Without a Rooster: The Urban Chicken Movement

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The Urbane Chicken movement claims to be about “the right to grow food” and “sustainability”.

To that, I say: Pfffth!

Calgary Food Policy Council: 2010 Local Food & Urban Ag Predictions for Calgary.

New Chicks, some of which are boys.

Sustainable? Sure,…. I’ll buy that. We have a bunch of people keeping a bunch of hens for eggs. Sounds good so far. Of course, most cities where this is being allowed or proposed the by-laws allow for some small number of HENS only. The argument is that this is somehow sustainable.

Rooster

Rooster

But, hey, never mind that someone ELSE has to raise chickens – including the roosters – in order to provide these people with chicks. Never mind that someone ELSE has to deal with the unwanted roosters – remember that roughly 50% of the chicks hatched are going to be male. The majority of urban chicken ‘farmers’ don’t even want to THINK about butchering chickens, let alone do it themselves. No sirreee – let’s ignore that part of the picture – it isn’t fun and doesn’t fit in with the ‘my chickens are wonderful, loving creatures who give me eggs’ view.

Right to Food [The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has the physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement] – Eggs in the store aren’t as good as free range eggs, but they are NOT ‘bad’. So, this is not about access to safe, adequate food. It is about the difference between regular and premium. The philosophy behind the UN right to food initiative is to ensure people do not starve, not to ensure they have access to caviar.

Food security [to ensure secure access to adequate amounts of safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate food for everyone, produced in an environmentally sustainable way and provided in a manner that promotes human dignity]– Yes it is true that a hen will help keep the bugs down in your garden. She will also help herself to your newest green shoots and some of your other produce, so she can only be in the garden at certain times. If you let her in the garden too soon she will scratch up your seeds and eat them before they even start. Yes it is true that she produces fertilizer-grade manure, AND she will eat some of your kitchen scraps. Along with her fertilizer she has various talents that may be enough to justify allowing people to keep a few hens. BUT Let’s not get too bombastic about all this. It is NOT about food security or the right not to starve. Really, all we’ve accomplished with keeping hens is to move the dial a few notches. Without the ability to breed and hatch your own hens, you are still dependent on someone else for your eggs – only now instead having to buy the eggs, you will have to buy the chicks. You can’t do anything to help preserve heritage breeds without a rooster.

You are still an ‘end-point’ consumer.

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Attention Educators: Serious Games is NOT equal to Educational Games

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Here is Ben Sawyer‘s latest talk – a Google Tech Talk

If you are one of those people who believes that Serious Games is synonymous with Educational Games, you should watch this. It will give you a pretty good idea of what serious games are and where they are now.

Ben’s “Serious Games is NOT equal to Educational Games” is around the 33 minute mark.

YouTube – Games Everywhere : The Larger Role for Web Platforms and Services for Games & Serious Games.

Digital Mill

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Why Educators Need to Learn About Simulations (and Games)

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Simulations (and games) are once again ‘hot’ in education – remember the “Edutainment Era” of the 80’s? Everyone seemed to think that the way to make “learning fun” was to wrap it up in some lame game. Educational Technologists and other educational designers leapt on this bandwagon with great glee. With the best of intentions they set about building educational games ‘Edutainment” without the slightest notion of what makes a game good, or what goes into game design.

The result was sad but completely predictable – the games were, for the most part, AWFUL. It is one of the primary reasons that most game developers are still highly suspicious of educators to this day.

By the way ‘edutainment’ is a loathsome word in the game industry, even though educators still insist on using it.

Ultimately, the idea of using games for learning was abandoned (the experiment failed) and OBVIOUSLY, games were to blame (certainly NOT poor design). Ergo – games are BAD.

To this day games are still banned in many schools, and the few educational games that are still being used are still awful, but the students don’t protest, because, after all, the alternative is still worse.

With Serious Games getting more and more press, educators are once again jumping on the “games motivate” bandwagon. (Serious Games, by the way, are NOT just about educational games).

Problem is, most of them STILL don’t know anything about games.  In some cases they are using the term “simulation” for the applications they build. “Simulation” sounds SO much more educational than “game”, no?

The problem is the same – people are designing these things without any real understanding of what it is they are designing. They seem to think that all they need to know is the educational part. Unless we do things differently this time, the result will be the same as it was in the 80’s.

Only not quite.

Serious Games are here to stay – the industry is getting into it, and there are rapidly growing developments in health, the military, politics, advertising, etc. Educational games are only a small part of this, and unless educators realize they need to learn something about the medium they are using, they will be left behind. Educational games and simulations will still be made, but it will be WITHOUT educator input.

Curiously, each discipline has a tendency to disrespect other disciplines, but there are a few fields where this seems to be pathological. An architect friend of mine used to complain to me that everyone seemed to think they knew as much about architecture as she did – after all, everyone lives in a house, no? But living in a house does not make one an architect. The disrespect that ‘outside’ faculty have for Education is well known within Education, but the same people who complain about how their own discipline doesn’t get the respect it deserves do the same thing to Informatics by depreciating the body of knowledge that underlies the technology they use. Using a computer application does not make one an Informatician. There are many faculty teaching in HE who really should learn something about education and instructional design, and that same principle also applies to the design of simulations, games, websites, and many other computer based applications.

