blinking text on their websites.

I won’t go through the usual laundry list of PowerPoint alternatives, but I will say that if you don’t have a good sense for how to use a tool, it doesn’t matter how good your tool is, the result won’t be much good. I’ve seen this already WAY too many times: the audience is told that the speaker is NOT going to use PowerPoint; instead, they are going to use one of the (cool, new) Web 2.0, or Cloud Tools. (Note that the ‘cool’ and ‘new’ is silent, but they are there nonetheless.) Then they launch into their Prezi talk, which consists of a bunch of rectangular frames arranged in neat rows and columns which the speaker proceeds to zoom in on one after the other. TA-DA! Prezi talk. Only it’s not. It’s still a slide after slide talk, only now, the audience has the added annoyance of having to put up with the speaker zooming in to each slide. Sometimes they are perceptive enough not to arrange their talk as a series of slides; sometimes they place them randomly. This often has the effect of causing the speaker to stumble around while (s)he searches for the next slide in the mess.

C’mon folks. I’d hate to think people are really that thick. A presentation is a performance. YOU are the star of this particular show. Whatever you put on the screen, HOWEVER you put it there, is there to SUPPORT your performance.

This sums it up quite nicely:

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A Dying Squirrel

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I’ve been worried about this for a while now.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

YouTube – ?What Google and Facebook are Hiding??.

 

On the one hand I really like having things tailored to my tastes and interests – and we’re getting to the point where we’ve come to expect this in every thing we do. It has it’s perks. On the other hand, it has some very disturbing implications, not the least of which is the subtle message that we, as individuals are ‘special’. Humans have a tendency to attribute intent to everything. We have a really hard time getting our heads around randomness – in other words, the idea that something could just happen, and not be because we somehow deserve it, or did something to cause it.

Little by little we are coming to believe that we, as individuals are far more important than we really are. We are getting our own personally tailored version of the web, our shopping experience, our banking experience, etc. because we deserve it. They call that narcissism. And it’s not a good thing in big doses.

The other really big problem with this is that most people do not seek out balanced perspectives. We look for opinions that support ours. It may even be a fundamental tribal imperative. The kind of tailoring that groups like Google and Facebook do foster that approach. Hell, it’s one of the big reasons that Facebook is as popular as it is in spite of the fact that the company itself has made no secret of the fact that all it really wants to do is sell our information to marketers.

“The internet is showing us a world we want to see not what we need to see”

Again, there are many positive aspects to this tribal approach. But if we use a different word to describe it, say , clique, we start to uncover the potential problem. Things quickly become narrow-minded and exclusive. This kind of approach can easily lead to a deepening of prejudices – it tends to harden an ‘us versus them’ kind of stance. It’s how cults work.

This is not good. Like Eli Pariser says, there is no functioning democracy without a balanced perspective.

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Are Education Academics Clueless Snobs?

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Yes, Virginia, There Is Knowledge Transfer « iterating toward openness. From David Wiley‘s iterating toward openness blog.

The fact that academics are incapable of recognizing that 99-some-percent of all the learning that happens in the world is pure and simple knowledge transfer is what leads people to believe that we live in ivory towers disconnected from reality. It can represent only one of two states: (1) we completely fail to see that this is the nature of most learning, even though we claim to recognize the value of “informal learning” (i.e., we’re clueless), or (2) our floccinaucinihilipilification of such mundane, everyday occurrences places them beneath our concern (i.e., we’re snobs). Either way, our critics would have a valid point.

For the most part, I agree. Now I would hasten to add that only SOME educators are clueless snobs, but I’ve met more than a few, that’s for sure. They aren’t rare. They may even be in the majority. I would further add that the majority of those kinds of educators reside in University Faculties of Education – as opposed to teachers, who actually have to teach stuff.

I can usually see some utility to almost any new answer-to-all-the-world’s-problems kind of proposal, and the MOOCs that are being talked about in the post are no different. But that’s not really the focus of this post. The focus is that I agree with Dave Wiley that many educators – the academics at least – seem to have lost track of the fact that a great deal of learning that happens is still the (in their eyes) uninteresting, get some answers or get something to remember kind. Perhaps that is one of the reasons we are doing such a lousy job of teaching these things – it does not constitute an ‘interesting line of research’. Academics can’t easily publish on this, so it can’t further their academic careers and thus, they aren’t really interested in figuring out how to do it better.

