What I Learned Today

When are you most engaged and inspired to learn something new? Thomas and Brown, in their book “A New Culture of Learning,” argue that play is a powerful setting, and motivator, and facilitator for learning. Sitting down to a new board game, exploring an online MMORPG, experimenting to find the best baseball swing — these are all settings that push you to integrate new information and also to explore the limits of what’s possible. What happens if I click there?

These are also settings that seem incompatible with the form that our public education currently takes.

Thomas and Brown sing the praises of the “new culture of learning,” which they define as unlimited access to information (i.e., the Internet) combined with an environment that allows for “unlimited agency to build and explore within boundaries.” Agency enables exploration and discovery, and the boundaries serve as spurs to imagination. Similarly, constrained art forms like the sonnet or haiku can provide boundaries that inspire new creations. Thomas and Brown also use the word “culture” deliberately, and not in the sense that probably first came to mind: think bacterial culture in a petri dish, something that grows through cultivation.

And in Chapter 2, something more radical emerges.

“For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur,” Thomas and Brown assert.

Wow. Yes! If a teacher is absent from the classroom, we assume that learning grinds to a halt, and that it is only through the teacher’s intervention that the students will learn anything. Yet a moment’s consideration raises a multitude of counter-examples. Have you ever read a wikipedia article out of curiosity? Watched a Youtube video to learn how to make mitered borders on a quilt? Tinkered with Legos to see how tall a tower you can build? Tried a new route to work to determine whether it’s a shorter commute? Invented a variation on a recipe? Read this blog to Learn Something New?

We are learning all the time, with or without teachers.

Thomas and Brown characterize our current view of learning as “mechanistic” in that “learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered” in which “the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can.” That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, the idea of an organized curriculum, a progression of easy to hard, sounds quite attractive to me. But it rests on some unstated assumptions that just might not be valid:

1. That all knowledge *can* be organized in a logical series of steps. Is this true of every field?
2. That the same organization of knowledge works equally well for everyone.
3. That knowledge doesn’t change much over time. (Otherwise the curriculum would be in constant need of revision.)

Thomas and Brown discuss #3 in their book. The first two are mine, and I think both assumptions are suspect.

What can we do instead?

Thomas and Brown suggest viewing learning in terms of an “environment” (the boundaries mentioned before). The learning culture emerges from the environment in which people operate, and they learn through engagement in that world (not by being externally instructed). Learners are not constantly required to prove that they “get it” but can instead embrace what they don’t know and keep asking questions and exploring.

I am reminded of the critique of education levied by Sir Ken Robinson in 2010, brilliantly illustrated by RSA Animate (“Changing Education Paradigms”):

It gets especially relevant around 6:30 when he discusses the historical evolution of our approach to public education and how influenced it has been by the industrial revolution. What was most striking to me was the point about how we educate children in “batches” by age. Really, does this ever make any sense?

Moving to an emphasis on the environment and play opens up entirely new approaches to learning. It also places more responsibility on the learner: to be active, to explore, to prioritize his or her own learning. This is a natural outcome to reach as an adult, free of the pressures of obligatory schooling — yet so often we are consumed with life maintenance that we do not carve out time for learning or for play.

Thomas and Brown suggested that this is, or at least has been, a natural shift in priorities. They argue that historically, as children grew up, the world seemed more stable with age. People figured out how the world worked, and then could settle into a mostly static view of the world and the best strategies for interacting with it. But they argue that today, the amount of change (driven by technological advances) renders this strategy less successful.

It’s certainly not new to claim that today’s citizens experience a higher rate of change than those in the past. However, this is the first time I’ve seen a prescription for coping that encourages, effectively, more play. “Embrace change,” Thomas and Brown advocate. Open your arms, and your mind, to a rich environment that provides endless chances for learning and growth.

I will quibble slightly with one of their claims. I don’t think it’s uniquely the Internet that makes this kind of endless learning possible. Some people manufacture a learning environment wherever they go, constantly wondering “how does that work?” and “why does it look that way?” and “could I make one myself?” It’s all already there, anytime you want it.

Play on!

Seth Fiegerman argues that the experience of aging in Facebook is a more trying one for those who joined it in their 20s than for the rest of us who joined after we’d already experienced an adult life. Younger users are “forever connected to people from the past” (even if they’d rather not be) while “older users [have] a powerful tool to reconnect with those they’ve long since lost touch with.”

He describes these younger users as being burdened by a growing balance of tenuous yet tenacious “friend” connections. These are not your true, close, cherished friends in the present, but rather those people who you once attended class with or met on a bus ride or used to date. “Before Facebook,” he argues, when the reason for regular connection and conversation was gone, those people would naturally and gently fade into the background and out of your life. But with Facebook, you must take “an unnatural and severe action” to “make a conscious choice to delete a person from your life.”

