FUN Should NOT be an ‘F’-Word

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… but, sadly, it appears it still is.

Playing with Reality at the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The opening keynote by Nathan Verrill, co-founder of Natron Baxter, set the tone for applied gaming as he pointed out that “For many people, fun is the f-word.” When we talk about bringing games or play into the classroom, there can be resistance on that very grounds–are we just just selling chocolate-coated broccoli? Why is there still a cultural trend towards fun and work as opposites that have to be tricked into coexisting?

It seems to be most problematic in the very discipline that should know better, namely, Education. I’ve come across this again and again (and again) – among classroom teachers, among administrators (at ALL levels of education) and, perhaps worst of all, among Education professors. Ed Tech faculty, even.

Here’s part of a conversation I had with an Ed Tech professor last year when I was starting my book:

I too have a question about one of your figures. In your “serious games” continuum, you have “Education” and “Fun” at opposite ends of a continuum (I don’t understand what the grid lines mean). Does the picture mean that if something becomes really fun, it can no longer be educational? OR that something really educational won’t be fun? How do you define “fun”? It might also help me, as a fellow EdTech to see your definition of ‘education’.

And the answer:

According to a lot of authors we have already discussed, education and fun do appear to be at the two extremes of a continuum. I’m not inventing that. That is what makes developing an effective AND engaging educational game so difficult, – balancing the two. Accepting to add water (fun) to wine (education).

It’s actually NOT what makes the design of good educational games difficult, but that’s a whole other story. Sadly, this guy actually makes educational games. He writes about them. Considers himself an authority, especially in educational circles. Unfortunately, it’s people like him who perpetuate the problem.

I’m not going to identify the person who wrote this claim. First, he doesn’t claim to have invented this notion – he merely claims to support it. Second, people don’t like being held of as examples of wrongheaded thinking. I also can’t show you the diagram we’re talking about, but it looks kind of like this:

The "Serious Games Continuum"

Not only is it seriously mistaken in placing education and fun at opposite ends of the spectrum, the placement of “fun” at the bottom betrays an attitude, AND the implication that Serious Games are only educational is also just plain wrong.

Obviously, we still have a long way to go before the formal educational community is sufficiently enlightened to ‘get’ games.

 

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What Tenure Gets You: A Reply to Naomi Schaefer Riley – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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What Tenure Gets You: A Reply to Naomi Schaefer Riley – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Well said.

True, tenure also protects some faculty who have not contributed in any significant way for years, but I would much rather carry a few freeloaders (there are always going to be some of those) than to give up on the whole idea.

 

We need this sort of protection especially now when greed and the infernal ‘bottom-line’ seems to drive everything.

As Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. ”

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“Audio without image crosses a wire in my brain.”

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“Audio without image crosses a wire in my brain.”

via Utilizing My Aversion to Phones • Another Passion.

This is wonderful. And here I was thinking it was just me and my aunt. I have an aunt who doesn’t like using the phone either. It’s one of the many, many things I admire about her.

I suspect my husband thinks I’m just being silly – he keeps alternating between trying to force me to talk on the phone (as if some kind of phobia treatment will fix my ‘condition’), and talking over me like I have some kind of disability.

It’s neither – I’m not actually afraid of the phone, and some days I end up talking on the phone with 15 or more different people. I have no problem talking on the phone to people who are looking for information, and I have no problem phoning to ask for information on something, but if there are any feelings involved or there might be nuances in the conversation that require interpretation, I hate using the phone. Really HATE it.

To me, the phone is quite simply inadequate for that kind of communication – in many ways it’s worse than email because there is no ability to review what you are about to say. I almost ALWAYS re-read my emails several times before sending them – and I almost always end up editing something. Communication is important to me, and the phone just isn’t up to the task.

There’s also the interruption factor: “Hey, let’s CHAT.” Never mind the fact that I might have been deeply engrossed in some work that will require at least 10-15 minutes after the call is over before I’m back up to speed again. Asking if I “have a minute” is a waste of time – I’ve ALREADY been interrupted. It’s already going to take me considerable time and effort to back into what I was doing, so I might as well finish the phone thing so I don’t have to get interrupted another time for the same thing. Don’t expect me to be all chatty though.

For me, there simply is not enough information in a voice if I can’t also see the face. It’s like not being able to see every fifth word.

 

Radio drama isn’t the same thing at all (it’s one way) so don’t even go there. I like radio drama as well as audio books. Different thing entirely.

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Student evaluations of teaching don’t correlate with learning gains « Computing Education Blog

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Student evaluations of teaching don’t correlate with learning gains « Computing Education Blog.

Mark Guzdial comments on a post made on (LISTSERV 16.0 – AERA-L Archives.) by Richard Hake, who disagrees with the popular (especially among administrators) notion that student evaluations of teaching are valid form of evidence to measure teaching. I agree with him too. They’re not.

They are measures of a teacher’s popularity and have little if anything to do with how much they have learned. He also mentions something I have found to be true again and again in my 30+ years of teaching: student evaluations often go down when students learn more by working harder.

 

Teaching awards do NOT imply that someone is a good teacher. They imply that someone is a good politician, who knows how to get people to like her (or him).

 

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I’m the only one left who remembers my childhood.

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So, the other shoe has dropped so to speak.

I don’t usually write personal things, but this one is important.

This isn’t going to be a long post but I wanted to get this out there before too much more time went by. I imagine I will have more to say on this later.

My brother was diagnosed with Leiomyosarcoma in March 2010. They were sure they got it all when they removed the tumour along with one adrenal gland, one kidney, and about 1/3 of his pancreas.

