My hope is that educators take the time to really explore what games can offer in the classroom – not because games are going to “save” or “revolutionize” education, but that they offer a metaphor of what learner-centered education can be.

By learning more about games, educators can decide for themselves if a particular game is something they want to introduce into their classroom because it supports their beliefs about learning, not because it’s all the rage. Or, they can learn how games carefully balance frustration with success to create engaging challenges.

Finally, I always say that the best way to bring games into the classroom is to let students design their own games. It puts the agency even further into the learner camp. Playing games is fun, but you are always playing by someone else’s rules. Making your own game means that you are in charge, and that’s where real learning can happen.

Games in Education Resources

Sylvia

This Education Week article summarizes several research studies on “stability bias” – where people confuse things that are easy to process with things that are easy to remember.

The stability bias works both ways: Not only do students give too little credit to effective study strategies that feel more difficult, but they can give more weight to ineffective strategies that make content feel easier to learn.

It’s like assuming that food that is easy to eat is the healthiest.

Sylvia

So I’d like to get more specific about what I think is wrong about the Khan Academy approach by writing about things I see as wrong with the way we teach math in the US.

No matter if we agree or not about Khan Academy, I’m fairly certain we can agree math learning is not going as well as we’d like (to say the least.) Too many people are convinced by the system that they “hate math”, and even students who do well (meaning, can get decent test scores) are often just regurgitating stuff for the test, knowing they can safely forget it shortly afterward.

There is plenty of blame to go around… locked-in mile-wide inch-deep curriculum, focus on paper and pencil skills, lack of real world connections, assessments that are the tail that wag the dog of instruction, a culture that accepts “bad at math” as normal, teacher education programs that have don’t have enough content area specialization, … you can probably add to this list.

I can’t tackle all of these. But if you are interested, I’d like to share my thoughts about Khan Academy and a few epic math myths that are relevant to a discussion of the Khan Academy. In America, these myths are so pervasive that even people who were damaged by the way they were taught themselves accept them and insist that their children be taught using exactly the same methods.

I think these myths explain both the widespread acceptance of Khan Academy as a “revolution” and also why in reality it’s not going to change anything.

Myth: Learning math is about acquiring a sequential set of skills (and we know the sequence)
I think people have a mental image of math that looks something like a ladder. You learn how to add single digit numbers – rung one. You learn 2 digit addition – rung 2. You learn 3 digit addition – rung 3. In this model, you get to rung 3 by throughly learning rung 1 and then rung 2.

The myth continues with the idea that the march up the ladder goes faster if we tell children exactly how to do the problems step-by-step. In the language of math instruction, these step-by-step processes are called algorithms. Some kids “get it”, some don’t, but we accept that as a normal way that learning happens, and “help” the ones who don’t get it by drilling them harder in the step-by-step process, or devising additional tricks and supports to help them “remember” how to solve the problem.

If they don’t learn (meaning pass tests), we take this as evidence that they haven’t practiced the steps well enough, and prescribe more of the same.

Khan Academy plays perfectly into this myth. Here are a convenient set of videos – you just find the one you need, push play and the missing rung in your mental math ladder is filled in.

A corollary to this myth is that we can test students for these discrete math skills, see which “rungs” are missing, and then fix that problem with more instruction and practice on that specific skill.

Let’s diagnose how we think about learning a simple math skill
When we teach 2-digit addition, we immediately introduce the algorithm of “carrying”. You should know, though, that the U.S. form of carrying is just one of many addition shortcuts, not handed down on stone tablets. It’s not used world-wide, nor is it something that people naturally do when adding numbers. But it’s cast in concrete here, so we teach it, then we practice that “skill”. With our ladder model in mind, if a child can’t answer the 2-digit problems correctly you do two things: 1) Do more practice on the rung under it, and 2) do more practice in the algorithm, in this case, carrying.

The problem is that if a student has simply memorized the right answers to rung 1 without real numeracy, reviewing carrying will not increase that understanding. In fact, it will reinforce the memorization – because at least they are getting SOMETHING right. They are like the broken watch that’s right twice a day. This issue gets worse as the math gets more complex – the memorization will not be generalizable enough to solve more complex problems.

A different vision of learning

“Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows”. “Papert’s principle” described in Marvin Minsky’s Society of the Mind.

If this is true, and since these administrative skills are not sequential, it makes it less likely that we really learn math in a sequential way. I think we’ve all had similar experiences, where a whole bunch of stuff suddenly makes sense.

This different vision of how people learn is called “constructivism“. It’s a theory of learning that says that people actively construct new knowledge by combining their experiences with what they already know. The “rungs” are completely different for each learner, and not in a specific order. In fact, rungs aren’t a very good metaphor at all.