There might be a reason that Facebook cheerily informs you when someone sends you a Friend Request, but provides no announcement when you are Unfriended. Or maybe that makes it worse, as you are left to discover your change in stature serendipitously, when you return to to a Once-Friend’s photo album and realize that you can’t access it anymore.

What’s unnatural and severe, I think, is not the conscious act of managing your friendships, but rather the Facebook concept of a Friend. Being connected to someone on Facebook encompasses a broad range of relationship types, not just friendship. It can indicate a networking connection with a work colleague, a shared hobby, an interest in dating, a current partner, an ex. In many cases, you might accept a Friend request out of social obligation rather than any personal interest. That doesn’t happen in real life, because we don’t go around distributing Friend status badges for people to wear. Friendship is permitted to be fluid and continuously valued rather than a discrete state that one attains.

Google+ made an effort to recognize these nuances by creating “circles” (friend lists) that had names other than “friend” (like Acquaintances). I’m not sure this solves the problem, either. It’s still fundamentally categorical, a constraint that seems to flow from the concept of a social network as a, well, network. Each pair of people either do or do not have a link between them.

A different possible refinement would be to create links between everyone and allow them to have a real value, or weight, associated with them that indicates the strength of the connection (which might be zero). These weights could be used by a social networking site to automatically filter that overwhelming news feed from all of your connections so that the highly weighted links provide more of the traffic you see. While perhaps more flexible, this approach also has problems: who wants to spend hours specifying the degree of friendship they have with each of their connections? And updating it as life progresses? What would they get out of it?

I also find it interesting that Seth, who lumps himself in to the “under 30” crowd plagued by these lingering ghost connections and an inability to Unfriend them, characterizes anyone over 30 as blithely free of such constraints. Those over 30 instead use Facebook to RE-connect with people they’ve lost track of over the years. “It’s where you rediscover old friends, coworkers and estranged family members,” but “the thrill is often short-lived because these relationships have been dormant too long.” Instead of too many past-their-expiration-date connections, the over-30 crowd is unable to jump-start the ones they miss most.

Both experiences can be traced to a common root cause: the ease with which you can Friend someone. It is easy to connect, socially awkward to disconnect, and fatiguing and impractical (in many cases) to resurrect an old connection that no longer exists in your non-Facebook life. And yet I wonder how differently these social phenomena would play out if we simply changed the name of a social link. What if you Bookmarked people instead of Friending them? That would constitute a one-way link with minimal (or no) pressure for reciprocity, and it wouldn’t have the social connotations of a “friend.” It would allow you to keep up and share with people of interest. And for those leery of pruning even their bookmarks, it would be easy to implement a time-decay rule that gently and silently removed bookmarks that didn’t see enough use.

Another option, of course, is to sign off of Facebook and go play board games, see a movie, make dinner, or otherwise hang out with… your friends.

James Paul Gee, a professor of Reading, decided to explore the world of video games. He picked up a copy of “The New Adventures of the Time Machine” (inspired by the work of H. G. Wells) and was surprised by its difficulty. “Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex […] and yet enjoy it,” he wrote in a paper titled “Good video games and good learning”. As an educator, he wondered what elements of these video games could be used to improve learning in a more conventional school setting.

Gee identified 16 learning principles that good (effective, successful) games use. I won’t go into all 16 here, but some are interesting to consider, especially in terms of how they might be adopted in schools or universities.

He posits that good games require the player to take on a new identity, inspiring “an extended commitment of self.” The game is a world that you at least partially inhabit. It’s personal. Learning in a class can be the same way, asking you to commit to see the world through the eyes of a physicist or a francophone or a mathematician. Personal investment changes your experience radically from memorizing facts to actively seeing the world in a new way.

Another important principle of effective games is that they give players the opportunity to experiment, and possibly fail, with a relatively low cost. Even if your player dies, you can restart the game. In traditional school environments, failure is often much more public and much more costly: feedback may come in the form of “that’s wrong” instead of “try again.”

Gee also posits that good games are “pleasantly frustrating” in that they keep you within, but right at the edge of, your “regime of competence.” Tasks are doable but challenging. I think this is my favorite regime in which to live, period: challenged but able to make some progress!

A final principle that caught my eye was what Gee calls “well-ordered problems.” Good games give you a series of problems to solve that provide a learning progression: easier tasks first that lead to more difficult ones. In the field of machine learning, some researchers have been studying the best way to present examples to a learner (human or machine). One theory that matches with Gee’s observation is called “curriculum learning”: start with easy examples and progress to more subtle or nuanced ones. Humans tend to use this kind of approach, which perplexes some machine learning researchers since it is provably better to first show the hardest or most ambiguous examples first, because they give you the most information. For example, if I wanted to teach you how to tell whether a child is tall enough to ride a roller coaster, I might point to a boy who is 35 inches tall and say “he’s too short,” and then point to a girl who is 36 inches tall and say “she’s tall enough.” Curriculum learning instead would give you examples like “that man who is 6’4″ is tall enough” and “the 21-inch infant is too short” and only gradually work their way to the harder examples closer to the threshold. However, many learning problems aren’t easy to map to a linear scale in which you just want to pinpoint a threshold, and in those cases, curriculum learning seems to be more natural and more effective.