My mom was diagnosed with stage-IV breast cancer in July. Her treatment was palliative. She seemed to be doing OK – was even starting to try and eat better.

In September, it was discovered that my brother’s cancer was not gone and that it had grown rather aggressively.

In November they stopped treatment.

He died on January 17.

I feared my mom wouldn’t be able to recover from that one. Her condition had been pronounced stable in March 2011, yet when she went in for a blood transfusion on April 28, they booked her into the hospital and told her she was dying.

She died May 10.

My dad died when I was a kid so now there is no one left who remembers my childhood. Not really. There’s no-one left who can tell me where the paintings on my mom’s wall came from, or who gave her that ring she’s had for as long as I can remember.

It feels like the end of the longest, hardest, and darkest winter of my life. I really hope it’s the end of the winter.

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Frankencode and Other Writing

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Students, Reading and Writing – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A former student of mine once coined a phrase that he used to describe the phenomenon whereby students take bits of code from various other programs and stitch it together in the hopes of ending up with something they can submit for an assignment. He called it “Frankencode”. (many thanks to Jared Hopf)

While I’m pretty sure Jared deserves credit for coining the term, the phenomenon is not new. The article above mentions it too only he calls it patchwriting. Maybe this could also be called Frankenwriting.

His hypotheses on why students seem to be able to write passably in writing courses but not in other courses are important.

  • In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors’ expectations are, and
  • A different issue is whether or not the student understands the course material: a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.

I think both apply to forms of writing beyond essays – like code. Actually, I’d go so far as to say they even apply to communication generally, so we also see the same problems and hear the same complaints when students do presentations. AND, while I’m on the subject, this may go some way to explaining why so many presentations made by professionals, and even professors lack, to put it mildly, luster.

I taught introductory programming at university for 25 years. It took me many (MANY) years before I was truly comfortable enough with the material to play around with it while I was teaching. That’s not to say I didn’t know how to program – I did (and do) and I was pretty good at it. However knowing a subject and knowing enough to be able to teach it require entirely different levels of knowledge. The better you understand your material, the better you can be at presenting it. Of course there are always those who have no problem pretending to know things – they, like consummate actors, can present on almost anything and make it look like they know what they’re talking about (except of course, to those who actually DO know what they are talking about). But, I digress.

Mr. Williams goes on to outline four methods by which people incorporate research into their writing. Let me expand that to the incorporation of outside sources generally. Here the list:

Writers have four means by which they can incorporate source content into their text: they can quote, summarize, paraphrase, or patchwrite that content. Contemporary educational and media discourse has been focused on whether writers acknowledge their sources when they incorporate material from them. A more profound question is how writers incorporate source material; quotation, summary, paraphrase, and patchwriting are separate discursive moves representing different levels of intellectual engagement with the source. Quotation requires only the ability to copy. Paraphrase requires comprehension of and engagement with a small bit of text, such as a sentence. Summary requires engagement with an extended passage, even the entire text. Patchwriting stands between quotation and paraphrase; it is neither an exact copying nor a complete restatement.

We definitely need to pay more attention to helping people learn HOW to incorporate outside sources and a little less obsessing about plagiarism. Let’s face it, most of the work we do is repackaging the work of others anyways. That’s also what the bulk of what is done by those we graduate once they get out into the real world.

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Trading off between Education and Fun??? SRSLY?

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The Wall Must Come Down | Learning From Hollywood.

Some years ago I did a survey with public school teachers to see if they were using games in school, and if not, why not. Some of the obvious and significant barriers were highlighted: lack of admin support, lack of resources, lack of time to learn, etc.

The comment that still sticks with me today is this one:

As a parent I object to having my child “play” on the computer when he has completed some piece of work. I want my kids working at school. I can use computer games at home for there entertainment. I also think that “edutainment” as a name is attempting to give computer games some degree of educational value. My students come to school to learn not to be entertained. Would you want your university profs. entertaining you?

I do understand the pressure on teachers to not “waste” time, but the sentiment voiced by this teacher still lingers in the heads of many educators. As soon as we start to have too much fun, educators become suspicious that there is not enough learning happening.

I’ve even had EdTech professors tell me, quite matter of factly, that “fun” and “education” are at opposite ends of a continuum. How sad. And, might I add, WRONG. A continuum implies a 2-dimensional perspective which in turn implies that education and fun are somehow at odds – one comes at the expense of the other.

That goes a long way to explaining some of what is wrong with our formal educational system (the propensity to see things in only 2 dimensions is also a problem).

By the way, the ONLY correct answer to the teacher’s last question is YES!!! Yes I DO expect professors to entertain their students. Now, if that were ALL they did, the students would be justified in feeling cheated.

Emotion is essential to learning – we can not learn without feeling something, be it anger, fear, or joy. It’s probably unethical, in most cases to scare our students, so, make them feel happy!

But none of that pseudoteaching either. REAL learning, with REAL fun.

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Comment on: Data-Oriented Design – A “New” Idea

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Gamasutra – Features – Sponsored Feature: Data-Oriented Design – Now And In The Future.

I know I probably shouldn’t care, but it really irks me when people attach a schnazzy new name to an old idea a claim the idea was theirs.

Data Oriented Design? Are you kidding me? This is NOT a new idea. It’s been around since the 60’s and 70’s, only then it was called Data Driven. Try looking up JSD or Data Flow Diagram.

Perhaps part of the reason software design has progressed so little over the years is that people keep “inventing” old ideas without ever learning from the past.

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