“…constructivism focuses our attention on how people learn. It suggests that math knowledge results from people forming models in response to the questions and challenges that come from actively engaging math problems and environments – not from simply taking in information, nor as merely the blossoming of an innate gift. The challenge in teaching is to create experiences that engage the student and support his or her own explanation, evaluation, communication, and application of the mathematical models needed to make sense of these experiences.” – Math Forum

Learning theory? What’s the point?
We need to talk about learning theory because there are different ones at play here. And to be complete, we are also going to need to talk about teaching theory, or pedagogy, along the way. Constructivism doesn’t mandate a specific method of teaching, but is most often associated with open-ended teaching, constructionism, project-based learning, inquiry learning, and many other models. Most of these teaching models have at the heart an active, social view of learning, with the teacher’s main role as that of a facilitator.

However, the teaching theory underlying most of American math education is instructionism, or direct instruction – the idea that math is best taught by explicitly showing students how to solve math problems, then having students practice similar problems. Direct instruction follows when you believe that math is made up of sequential skills. Most American textbooks use this model, and most American teachers follow a textbook.

This is important distinction when talking about Khan Academy. Khan Academy supports teaching by direct instruction with clear (and free!) videos. If that’s your goal, you’ve found the answer…. but wait…

Is clarity enough?
Well, maybe not. Even if you believe in the power of direct instruction, watch this video from Derek Muller, who wrote his PhD thesis on designing effective multimedia for physics education. Really, if you are pondering the Khan Academy question, you must watch this video.

“It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven’t learned anything. The apparent reason for the discrepancy is misconceptions. Students have existing ideas about scientific phenomena before viewing a video. If the video presents scientific concepts in a clear, well illustrated way, students believe they are learning but they do not engage with the media on a deep enough level to realize that what was is presented differs from their prior knowledge. There is hope, however. Presenting students’ common misconceptions in a video alongside the scientific concepts has been shown to increase learning by increasing the amount of mental effort students expend while watching it.” - Derek Muller, Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos

Derek makes an interesting point - clarity may actually work against student understanding. Videos that slide too smoothly into an explanation do not give a student a way to process their misconceptions and integrate prior knowledge. The very thing that makes the videos so appealing – Khan’s charisma, sureness, and clarity may lull the viewer into comfortable agreement with the presentation without really absorbing anything (Research references and Dr. Muller’s PhD thesis on this subject)

Hooks, not ladders
This goes back to my original point. People learn by reorganizing what they already have in their head and adding new information that makes sense to them. If they don’t have a “hook” for new knowledge, it won’t stick. The tricky part is, though, that these hooks have to be constructed by the learner themselves.

Wishful thinking about downloading new information to kids is just that – wishful thinking.

There is no doubt that Khan Academy fills a perceived need that something needs to be fixed about math instruction. But at some point, when you talk about learning math, you have to define your terms. If you are a strict instructionist – you are going to love Khan Academy. If you are a constructivist, you are going to find fault with a solution that is all about instruction. So any discussion of Khan Academy in the classroom has to start with the question, how do YOU believe people learn?

I have more to say about Khan Academy and math education in the US — this post turned into 4 parts!

Part 1 – Khan Academy and the mythical math cure (this post)
Part 2 – Khan Academy – algorithms and autonomy
Part 3 – Don’t we need balance? and other questions
Part 4 – Monday… Someday

Stay tuned – Sylvia

My context for these posts: I fully admit I’m not an expert in math or math teaching, just an interested observer of K-12 education in the U.S. As president of Generation YES, I have unique opportunities to see lots of classrooms in action and talk to lots of teachers. It means I get to see patterns and similarities in classrooms all over the country. I don’t intend to do a literature review or extensive research summary in these posts. This comes from my personal experience, my master’s degree in educational technology and draws from a subjective selection of research and sources that have had a deep impact on my thinking about learning. Finally, I am NOT trying to tell teachers what to do. I’m not in your classroom — that would be silly.

This may be old news for some of you, but I just came across a website  - Child Trends that seems like it would be a really useful resource for planning new school programs or for writing grants. It covers research on children in many areas including child health, education, behavior, and more. Although not technology related, often it helps to reach out to other areas of research to justify practices that support technology use with youth.

For example, teaching children about online safety, dealing with cyberbullying and other online risks is not just about teaching technology. And looking to research to find out “what works” to prevent face-to-face bullying or preventing risky behavior means you aren’t reinventing the wheel.

Here are just a couple of their reports on youth development that offer some lessons for the design and support of well-rounded cybersafety programs:

Research Briefs (all PDFs)

• What Works for Acting-Out (Externalizing) Behavior: Lessons from Experimental Evaluations of Social Interventions
• What Works for Promoting and Enhancing Positive Social Skills: Lessons from Experimental Evaluations of Programs and Interventions
• Multiple Responses, Promising Results: Evidence-Based, Nonpunitive Alternatives to Zero Tolerance

The site is well worth exploring further.