What else can we learn about learning from how games are designed? Do game designers know something that educators don’t? Not necessarily — but their incentive structure is different, which may lead them to create new kinds of playing, and learning, environments that educators can borrow from.

All games are not created equal, and neither are all gamers. Ito and Bittanti, in chapter 5 of “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media,” identify five different “genres of game playing” that describe different motivations and modes of play. They are:

1. Killing time: playing a game while you wait or because you’re bored or want to be distracted (e.g., crossword puzzles, solitaire, Minesweeper)
2. Hanging out: playing a game to connect with other people socially (e.g., party games, board games, Rock Band, bridge)
3. Recreational gaming: playing a game for the sake of the game (e.g., first-person shooters or really anything you get immersed in)
4. Organizing and mobilizing: playing a game that’s grown into a formal structure (e.g., being the dungeonmaster for a D&D game or a guild leader in MMORPGs)
5. Augmented game play: playing a game and creating additional “paratexts” around the game, such as fan sites, hacks, walk-throughs, cheat codes, or a focus on the creative element of the game (player customization, campaign design, etc.).

Player investment in (and passion for) the game increases along the list, from killing time up to augmented game play.

While some games seem to associate directly with a particular game playing genre, there isn’t a strict mapping. For example, players can enjoy World of Warcraft in any of these modes, depending on their interest in the game, their technical prowess, and their current mood. Bridge can be played socially, with ample table talk, or in a cutthroat competitive mode in which silence reigns outside of the bids. A player’s current genre might even change during the course of a game playing session.

Reflecting on my own game playing, I am not sure I have a particular preferred genre. The time I spend playing games today is limited, due to other demands on my time, and therefore limited to the “hanging out” genre (occasional board games or video games with friends). But during my first year in college, I discovered online communal role-playing games (the text-based predecessors of today’s MMORPGs), and that experience ranged over most of the five genres.

I was quickly captivated by the Pern-based games in which you could create a character who had the chance to be chosen as a dragonrider — every Anne McCaffrey fan’s dream. I spent hours developing my character and role-playing with other people on the game. I was bowled over by the idea of a bunch of people getting together to effectively write a collaborative novel in realtime (!).

Rather than progressing from a social to technical to creative motivation (as suggested if you view the genre list as a progression), it was the creative element that drew me in first (augmented game play). My interest in programming inspired me to learn how to create custom interactive in-game objects. As I developed friendships with other players, the social aspect (hanging out) became more present; sometimes the role-playing would taper off while the players engaged in “out of character” discussions on communication channels that weren’t part of the in-game play but were still social. As my investment and expertise grew, I became more involved in the organization part of the game: helping run large-scale events (such as dragon egg Hatchings) and creating names and descriptions for the next batch of dragons. Eventually, real life constraints placed limits on how much time I could invest in the game, and I moved on to other things.

I would not be surprised if most people find their engagement with any particular game to move between genres as I’ve described here. Over time, what interests you most about a game (and keeps you coming back) may change, due to your own changes in expertise, or a simple desire for variety.

How would you categorize the way you play your favorite game?

Perhaps you have seen this iconic photograph, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968:

It is an arresting view: our Earth, seen from the outside. But not just from afar: from another place in space. The lunar landscape gives it a certain awe-inspiring context. How small our Earth looks against the vast stretch of the lunar horizon!

Yet despite its beauty, this photo has irritated me for some time. It is titled Earthrise, a poetic and yet almost entirely misleading name.

How many people have seen this photo and come away thinking that the Earth rises on the Moon?

How many still think that?

The Earth was not rising. The Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, which means that it always points the same face at the Earth. From the Moon’s perspective, the Earth would hang at a fixed point in the sky, depending where you stood on the Moon’s surface. (From the far side, you would never see it.)

However, the astronauts were not standing on the surface but instead in orbit around the Moon, so from their perspective, the Earth came shooting up over the horizon, an artificial Earthrise.

BUT WAIT!

That’s not quite right. Today I learned that the Earth isn’t entirely stationary in the lunar sky, because it (the Moon) librates (wobbles) a little bit back and forth, which makes the Earth appear to move slowly, subtly in the sky, over the course of a month. Perhaps more interesting to the observer is the fact that, from the Moon, the Earth goes through phases (as shown above).

China’s Yutu rover recently captured its own “Earthrise” shot, which includes the lander, and the Earth in a different phase:

Orbital geometry aside, these photos are just breathtaking. And the idea of our blue planet rising, sailing overhead, and then setting is such a dramatic and captivating one! But not reality. As you now know.