Composing Play: Epic Learning in Literacy Spaces
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tl;dr A short talk about using game design to hack a crappy remediation mandate. Links to resources in this URL http://tinyurl.com/jaxonepic and on my website.
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Composing Play: Epic Learning in Literacy Spaces
- 1. Composing Play:Composing Play: Epic Learning in LiteracyEpic Learning in Literacy SpacesSpaces Epic Learning in LiteracyEpic Learning in Literacy SpacesSpaces Kim Jaxon @drjaxonKim Jaxon @drjaxon California State University, ChicoCalifornia State University, Chico kimjaxon.comkimjaxon.com Link to resources: http://tinyurl.com/jaxonepicLink to resources: http://tinyurl.com/jaxonepic
- 4. ““the term participation describe[s] the socialthe term participation describe[s] the social experience of living in the world in terms ofexperience of living in the world in terms of membership in social communities andmembership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises”active involvement in social enterprises” --Etienne Wenger--Etienne Wenger --Etienne Wenger--Etienne Wenger --Etienne Wenger--Etienne Wenger
- 7. Jean Lave & EtienneJean Lave & Etienne WengerWenger Etienne WengerEtienne Wenger Learning as Social, as ParticipationLearning as Social, as Participation
- 8. communities in which they participatecommunities in which they participate Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual mind and towards social and material conditions that influencemind and towards social and material conditions that influence learning and meaning makinglearning and meaning making Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual mind and towards social and material conditions that influencemind and towards social and material conditions that influence learning and meaning makinglearning and meaning making Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual mind and towards social and material conditions that influencemind and towards social and material conditions that influence learning and meaning makinglearning and meaning making Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual mind and towards social and material conditions that influencemind and towards social and material conditions that influence learning and meaning makinglearning and meaning making Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual mind and towards social and material conditions that influencemind and towards social and material conditions that influence learning and meaning makinglearning and meaning making Shifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individualShifts the unit of analysis away from a focus on the individual
- 9. ““knowledge and cognition is distributedknowledge and cognition is distributed across objects, individuals, artifacts, andacross objects, individuals, artifacts, and tools in the environment”tools in the environment” --Ed Hutchins--Ed Hutchins --Ed Hutchins--Ed Hutchins
- 14. ““And the chance to do somethingAnd the chance to do something you’re good at as part of a largeryou’re good at as part of a larger project helps students build realproject helps students build real self-esteem among their peers”… “Notself-esteem among their peers”… “Not empty self-esteem based on nothingempty self-esteem based on nothing other than wanting to feel good aboutother than wanting to feel good about yourself, but actual respect and highyourself, but actual respect and high regard based on contributions you’veregard based on contributions you’ve made.”made.” (McGonigal,(McGonigal, Reality is BrokenReality is Broken, p., p. 130-31).130-31). , p. 130-31)., p. 130-31).
- 16. The Early Start programThe Early Start program requires CSU campuses torequires CSU campuses to “design a program for incoming“design a program for incoming freshmen to develop proficiencyfreshmen to develop proficiency in mathematics and/or Englishin mathematics and/or English before they enroll asbefore they enroll as matriculated freshmen.”matriculated freshmen.” 1616
- 22. Our goal: Make it not teh suck.Our goal: Make it not teh suck.
- 34. than 80% had comments.than 80% had comments. Faculty evals were high: 4.47/5.00Faculty evals were high: 4.47/5.00 Students were asked to complete enoughStudents were asked to complete enough Quests to earn 150 points: all studentsQuests to earn 150 points: all students went well beyond this minimum. 90+went well beyond this minimum. 90+ students earned more than 300 points andstudents earned more than 300 points and 12 students earned over 1000 points.12 students earned over 1000 points. Students have stayed connected to theirStudents have stayed connected to their peers.peers.
- 36. 3636
Notas do Editor
- tl;dr Talk about using game design to hack a crappy remediation mandate. Links to resources in the URL http://tinyurl.com/jaxonepic and on my website.