The thing here is that the simulations that interest educators come from a body of knowledge that includes simulations in general. To try and ignore the foundation on which digital educational simulations are built is like doing chemistry experiments without learning anything about chemistry or the experimental process. One does not need to know everything there is to know about chemistry or the experimental process, but there is a body of knowledge that is foundational without which success is at best, random.

If you are going to make digital educational simulations, you need to know about education, and you need to know about simulations.

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Keeping a Single Duck is Cruel!

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This video came across my path today:

YouTube – Ducks who Truck.

Cute, but I pray this does NOT inspire people to go out and get a duck as a pet!!!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T!!!

Every year I get people who contact me looking for a (one) duck or egg to raise and keep as a pet. They ALL try to convince me how much they will love the duck, and they ALL try to convince me that the duck is truly happy.

Forgive if I sound vitriolic, but this sort of thing just makes my blood boil. It is a prime example of our human arrogance (of COURSE every living thing want what we like….).

First off, since WHEN did wanting something make it good or right?

Since when did loving something guarantee its happiness?

How would YOU know if the duck is happy? How many ducks have you known? Animals want to survive, and most will make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in. Making the best of a situation is NOT the same as being happy.

After 40+ years of studying and working with animals of all sorts, I have learned that different kinds of animals require different lives in order to be really happy. They will make the best of whatever situation they have and most never show any signs of depression. People are fooling themselves when they tell themselves the animal is ‘happy’.

Birds should not be treated like dogs or cats, and I would not put one on a leash, even a very long one. Ducks can learn many things and you can often teach a duck to follow you but there will still be times when instinct takes over and he does what comes naturally for a duck, like heading for the nearest lake or stream for a swim.

The problem is that no matter how much you loved him, you can NOT know what it was like for him. Just because he looked “happy” by human standards, does NOT mean he was happy by duck standards.

Ducks ARE NOT people (or dogs or cats, or parrots…)
Animals are adaptable, and will try to survive in whatever conditions they find themselves.
Your idea of a perfect life for a duck is NOT (and I cannot stress this enough!!) NOT a duck’s idea of a perfect life.The life you gave him is no more suited to a duck than dancing and riding a bike is suited to a bear.

Here are just a few reasons why this is a BAD, BAD idea:

  1. Ducks are social animals. Raising a duck away from other ducks is cruel (they absolutely need other ducks for their proper development).
  2. Ducks can NOT be house trained – and they poop every half hour or so.
  3. Ducks can live to be 20 years old. p.s. Ducks imprint as babies. They will follow anyone around because it is their instinct to do so. Don’t confuse instinct with choice. It has NOTHING to do with what he likes.

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Web 2.0 Fail – Using New Tools in Old Ways

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I am often struck by the fact that so many people who claim to be using the latest, coolest, Web 2.0 (and 3.0, whatever that is) tools are not actually doing anything new. They are merely using a new tool in the same old ways they have always done. THAT is not progress.

For example, if you can print out the contents of your website on paper in a way that makes sense, you are NOT designing for the web. What I mean to say is that you are not taking advantage of what the medium can really do if your content is linear. The web does not need to be linear – that is one of its charms. Now, that’s not to say that all web content must be set up with lost of bells and whistles, like this one (it’s a flash site, so those of you with ipods, iphones, and ipads, once again, Too Bad you can’t see this), but I REALLY hate it when people claim to be doing something they’re not. There’s nothing really wrong with have linear information in a web site, but DON’T pretend it is more than it is. That’s, well, dishonest.

Take presentations, for example. People LOVE to hate powerpoint. Like Mark Congiusta says so well here:

It’s not powerpoint’s fault. People just don’t use it right. But because PPT is so maligned, people seem to think that simply using something else is in and of itself better. Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s NOT. Take one of the new kids on the block for example, Prezi

prezi logo

Prezi offers a way to build a presentation that is effectively a single slide. The slide can be really big and you can zoom in on whatever parts you want. It’s a nice idea. Cool even. When I first heard about it I tried to think of ways to use this to effect in some of the presentations I have done in the past. I can think of only a few that would benefit from this kind of visualization. I still haven’t made a Prezi presentation. If I have a presentation to do that lends itself to a non-linear, big-picture approach, I’ll give prezi a try. But I’m NOT going to use it just because it’s new and sexy.

Today, I came across a link (Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and Web 2.0 Tools) that prompted this post. Now I don’t know the author of the presentation so please forgive me if this offends anyone, but this is an example of exactly what I’m talking about. What makes it all the more ironic is that the SUBJECT of the presentation is exactly what they’re NOT doing – i.e. using web 2.0 tools.