The sexy research lies in fuzzy ‘learning to learn’ research. Personally, while I completely get how vital this is, I have little faith that we are  actually making much progress in figuring out good ways to do it. It’s like trying to figure out how to write a best-selling novel, or make a block-buster movie or videogame. You’re not going to find a recipe, but it’s still worth studying the masters. Some people are good at it, and others, just aren’t. It’s a little sad how many professors of education fall into the latter category – i.e. the category of people who are not good at teaching stuff to people. You’d think that they – of all people – would be better at it than many of them are.

Anyhow, this also gives me another opportunity to harp on one of my favorite personal beefs: I think part of the reason educator-academics seem not to get that a huge amount of the learning that happens is what you could say lies at the low end of Bloom’s taxonomy is that they don’t actually do any of this. I know, lots of people claim that Blooms’ is passe – but hey, I don’t care. It remains a useful device for talking about learning. But back to my beef: a great many of the educator-academics I have met have degrees ONLY in education. Sure, they may have taught in a ‘real’ school for a little while (often not long though), but I can tell you from personal experience that one or two, or maybe even five years of actually doing it will not give you the experience you need to really understand how hard it can be to teach something. The perspective I gained after teaching CS for 25 years is light-years away from what I knew after I’d been teaching for 5 years.

Teaching about teaching is a whole different game. It’s meta-teaching. I have to hand it to them though; they’re good at that. They often fool countless students into believing they know what they are talking about (some call it pseudoteaching). You know what though? They really don’t. They actually don’t know what they’re taking about – mostly, they’re just good salespeople. Sure, they may understand it, academically – in other words, they understand it like I can understand what it’s like to be a brain surgeon by reading about it and watching movies about it. Truth is, until I’ve had my hand (or whatever) inside somebody’s head, I can’t understand. Not really.

Until you’ve actually had to teach something, You don’t really understand what’s tricky about it. Talk to any ‘pure educator’ about teaching recursion. Mostly, they have no clue.

I think all academic educators ought to know something besides education. They should not only know how to teach,  they should know how to teach SOMETHING – and they should have had to do it. If nothing else, it might give them an appreciation for the difficulties specific to teaching some thing, as opposed to teaching in the general sense.

If we want to raise the respect of the field of education (and I think we should), it should be HARDER to get a degree in that than in many other disciplines. It should NOT be the consolation prize.

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Does everything really need gamification?

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Gamification Summit 2011 San Francisco.

This seems to be the hot, hot, hot topic these days. There are conferences, books, and companies jumping on the bandwagon to bring you apps and more that can help you gamify your web space, your company, and even your school.

Don’t get me wrong – love games. I think they are an extremely important and versatile medium for all kinds of things.

BUT, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see everything and every place gamified.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but points, badges, and shallow machine generated flattery are not things that motivate me, or make me feel special. Stickers didn’t work so well with me when I was a kid either, and this is really no different. Gamification will not make me feel any sense of loyalty to the company doing it to me, nor will it make me more engaged. While there are a few exceptions, many of the examples of gamification are rather repulsive – and I’m sure that was not what they were going for.

Take Branchout! for example. I don’t want to be part of an ’empire’, even if it’s my own. I don’t want badges, and I could care less how many points I have. I don’t want to feel like everything is a competition. I really don’t. (I KNOW I’m not the only one who feels that way.) There’s even evidence to suggest that competition can be counterproductive.

This stuff does not make me feel happy, or warm and fuzzy, or accomplished. It makes me feel a little unclean though – like I should take a shower and start over again with a clean piece a paper.

What ever happened to sincerity? ACTUAL quality and service? People who cared about doing a good job that was NOT directly tied to money alone? Feeling good about a job well done, as opposed to ‘winning’?

I guess, only time will tell.

p.s. I think there are some excellent examples of using gamification effectively – but I suspect, here, like everywhere else, Sturgeon’s Law holds:

90% of everything is crap.

Gamification – When Your Customers Participate, Your Business Wins! – Bunchball.

Gamify your online experience with the BigDoor Gamification API.

 

 

 

Badgeville.

 

Gamification Platform | Gamify.

 

 

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The End of an Era

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Glen / Glenda

Glen, our last Guinea Fowl, died yesterday. He was a little more than 6 years old. I don’t know if he just died – I’ve seen them keel over with absolutely no warning – or if he had help.

I’ve been told that the Guinea Fowl we raised are domesticated. I wouldn’t really describe them as ‘domesticated’, so much as ‘willing to hang around for the food and shelter’. I tend to think of domesticated as including some degree of tameness, and at least a modicum of tolerance for humans. Guineas have neither, and Glen had neither in the extreme.