- Just to give me what I hope is some street cred: I do identify as a gamer and a geek, although with the some of the crowd here I’m probably a 6 on a scale of 1-10. I don’t have a Steam account, for example, but I do know what Steam is, I mainly play on the PS4, and by mainly I mean playing the Ratchet & Clank series over and over, or I play old school…Atari, Centipede, Ms PacMan, Pengo, Pong…which we own. The Centipede was a birthday gift last year from my awesome spouse. Atari cartridge proposal. And SF Giants’ Legos. Because Giants. And Legos. Geek cred.
- For the past few years, I’ve thought carefully about course design and building participation into the ideology of the design. The way we make use of a term like participation is in need of rescuing: moving away from a limited view of participation as it is often linked to motivation, engagement, or hand-raising and toward the view that participation as a concept is more generative when connected to the idea of…
- membership in communities of practice, which I borrow from Lave & Wenger. Reviewing syllabi in many of the GE courses on our campus, participation is often listed as 5%, 10%, or in rare cases, as high as 50% of the grade in a course. But I find this to be an odd way to think about participation:
- Demonstrating engagement by hand-raising and talk are fairly limited views of participation, and in fact, these ways of being are more connected to performance—acting like a student—than participation. We certainly want students to participate more than 10%, of even half, of the time. Are they participating when they are listening and pondering the ideas of their peers? Yes. In thinking about course design, I consider how students become members of our classroom community, the university, and our discipline. Starting from some basic things about being human: Everyone wants to be seen and heard and that they are needed to make things work.
- Participation and Community frameworks arise from Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, and Neo-Vygotskian scholars who research situated learning and distributed learning.
- The research discussed in these texts is not focused on schools. Lave & Wenger set out to rescue the idea of apprenticeship.
- The connections from Situated learning to the ideas embedded in games and game theory are not difficult to make. Ideas from scholars such as Gee, McGonigal, Bogost, Squire resonate with me because of the focus on play, participation, person-directed learning, failure, risk—all part of similar and connected frameworks. A couple of years ago I started playing with the idea of Epic learning. Jane McGonigal often talks about this in relation to WOW …collaborating with people we like… to do something big.
- I started thinking about how we seek out epic events…like going to a concert where 10,000 other people are screaming the same lyrics at the top of their lungs. We don’t want to go to a Pearl Jam concert alone. I started to think: Wouldn’t a classroom be amazing that had a lot of people who were interested in working on a shared goal. And the arguments that are often made about class size fell away for me. It’s not about a class being large or small; it’s about having structures and activities in place to support the size and the goals. I would imagine many of us have been in awful grad seminars with 8 people…not the size, but the means of participation. Thinking of learning in terms of the “epic” gave our writing program a mechanism to bring all of these conceptual elements together.
- In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that the best online and face to face games, far from being transitory bits of meaningless fun, create deep learning experiences in which players voluntarily work together within a set of rules to establish goals and give each other practical feedback on their performance (also see Gee, 2007). In these scenarios, she argues, the satisfaction we receive from carving out meaningful moments of play, and perhaps being successful, form strong bonds between us and other people that enable future action. What McGonigal calls “epic scales” are those moments in which we recognize that the projects and actions we engage in and environments where they take place seem “bigger than ourselves” (p. 98).
- While many examples are drawn from online games like Portal and Halo, her argument extends to crowdsourcing and “real life” applications like Foursquare, or distributed computing platforms that create protein-folding simulations to search for actual cures to Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease. Epic scales provide contexts for action as a form of service to these larger goals, encourage wholehearted participation, and—perhaps most relevant to our goals in designing classrooms—provide mechanisms for the exchange of expertise. When systems are designed to help people share their interests and goals, she argues, people can be called upon and are motivated to do work they excel at.
