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Month: April 2011

Epistemic games and situated learning.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Space Invasion

In the last chapter of my hopefully-soon-to-be-complete Ed.D. thesis I’m applying a model of digital literacy to games-based learning in an attempt to see if there’s scope for a ‘digital games literacy’.

One of the leading lights in this field is the Australian academic James Paul Gee who, thankfully, writes in an extremely incisive and lucid fashion. In Are Video Games Good For Learning? he produces this wonderful passage about the ‘just-in-time’ learning and scaffolding provided by good video games (my emphasis):

Video games are external (i.e., not mental) simulations of worlds or problem spaces in which the player must prepare for action and the accomplishment of goals from a particular perspective. Gamers learn to see the world of each different game in a quite different way. But in each case they must learn to see the virtual world in terms of how it will afford the sorts of actions they (where “they” means a melding of themselves and their virtual character) need to take to accomplish their goals (to win in the short and long run).

[…]

While commercial video games often offer worlds in which players prepare for the actions of soldiers or thieves, the question arises as to whether other types of games could let players prepare for action from different perspectives or identities such as a particular type of scientist, political activist, or global citizen, for instance. If games could play this role, they would speak to one of the deeper problems of education, the fact that many students who can pass paper and pencil tests cannot actually apply their knowledge to real problem-solving (Gardner, 1991).

Good video games distribute intelligence (Brown, Collins & Dugid, 1989) between a real-world person and artificially intelligent virtual characters. For example, in Full Spectrum Warrior, the player uses the buttons on the controller to give orders to two squads of soldiers (the game SWAT 4 is also a great equivalent example here). The instruction manual that comes with the game makes it clear from the outset that players, in order to play the game successfully, must take on the values, identities, and ways of thinking of a professional soldier: “Everything about your squad,” the manual explains, “is the result of careful planning and years of experience on the battlefield. Respect that experience, soldier, since it’s what will keep your soldiers alive” (p. 2). In the game, that experience—the skills and knowledge of professional military expertise—is distributed between the virtual soldiers and the real-world player. The soldiers in the player’s squads have been trained in movement formations; the role of the player is to select the best position for them on the field. The virtual characters (the soldiers) know part of the task (various movement formations) and the player must come to know another part (when and where to engage in such formations). This kind of distribution holds for every aspect of professional military knowledge in the game.

By distributing knowledge and skills this way—between the virtual characters (smart tools) and the real-world player—the player is guided and supported by the knowledge built into the virtual soldiers. This offloads some of the cognitive burden from the learner, placing it in smart tools that can do more than the learner is currently capable of doing by him or herself. It allows the player to begin to act, with some degree of effectiveness, before being really competent: “performance before competence.” The player thereby eventually comes to gain competence through trial, error, and feedback, not by wading through a lot of text before being able to engage in activity.

Such distribution also allows players to internalize not only the knowledge and skills of a professional (a professional soldier in this case), but also the concomitant values (“doctrine” as the military says) that shape and explain how and why that knowledge is developed and applied in the world. This suggests an important question for research: whether and how other “professions”—scientists, doctors, government officials, urban planners, political activists (Shaffer, 2004)—could be modeled and distributed in this fashion as a deep form of value-laden learning (and, in turn, learners could compare and contrast different value systems as they play different games).

Shaffer’s (2004; 2005) “epistemic games” already give us a good indication that even young learners, through video games embedded inside a well-organized curriculum, can be inducted into professional practices as a form of value-laden deep learning that transfers to school-based skills and conceptual understandings. However, much work remains to be done here in making the case that the knowledge, skills, and values that good games offer transfer to school and, in particular, to students’ learning in traditional content areas.

(Gee, J.P. (2006) ‘Are Video Games Good For Learning?’ (Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 03/2006, p.174-6)

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stéfan

From my research: New Literacies around the world

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

In case you’ve not subscribed to the RSS feed yet, I’m updating my new blog literaci.es regularly with the outputs from my ongoing Ed.D. work:

‘Digital literacy’ in Norway?

The history and status of digital literacy in Norway is complex. The term is presumed by English-speaking researchers and educators to mean, in a straightforward way, the same in Norwegian as it does in English. However, given the difficulty in translating words such as ‘literacy’ into Norwegian, and words such as ‘kompetanse’ from Norwegian, ‘media literacy’ is a term preferred increasingly to ‘digital literacy’.

 

New literacies (or the lack of them) in Singapore

In this standards-based, heavily-pressured educational culture – a society where, anecdotally, painkillers are stocked alongside exam-preparation books (Bracey, 2008) – it is unsurprising to find the dominant ‘new literacy’ to be Media Literacy. In addition, much of the available research literature into new literacies comes from, or through the lens of, Singapore’s National Institute of Education.

 

Digital Media Literacy in Australia

The seeming Australia-wide agreement on Digital Media Literacy as the accepted form of New Literacies is explained in part by Gibson (2008). He gives an overview of the ‘literacy wars’ in Australia, quoting Ilyana Snyder on how the press and professional journals keep alive the debates between conservatives and progressives (Snyder, 2008). The battleground over different forms and manifestations of traditional (print) literacy allows, suggests Gibson, Digital Media Literacy to show “some promise of a revival of educational optimism” (Gibson, 2008, p.74).