He was the only critter on the farm who could truly be described as nasty. It was a good thing he was little – Guineas rarely top 3 lb. – because his two favorite pastimes seemed to be 1) tormenting the ducks by chasing them around, and 2) sneaking up behind people and attacking them when they weren’t looking.

He was quite peculiar though. I should know better by now than to use names like this (one day I’ll tell the story of our geese: Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice). We named him Glen/Glenda because guineas are notoriously hard to sex. You see he was raised in isolation – the only guinea hatched that summer. It was the same year that B. got her first cockatiel. B would walk around with the cockatiel on her shoulder, while her younger brother M walked around with Glen on his. This was really quite funny, until Glen took an interest in things shiny – like eyes. Then he didn’t get carried on shoulders any more.

He herded the ducks – tried to get in on the fun whenever I was rounding them up. He’d come running from where ever he was, follow me out to the yard and start chasing ducks every time I did. I doubt he was trying to help – guineas are control and order freaks – everything has to be exactly the way they expect it or they get upset. And believe me, when a guinea gets upset, it can make noise all out of proportion to its size. Louder than turkeys, even. My guess is that he was trying to make the ducks go back to where they belonged.

Guineas aren’t very smart – at least not individually. You see, they constitute a “collective”. We started out with 2 guineas and discovered that they could not always remember that they knew how to fly. If they found themselves on opposite sides of a fence it sometimes took several days for them to ‘find’ each other again. They would both run back and forth along the fence-line, quite upset that they had been separated.

You need about a dozen to make one complete, functioning organism. Individually, their brains seem incomplete [I suspect their heads are largely ornamental ]. With a dozen or more, at least one will remember that guineas can fly at any point in time and then when the others see it, they remember too. With enough of them, there’s almost always one who remembers whatever life skill they happen to need at the moment and thus will ensure the survival of the collective.

Glen wasn’t the only one who’d try his hand at herding, although he was certainly the most persistent. Each year when I first let my baby ducks out to the pastures (we have livestock dogs to protect them) the guineas would spend the day trying to herd them back where they belong. Once they get them back where they belong, order has been restored and the guineas loose interest. As soon as the guineas turn their backs the baby ducks come right back out of course and the whole show starts again. The first time I saw this I assumed the guineas were attacking the ducklings but after watching them a while I realized that they weren’t actually pecking at the babies, just “rushing” them to get them to move. They’re not very good herders. They also have short memories (at least for some things). Each time they accomplished their immediate goal of “getting the ducks back in order”, it was like someone turned off a switch in their tiny little brains. They’d stand up straight and look around, like they just woke up and didn’t know where they were. After a minute or so they’d shrug (or shake themselves) and go on about their business like nothing had happened. Then, after a few minutes they’d notice all these ducklings in the wrong place and they’d get upset all over again.

The livestock dogs trust them though because often enough they are right about some potential threat, and when they start their characteristic “There’s something different here!” ruckus, the dogs always come to check it out. But you can almost see the dogs roll their eyes when they arrive and discover it was just some bucket I left in the wrong place.

Our house Rottie reacts when the guineas sound the alarm too.

It’s not all noise and bluff either – I’ve seen then put the run on both foxes and coyotes. Collectively (!) they are quite formidable.

I’ve known them to drown mice – one morning I found 14 dead mice in a 3″ deep bowl of water. Now, I can believe that maybe one or two might end up in the bowl and be unable to climb out, but once there are 5 or 6 floating in that little bowl, it’s really hard to explain how the rest could have drowned without help. There was no-one around except the guineas. All night. With nothing better to do, I guess.

Guineas also have funerals. It’s sad that Glen won’t get to have a proper Guinea Funeral. Of all the guineas, he really deserved one. You see, not only do guineas form collectives, but they also form sub-collectives (like the Borg). So, when 3-of-7 dies, the other members of his/her sub-collective gather around and pay their respects. They line up facing the fallen guinea, and one by one, gently try and nudge their fallen comrade, presumably to see if (s)he might simply be snoozing. Then after a while, they just stand there, making their characteristic inter-collective whistle sounds. Eventually, after 10 or 20 minutes of this the funeral is over and they wander off. Members of other sub-collectives don’t get involved.

If you take the time to watch and get to know them, you find that most creatures are really quite interesting.

It’s unfortunate that my 200th blog post would be about yet another passing (there have been so many this year), but, at least, it’s memorable.

Farewell Glen. You made your mark.