Sylvia

Next week I’m keynoting the Learning@School 2011 conference in Rotorua, New Zealand (Feb 23-25).

I’ve been working on my keynote presentation and thought it would be a good idea to test some of it at PETE&C, the wonderful Pennsylvania state educational technology conference. I added a lot of video of student work, students talking about how their leadership opportunities using technology changed their lives, and more. I always like to SHOW the results of student empowerment rather than just TELL about it.

But as my friend Gary Stager likes to say, multimedia is just Latin for “doesn’t work in front of an audience.” Just a few minutes into my presentation my speakers went dead. Now I’m faced with a dilemma – do you stop what you are doing to do tech support in front of 100 people? Do you just skip the video? Do you try to paraphrase what’s happening in your now silent video? ACK!

I asked if anyone in the audience had any speakers – and one woman came up with hers. Success! Wonderful sound….for about 20 seconds. Then the battery light started blinking, the sound faded away and she apologetically said she had forgotten to charge them up. Back to square one. I fumbled my way through the rest of the presentation, hoping my enthusiasm would make up for the lack of real examples.

By the end of the talk I was pretty discouraged, feeling sad that people didn’t see all the marvelous goodies I had to share and thinking about all the things I should have done differently. It was very heartening that several people came up to me and said that the session had been very inspiring and they were already thinking about some new ways to empower their students with technology. I also saw some very nice tweets about the session. Other people cheered me up with stories about much worse technical calamities that they had endured at conferences or in the classroom. There seems to be relief in shared pain!

But bottom line (and new speakers in hand) I am ready to prove the old theater adage completely right. The bad dress rehearsal surely means that my keynote for New Zealand will be great! Kia ora!

Sylvia

We also know that most people talking about learning games these days are talking about video games, since they seem to have extraordinary abilities to enthrall kids for long periods of time. It’s obvious that when you play video games, you learn. You learn rules, you gain experience that allows you to adjust your play for greater success, etc. So when you look at educational games, you have to decide if this translates to the kind of learning that you believe in.

There are lots of educational games that use the vocabulary and look of games to create a game-like experience, except that it’s not really fun (unless you already know the answers.) Dragging or shooting things (the correct fraction, igneous rocks, the matching chemical symbol)  is not a game, it’s a fancy worksheet. So – do you believe worksheets and flashcards are good for learning or busywork? Putting it on a screen with 3D graphics should not change your answer to that question.

Do you believe in practice? Alfie Kohn says, “…practicing doesn’t create understanding.” If you have kids who can’t multiply, or haven’t grasped the concept of fractions, will shooting at the right answers with a galactic flamethrower help?

Do you believe in chocolate-covered broccoli? Do students have to be tricked into thinking that they are doing something fun to learn something important?

So the answer to the question, “what’s a good game for learning ____” – is not so simple as a list. It has to be answered with the question – “what do I believe about learning?” leading the way.

• Do you believe learning is about making meaning – or memorizing?
• Do you believe that learning is natural, or that children have to be tricked and cajoled into learning?
• Do you believe that math is a set of skills – or deeper understanding of concepts?
• Do you believe that faster answers are better answers?
• Do you believe history is memorizing facts – or understanding complex relationships between events?
• Do you believe “time on task” is a good measure of learning?
• Do you believe that vocabulary can and should be learned without context?
• Do you believe that practice creates understanding?

Even when teachers hear this, they say, “but surely practice is good reinforcement”, “if they gain speed and automaticity on easy problems, they can tackle harder ones”,  or “some students are so far behind they really need the practice” – to which I can only quote Alfie Kohn again, “In reality, it’s the children who don’t understand the underlying concepts who most need an approach to teaching that’s geared to deep understanding.  The more they’re given algorithms and told exactly what to do, the farther behind they fall in terms of grasping these concepts.” (my emphasis)

What this says to me is that using practice to reinforce skills may actually undermine a student’s confidence in their own thought process. They may come to look at learning as a rote skill that is supposed to be automatic, not thoughtful, something that if not immediately obvious, is unreachable.

So finding good games, then, means finding games that reinforce the style of learning that you believe in. Which, in a sea of hype about the benefits of educational games, might not be as easy as it looks!

What do you believe about learning?

Sylvia

In this new report, Transforming School Conditions, 14 accomplished teachers from urban districts around the country merge their own experience in high-needs schools with the best current education research, to discuss conditions that are are needed for teachers to teach all students effectively. Their recommendations for school policy and practice offer a guide to developing systems of support for meaningful and sustainable school reform.