 

The USA: a New Literacies desert?

Due to the standards-based, testing culture in US schools, NYC’s approach is understandable. They have adopted the publication of an authoritative body who, in turn, have reacted to an environment created by US educational policy in the wake of NCLB. Such an environment stresses the importance of being ‘information literate’ and focuses on the traditional basics but, perhaps, at the expense of a cohesive programme for New Literacies.

 

The USA: a New Literacies desert?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This is is the very first draft of a section for my Ed.D. thesis; I’ll be returning to this soon.

The bibliography relating to the referenced literature can be found at http://dougbelshaw.com/thesis (I’ve blogged more about my thesis at http://dougbelshaw.com/blog)

The United States of America (USA) is a large and diverse country. Its approach to New Literacies reflects this, with work carrying on apace in almost every area. In a similar way to the ‘literacy wars’ in Australia taking up most of the space for debate, so in the USA almost everything relating to schools has been framed in the past decade by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This was signed in 2001 by then-President George W. Bush and, ostensibly, aimed at setting high standards increasing the number of measurable outcomes for schools. These outcomes are tied to funding.

There have been many outspoken criticisms of NCLB and, indeed, President Obama announced in early 2011 that NCLB shall be replaced (Obama, 2011). Chapter C Part D of the NCLB Act is entitled ‘Enhancing Education Through Technology’ (EETT) and has as its primary goal improving student achievement through the use of technology. A secondary goal is:

To assist every student in crossing the digital divide by ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade, regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, gender, family income, geographic location, or disability. (US Department of Education, 2001)

What is meant by ‘digital divide’ is not made explicit nor what it would mean for students to be ‘technologically literate’.

Given the federal nature of the USA, some states have different policies relating to technology than others. More forward-thinking states such as California have drafted policies dealing explicitly with New Literacies, citing the European Union as a “leader in digital literacy” (CETF, 2008, p.11). California’s ICT Digital Literacy Framework defines ICT Literacy as

using digital technology, communications tools and/or networks, to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create and communicate information in order to function in a knowledge society. (CETF, 2008, p.5)

The verbs from ‘access’ through to ‘communicate’ form a kind of taxonomy which, the authors of the framework claim, is common to existing national and international frameworks. What the Californian framework certainly does have in common with other countries is a focus upon competition and the economy. The role of individuals in a ‘21st century citizenry’ for example is to “Apply digital literacy skills to access health, e-government, banking and to support healthy environment [sic]” (CETF, 2008, p.14).

Given the federal nature of the education system in the USA there are many and varied definitions New Literacies. President Obama, for example, proclaimed October 2009 to be ‘National Information Literacy Awareness Month’ beginning his proclamation with these words:

Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of  online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of  information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. National Information Literacy Awareness Month highlights the need for all Americans to be adept in the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Information Age. (Obama, 2009)

It is clear from this statement that the higher echelons for educational policy-making in the USA believe the use of technology to be only part of a wider ‘information literacy’. Given that Professor Henry Jenkins, John Seeley Brown and other well-known educators and thinkers in the USA are increasingly focusing upon Digital (Media) Literacy, there is seeming a disconnect between research, practice and policy.

Given this vacuum at the national policy level, individuals, groups, and organisations have stepped in to promote various visions of New Literacies. Marc Prensky, promoter of the digital natives/immigrant dichotomy we shall discuss in Chapter 5, has claimed that ‘Programming is the New Literacy’ (Prensky, 2008) whilst the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a corporate responsibility initiative from organisations such as AOL, Cisco, Microsoft and Apple, in partnership with the US Department of Education.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has representatives of everyone from Lego to the American Association of School Librarians on its Strategic Council and sees its mission as serving as “a catalyst to position 21st century readiness at the center of US K12 education by building collaborative partnerships among education, business, community and government leaders” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004). Importantly, the Partnership has ascertained each state’s 21st century ‘readiness’ as well as putting together a cohesive framework, including information literacy, media literacy and ICT literacy, for adoption by educational institutions. However, they also talk of ‘health literacy,’ ‘financial literacy’ and even ‘entrepreneurial literacy’ – without defining any of these terms. It is clear that these terms are being used within a wide context of their ‘four Cs’ of “critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration; and creativity and innovation” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004).

Given this confusing landscape and the lack of a clear ‘steer’ from national government on New Literacies, states have sought to define their own curricula and assessment tools. New York City’s (NYC) Education Department, for example, have taken the American Association of School Librarians’ Standards for the 21st Century Learner (AASL, no date) and developed it into an ‘Information Fluency Continuum’. This defines the information literacy standards that students should develop by Grades 2, 5, 8 and 12 and are coupled with information literacy benchmark skills assessments for each Grade level.

Due to the standards-based, testing culture in US schools, NYC’s approach is understandable. They have adopted the publication of an authoritative body who, in turn, have reacted to an environment created by US educational policy in the wake of NCLB. Such an environment stresses the importance of being ‘information literate’ and focuses on the traditional basics but, perhaps, at the expense of a cohesive programme for New Literacies.

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