Play

I enjoyed the Rousseau references in Kane’s work, which led to the idea of removing boundaries that would, as later indicated by Maria Montessori, allow children’s “natural urge to explore and hypothesize, compare and dramatized.”

In secondary schools, the connotations carried by the term ‘play’ are very much the domain of primary and pupils are expected to have left that behind.

This paper explored the ideas whereby ‘play’ allowed the player (children) to articulate and simulate ideas and imaginative constructs in the ‘real’ world; it facilitates the inevitability of ‘change’ that shapes our futures and destinies.

I now view ‘play’ as a powerful activity, which should underpin – wherever possible – educational activities and processes.  ‘Teaching to the test’ suits the passive, simply regurgitate content model of education – one born from the Dickens era and the Industrial Revolution.  If we are to produce critical minds, we must allow these minds to ‘forage’.

Pedagogy & Design

Motivation (Whitton, 2010)

On a personal level, I value my free time – what little time is afforded to a secondary school teacher with a young family and who is undertaking two separate course of study at postgraduate level – any of which tries to contain elements of newspaper and short story/poetry reading.  I would categorise myself as one who would need to see an educational purpose or that the completion of domestic and academic activities on the peripherary were not being undermined by spending time at a console or PC playing a game.

According to Whitton (p. 37) motivation and purpose are paramount to digital games-based learning; users need to be in control, and for games in learning, users will accept them if they are the most effective way of learning – this is the most important aspect (p. 40-41).  Games have the ability to engage but must have sound educational principles in order that the play does not obfuscate the learning outcome(s).

Achieving the necessary immersion – whereby players (learners) are fascinated and increasingly challenged – relies on the authenticity of and identification with a particular context for a user.  This leads to the experience of ‘flow’ (as defined by Csikszentmihalyi) whereupon the player enters into the optimal state of learning, and is in complete control of this experience.   But motivation is seen as a complex process.  Students’ intrinsic motivations for school decline grades 3 to 9, as a result of extrinsic motivations – grades, expectations, etc. Fun, joy, meaning, challenge have been stripped out.  So what are the differences between this traditional school-based learning and digitial games-based engagement?

Malone & Lepper developed a taxonomy of four factors in intrinsic motivators when playing games: game challenge, curiosity, control and fantasy, with ten additional factors being defined by Tuzun (2004): identity presentation, social relations, playing, learning, achievement, helping, rewards, immersion, uniqueness and creativity.

Relating to the idea of the expectations place on appropriateness of a learning activity or game, the greatest potential is in developing high-level, transferable skills: autonomy, analysis, critical evaluation and team working.  Experience, discussion and application is the constructivist approach, a theory deployed by Vygotsky.  In order to support this optimized state of ‘active learning’ constructivism suggests:

- Situated cognition
- Cognitive Puzzlement
- Social Collaboration 

and I would suggest that many digitial games – specifically designed for learning or otherwise - offer such a constructivist learning environment:  "a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities."

Honebein (cited in Whitton, 2010) presents 7 pedagogic goals of the design of constructivist learning environments: 

·          Responsibility for how/what they learn
·          Multiple viewpoints
·          Ownership of learning process
·          Authentic and relevant
·          Real-life activities
·          Support social learning
·          Multiple modes of learning

Additionally, game play must be offered in conjunction with periods of structured reflection, whereby the player can reflect on the activities just taken place with a view to tuning and restructuring their schematic models for use in further play or in transferable application.

At the heart is the learner or the player – the teacher acts merely as a learning facilitator, with opportunities for communities of practice (both bodied and disembodied) delivering additional critical support.  This ‘experiential learning’ (Kolb) requires feedback being given to the user in a timely and relevant format in order for the user to check their progress.

So, digital games can support the main educational theories of learning: active learning and constructivism, experiential learning, collaborative learning and problem-based learning.  

What succeeds is academic learning disguised as contextualized with important social issues, aesthetically-rich dramatic play.

"The learner remains flexible, adapting performance in action." - 29. The Transfer Principle

This is key to effective learning and teaching.

Week 8

I have been thinking about Gee, Whitton in conjunction with the readings in Week 4 of my MEd (Chartered Teacher) course, which this week focuses on Cognitive Style and Formative Assessment.  Furthermore, do certain games and game genres appeal to users based on the Howard Gardner’s idea of Multiple Intelligence?

Cognitive Style

Richard Riding (Richard Riding , School Learning and Cognitive Style, 2002, David Fulton Publishers, London) defines the term cognitive style as an individual’s preferred and habitual approach to organising and representing information. He goes on to suggest that it may in fact be built into us and influence how we naturally tend to react to events and ideas.

If we recognise the way(s) in which we prefer to work, it allows us to develop strategies to work more effectively or to minimise our weaknesses. Riding proposes that there are different dimensions along which we are placed.

Firstly there is the: wholist – analytical dimension: whether a person organises information in wholes or parts. Secondly there is the: verbal – imagery dimension: whether a person represents information verbally or in mental pictures.

These two dimensions can be seen as if on two continuums, and can be represented as follows:
Within the wholist – analytical dimension wholists would see the overall picture (perhaps missing out on details);

While analytics would see a collection of different parts (perhaps sometimes concentrating on one or two parts to the exclusion of others).

Somewhere in the middle (and perhaps getting the best of both worlds) would be intermediates.

Perhaps this is what Gee is positing re subdomains, if one thinks about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory, and furthermore, I am aware of the multimodal aspect of digital games, and the second dimension is pertinent to the use of such games in adapting delivery for optimum reception by pupils. For instance, is the Nintendo Wii providing the necessary support for the kinesthetic learners as defined by Howard Gardner in his idea of Multiple Intelligences?.

Within the verbal – imagery dimension verbalisers would consider or represent information in words or through word associations while imagers would use mental pictures either of information or of things associated with it. Then somewhere in the middle again would be a group of bimodals.

Riding suggests that verbalisers will prefer stimulating environments with a social group helping them to develop or share meanings while imagers will prefer a more passive, static environment.  Does this have an effect on the predilection of some gamers for online collaborative gaming?  There seems to be little doubt that the pockets of digitial games-based and traditional learning is apposite within a classroom setting.   It would of course be possible to have different combinations of the dimensions, for example an analytic imager or a wholist verbaliser.  Riding goes on to state that someone’s preferred style doesn’t seem to relate to intelligence or ability and that ability would influence the level of performance while style would influence the manner of performance. He also says that it is separate from both personality and gender.

Cognitive style is the preferred manner of working but importantly learning strategies can be learned and developed to support or give alternatives to our first preference.

So, what does this all mean for learning, and in particular digital games based learning?

Well, learning performance is liable to be affected by an interaction between cognitive style and:

• engagement in critical thinking and reflection tasks before the beginning/at the end of a lesson
• intra-/inter-group engagement
• first-person involvement
• cross-curricular learning (History, e.g.)
• the provision of 'rich tasks', whereby pupils can produce non-fiction investigations, engage with World War poetry
• group collaboration and competition (Whitton)
• used a source for personal journal writing