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The cost of Bullying

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There are NO bystanders. NO-ONE can claim innocence or that it’s “not my problem”. Here is one place where things really are black and white. If you do nothing to help the victim, YOU ARE HELPING THE ABUSER.

When I was targeted, out of 70+ faculty in my department, wanna know how many people stood up for me? TWO. And one of them was me. A few others made a feeble effort, but they did nothing that would, in any way, risk anything they personally had. I had often taken risks for them, but they were unwilling to do the same for me. Most ultimately turned on me (that’s where the mobbing part comes in). Those with principles have left the department (any time you see a high staff turnover you KNOW there is something going on). All that’s left there now is people whose principles and integrity are weak at best and compromised beyond repair at worst. A few never had any in the first place.

The Silent Epidemic: Workplace Bullying | Psychology Today.

One study by John Medina showed that workers stressed by bullying performed 50% worse on cognitive tests. Other studies estimate the financial costs of bullying at more than $200 billion per year.

They found that employees who had managers who were incompetent, inconsiderate, secretive and uncommunicative, the employees were 60% more likely to suffer a heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac condition. By contrast, employees who worked with “good” leaders were 40% less likely to suffer heart problems.

A 2008 meta-analysis of the connection between health and leadership by Jana Kuoppala and associates concluded that good leadership was associated with a 27% reduction in sick leave and a 46% reduction in disability pensions.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the targets of office bullies are not the new, inexperienced and less confident employees. The targets, according to research, are the highly competent, accomplished, experienced and popular employees.

So, in a sick and perverted way, becoming the target of a bully is a compliment.

By putting so much effort into making your life miserable, they are actually acknowledging that you are better than they are (of course, in some cases, almost EVERYONE is better than they are).

The people who are never noticed by the bully? You are seen to be insignificant – unimportant. In some ways, that would be worse.

Note: My next post will be my 200th. Cool.

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The Problem with Taxonomies in Education

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I’ve been following a discussion on one of the education forums that is discussing the utility of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and others.

Bloom's Rose

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. John M. Kennedy T.

There are complaints that Bloom’s is out of date, that we know so much more now than we did then, that is needs to be updated to take modern technology into account, and so on. Then people point to whatever their favorite taxonomy is.

Truth is, they ALL have problems (some more than others) – but it really has nothing to do with what most people complain about.

People tend to view Bloom’s in a linear fashion simply because it is presented as a linear list. Educators seem to have this great faith in visual representations – if you can make it into a chart or some sort of picture, it magically takes on significance that it never had before.

Bloom’s should not be viewed as a simple liner list. And it for sure isn’t a formula or recipe for designing instruction. I’ve never thought of it that way. Bloom’s has its limitations, just like any other list, but if it is viewed as a set of non-exclusive classifications it remains useful. Webb’s DOK is also a simple list; it’s just that the list is presented as a circular chart.

Webb's Depth of Knowledge

Webb's Depth of Knowledge

There is still an implied linearity in the fact that the levels are numbered 1,2,3,4. If they really wanted to remove the linearity, then it would be important to use some other label – colours maybe. And, just for the record, there is an implied progression – going clockwise, of course – because, after all, clockwise is simply a linear progression wrapped around a circle. Note the incongruity between ‘Level One’ and ‘Level Four’ – Level One really does not follow from Level Four, so the representation of this list as a pie (or whatever you want to call it) is misleading.
Whatever people want to say about it, Bloom’s is still a useful guide (although, I have serious problems with the ‘revised’ one), but neither it nor any of the other charts should be used as though they are formulas for designing instruction.

That’s where the real problems lie. People really want some sort of recipe they can follow that will ensure their instructional designs are robust, complete, effective, and, well, good. I’m willing to grant that most educators do this because they genuinely want to produce good learning experiences.

People try to do the same thing (find recipes) when designing software. That’s what the field of Software Engineering is about – but here it’s even worse because often the ‘desire to produce better software’ is a pretense. What they really want is to find ways for mediocre programmers to write programs that work (at least, sort of). That way you can hire 20 mediocre programmers, pay them peanuts, and sell the resultant software for buckets of money. What they really should be doing, is hiring just a few, really GOOD programmers, and pay them what they’re worth.

Taxonomies are great in biology. Taxonomies describe mutually exclusive classifications in the the natural world (i.e. a mammal cannot also be a fish), but when it comes to education (and anything else that has to do with social interaction and behaviour), taxonomies do not have those same clear-cut demarcations. They are NOT formulas.

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