- It may be that no writing course can ever match the intensity of a campus wide tournament of Humans vs. Zombies or the sheer scale of World of Warcraft. But in terms of writing instruction, the language helps us think through new ways to make large classes feel intimate and to encourage small groups to feel empowered. This attention to games as authentic spaces for learning focuses us in on the issues of participation and community that often fail to take root in college classrooms.
- Our most recent “course” actually grew out of barren soil. In 2010, the California State University system (comprised of 23 campuses) received an unfunded mandate from the Chancellor’s office asking all the campuses to create programs, course, activities for incoming freshmen in need of remediation.
- A couple of things about many of us who work in composition and literacy: we are not fans of “remediation.” Mainly, the testing that leads to these claims is not a good indicator or who might need support. All writers need support. All of us can use help particularly when we move into new genres (grant writing...anyone). We believe that students should be doing the work of college in college, particularly the literacy work of college. You have to be in the community of practice that uses literacy in particular ways, remember. And even if we did, the mandate requires 15 hours in the summer…not sure what we can do with literacy in 15 hours. And last blow: students have to pay for it: $182. We resisted. We wrote memos and position statements. And all of us just finished our third year running early start programs. For the first two years and this last summer, we ran a two-week online course for Early Start. I decided to go a little rogue in the efforts. So last spring, I took my 400 level course for students who want to be writing mentors in our program—mainly juniors and seniors and some grad students—and asked them if they would be interested in designing a version of Early Start with me.
- I showed my writing mentors—these juniors, seniors, and grad students, Rafi Santos Ignite talk from DML 2012. He connects hacking and maker culture. And he talks about hacking the ideologies that are built into to digital platforms. And he, and Max Tempkin—the designer of CAH and Humans V Zombies, both talk about baking in ideologies that matter to us in game and education design.
- The students read McGonigal and a ton of resources on game design. We played games, we made games, we backward designed games, we gave quick presentations on design
- And when we were ready to start designing Epic, on the white board I wrote one goal and we rewrote it each day of class: “make it not teh suck” After about 5 weeks of learning theory and theories in tutoring writing, the 25 students who had read voraciously in game theory created Early Start: EPIC.
- Still trying to name the thing we made: Quest-based, sort of an alternative reality game in that the game was woven into activities students were already participating in on campus, not very good at the storytelling part of ARG, not voluntary in many ways like games should be to play, options for mobile portion of the game through Tale Blazer app, so sort of Augmented Reality components… Number one thing that keeps students in college is connections—to peers and campus. Peer connections that are academic and not simply social. Could we help them make those connections through a course that had an emphasis on play? We also thought about literacy very broadly, as connected to identity…develop “ways of being” that matter to college success. The mentors interviewed and surveyed freshmen, and they thought through their own recent college entry, and thought about what they “wished they’d known.” We borrowed from Lave & Wenger and asked “what does it take to move from newcomer to old timer on our campus—what makes a student successful?” And how might we create quests that embodied those ways of being and valued campus ideologies?
- Example Twitter and Facebook posts follow.
- Then, when they got to campus—two days before start of fall semester—they continued on quests. Eventually, they used the quests as data collection resources and put them together to create resources for other incoming students. Examples are on the EPIC website
- I had said to the mentors early on that my hope was we would create something so awesome and meaningful that other incoming freshmen, who were not required to do early start, would say “how did you get to do that” And they’d answer, “I failed the English Placement test.” Kewl.
- When I speak with colleagues, you often hear people talk about all the constraints: I can’t do that at my site for x,y,z reason. And of course there is truth here: nothing is transportable in wholesale from one site to another, even if the department of ed would like us to believe that by highlighting best practices. But, we can think about the affordances of the designs we share. What can we use? What frameworks can be borrow from that could drive the particular details of the practices at our local sites? How can we take shitty mandates and constraints and hack them—do what we want anyway? Ask forgiveness not permission, show the awesome work students did after the fact, and convince administration and policy makers that students are brilliant once we decide to get out of the way.
- TL:DR Just do the (epic) thing.