Their recommendations highlight the need for any reforms in teaching to come with a high degree of involvement of the affected teachers — not to be delivered from the top down, outside in, or by an imaginary superhero. The changes have to come from those “at the coalface,” as they say in Australia, meaning those who are in the trenches doing the real work.

View TWC Virtual Magazine Report here (With embedded media)

View pdf of the report here

Bill Ferriter and Barnett Barry provide summaries and perspectives on this report if you don’t have time to read the whole thing (but you should!)

Sylvia

What a handy shortcut …and a trap. I’ve posted before about the danger of adopting marketing terms as meaningful language. Marketing terms work because they are emotional shortcuts. Marketeers love these words because they can say more in less time, allowing the consumer to fill in the pesky details of whatever is being sold with what they were hoping to hear.

Look closely, can you see the learning? (Graphic attribution: ocean.flynn)

For educators, this is a cautionary tale about being swept up by what marketeers call an “empty vessel” – a term that evokes strong associations but actually is meaningless. (Think shampoo descriptions like “citreshine”, “silkessence”, etc. – made up words meant that evoke cleanliness, fullness, and the happy feeling of lush, shiny hair, but without any actual science behind it.)

You may have heard that Web 2.0 is “all about” interactivity, ease-of-use, democratizing publishing, collaboration, communication, connectivity, users vs. bosses, new business models vs. old, two-way vs. one-way, personalization, micro-functionality, customization, online apps, the new architecture of society, networking, a platform, innovation, long tails, style, transparency, participation, generative, folksonomy vs. directories, the wisdom of crowds, clouds, self-sorting, finding vs. searching, syndication vs. stickiness, services, an attitude, a network that learns, emergent, in perpetual beta, the collective intelligence, engagement, … should I go on?

All of these are true, and at the same time, none of them are the true single lens to see what Web 2.0 is. Something this malleable, this variable, this divergent, can’t also be meaningful in any one single sense.

And because Web 2.0 has become essentially meaningless, what it means for learning is not known without more details. Talking about Web 2.0 tools and learning is meaningless as well – until you  explain what the tools are, what they are used for, and what the students do with them. It’s just not good enough to talk about how the Luddites don’t get it. Simply using the term “Web 2.0 tools” deliberately obscures the facts — no wonder people don’t get it.

Can this be undone? Can we nag people into proper usage? No, I don’t think so — it’s a done deal. Web 2.0 has reached escape velocity into the orbit of common use, one more empty vessel pretending to have meaning where there is none. It’s too easy, too convenient a shortcut to express the current new new thing. There is no way to wrangle it back down to earthly reality. These terms are typically short-lived, though, as the next new new thing will surely take its place.

Web 3.0 anyone?

Sylvia

Related posts:

• Web 2.0 and historical perspectives
• That’s hot – Web 2.0 and the empty vessel

He talks about some of his old concepts, such as the Hole in the Wall project, where computers were placed in walls in the slums of India, and what happened as the children taught themselves and others how to use them. His concept of “Minimally Invasive Education” is based on these experiments, basically giving children fully functional computers and time to explore questions of interest. The results were amazingly consistent — children can achieve basic competency on computers completely on their own, even when the interfaces were in languages they didn’t understand. It calls into question the whole definition of technology literacy and how we traditionally teach it.

There is more about his projects here in my blog post from 2007 which has videos and links from those earlier experiments, and some thoughts on what this means about the role of the teacher.

Now for an update. Mitra has been busy, designing all kinds of environments to explore the range and limits of what children can do with computers. This new TED talk shows these experiments, future plans and how he sees education as a self-organizing system with learning as emergent behavior.

In it, he talks about his current experiments using a “granny cloud” and Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). Both of these are experiments where students had access to grannies, teachers, and other experts over broadband connections. For example, a “granny” might read aloud to the class, or to an individual student. What might this mean to a classroom where students have no regular teacher, an overburdened teacher, or an undertrained teacher? What might this mean to children who have no classroom at all? Could kiosks be placed in remote village centers?

These experiments, like the One Laptop Per Child project, seek to address the learning needs of the developing world. And we need to meet those needs, to bring education and hope to all people around the world. It is incredibly short-sighted to view education as a competition, where American children “win” only if children in other countries lose. We need people like Sugata Mitra to explore new ways of teaching and learning that can reach everyone on earth, not just those with access to traditional classrooms and good teachers. And as a bonus, in doing so, it provides new insight and raises questions about what conditions and environments really support good learning.

Some might see this research as an attack on teachers, questioning the need for any teacher in any classroom. I do not think this is the case, as I explained in my blog post from 2007 about this concept.

But what do you think?

Sylvia

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed – What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there…“ How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom – but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

• The rewards of serendipity
• Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
• The importance of socializing
• Choice
• Freeing up time constraints
• Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia
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