Let me explain. They are using prezi (web 2.0 tool?, check); they are NOT using powerpoint (we’re SO over old technology, check). BUT the presentation consists of,…. can you guess? 15 traditional slides arranged in chronological order. So that begs the question, WHAT’S THE POINT OF USING PREZI HERE? If you want a presentation where it’s easy to jump to the embedded links, use GoogleDocs. It’s also free; it’s also ‘in the cloud’ (so you can still claim you are using a Web 2.0 tool) and if you want to look at all the slides at once (a la zoomed out mode in Prezi), well, all you need to do is look at the slide sorter. There really isn’t anything here that can’t already be done using powerpoint. It’s a nice presentation, but it is not ‘new’ in terms of format in spite of the fact that it uses a new tool.

So I thought, well maybe this is just an isolated example. NOPE. I looked at a bunch of slides on the site – almost ALL of them were simply ‘regular’ sets of chronologically ordered slides pasted on one big prezi slide.

BAH!

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Why Educational Games are still boring…

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One of the things I keep coming up against again and again is the ‘language’ problem. Having come from computer science and only recently introduced to ‘formal’ education (I”ve been teaching at university for ~30 years), I was at first quite confused by the way education distinguishes between games and simulations. In CS all games are sims (though not all sims are games), and in serious games, only SOME serious games are educational ones. I often see articles written by and for educators that treat the terms serious games and educational games as interchangeable. It is certainly true the ed games are part of the serious games space but there is much more to serious games than ed-games. (It’s one of the things that really bugs Ben Sawyer.)

Many disciplines do this, but Ed Tech in particular has a tendency to co-opt words that have specific meaning in CS and then use them in different ways. That was fine so long as the disciplines and the literature did not intermix, but contrary to Clark’s claim that the delivery method is merely a vehicle, as technology becomes more complex, the bodies of knowledge needed to take full advantage of those media also expands. Ed Tech has been unable to keep up. Just like it is no longer possible to ‘cover’ all of CS in a 4-year degree (it was possible about 30 years ago), it is no longer possible to cover enough tech in EdTech to produce people who actually understand their tools. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that many EdTech programs are post-grad programs, so it is being done in 1 or 2 years rather than 4.

In computer science, all games are simulations – though the reverse is not true. The field of digital simulation is much bigger than most people realize. To muddy the waters even further, those live-action f2f activities known in education as ‘educational simulations’ really have almost nothing to do with digital simulations. They have nothing at all in common with digital simulations when viewed from a technological perspective.

My own theory about why so many educational games are boring includes these notions:

  1. Making good games is very hard, no matter who you are or what you know. It takes a rare talent that cannot easily be ‘taught’ (if indeed it can be taught at all) – just like writing a good story, making a good movie or composing a good song. (Here, as in all things, Sturgeon’s Law holds: 90% of everything is crap.)
  2. Designing good instructional interventions is also hard. It is in some respects harder than making a good game because you often need to reach an unwilling audience (they HAVE to be in your class). While game designers are always keen to increase their demographic, people are free to buy and play a game or not. As educators, we are kind of obligated to deliver on at least some of our educational objectives.
  3. Each discipline draws its own specific kind of ‘geek’ and educators are by and large, not gamers. They don’t ‘get’ digital games. Card games, board games, game shows, educational sims, and digital games are not simply part of a continuum. Digital games are different.
  4. Educational Technologists, for the most part, do not know enough about how technology works to use it well. I studied CS for 7 years. I wouldn’t suggest that everyone in Ed Tech needs to do the same, but I DO know that they really need to learn much more about the technology than most are getting now. There are approaches and designs I can create that someone without my background just can’t. Just what subset of what I know is core to EdTech? That part I don’t know yet, but I do know that asking someone who only knows either discipline will not give you a useful answer (in the same way that you should not ask a mathematician what the average university student needs to know about math).

I suspect that part of the reason that sim-games are making headway is that they still look enough like the simulations that Gredler (1996, 2004) defined as OK to pass as Educational. As soon as we start to have too much fun, educators become suspicious that there is not enough learning happening. (This is a sweeping generalization, but useful for discussion purposes). Educators believe that ‘pure’ sims are not enough (they are wrong of course, but simulations that lack a game element need more from the facilitator to make them work as educational interventions). Games are still not acceptable in formal education, so the middle ground gets the nod.

Gredler, M. E. (1996). Educational games and simulations: A technology in search of a research paradigm. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (pp. 521–540). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.

Gredler, M. E. (2004). Games and Simulations and Their Relationships to Learning. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J.: Association for Educational Communications and Technology., Lawrence Erlbaum.

 

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lols – Once More From the Top….

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lol 4
lol 4

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Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price – NYTimes.com

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Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price – NYTimes.com.

I think everyone has a choice.

 

One of the choices people are NOT making anymore is to spend time pondering.

 

If you don’t keep balance in your life, then various skills are lost. There is this fallacy that we are wasting time if we don’t fill it with something “productive”. Since we can’t actually do that, we fill in the spaces with FB, reading email, surfing around, and other largely random activities.

I spend 6-10 hours/day on the computer. BUT: I also spend time outside, often alone (except for the critters). I have spent countless hours sitting and watching animals, and I can finish a novel on a 6-hour flight.

I tried both of those two tests linked in the article – test your focus & test how fast you switch tasks…. I got a perfect score on the focus test and missed one on the switching test but I was slower than both groups. (btw the focus test is non-verbal and the switching test is verbal – that also makes a difference).

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