Playing LBP with my 3rd Grader

One day last week my third grader got out of school early due to winter weather. I brought her into work with me, and down to Ruby's office where she got to play LittleBigPlanet (LBP) on the HASTAC research PlayStation3. She'd never played on a PlayStation before--her only gaming experience was with the Wii and some American Girl and PopTropica games on the internet. It was interesting for me to watch her learn and play. It was fun for her to play a game she'd heard about from a bunch of her (boy) friends. (In fact, she only has one girl friend who she knows plays on a PS--and she has an older brother.)

We talked together about the experience, below. I'm "M" (me) and she's "D" (daughter).

M: So, what did you think of LBP?
D: I thought it was really fun and cool. It was a whole new experience.

M: Your Sackgirl was pretty adventurous looking. Did you think of her as a character acting in the game or was she you?
D: I just put together crazy things. I thought of her as me, sort of. But sometimes she was someone else.

M: How about when you got stuck and got frustrated? You killed yourself so you could continue with the game.
D: I thought it got pretty frustrating, but once I got to this thing where you have to grab and that was pretty hard. So I killed myself then and went back to my pod.

[As her mother, this concerned me, I have to say. I think it would be good for there to be an eject button or something like that so that she didn't have to kill her Sackgirl to start over. I don't really like that message. In fact, it made me very uncomfortable. This is exactly the sort of gaming aspect that many parents don't like and won't buy into. It's not super violent, but she's 8 years old. There's no violence that's good violence at that age (at any age?).]

M: What was your favorite part about LBP?
D: I liked where you could get points, and talk to people and do cool things when you got the points. But I also liked when the people talked to you and told you clues so you could put the clues together like a puzzle.

M: Do you think you would've been able to figure out the things they told you on your own?
D: Maybe. When I had to dress Charlie, one of the guys told me I had to dress him. So I had some sneakers and a torso, so I put those on Charlie then the bridge fell down. So I sorta had to figure out some stuff on my own. It was like puzzle pieces.

M: What did you think of earning prizes and stickers and stuff?
D: My favorite part was when you earn stickers, cuz you had a long line of bubbles that you bang into.

M: Do you think you learned anything?
D: Not really. It was fun and I sorta learned how to grab things, but that's not exactly educational.

M: Would you like to play games like this even if there were some educational parts to it?
D: Yeah. It would be still fun. It wouldn't be as fun, but it would still be pretty fun. So I take that as a yes.

D: I thought LBP was really fun. It was cool how you could stick things almost everywhere and how you had a poppit that could pop out. At first it got really frustrating but then it got really easy. Once it got easy I moved on to the next level but that level was HARD.

M: I'm sure that playing LBP would be even more fun for D if she were playing with her friends. And I can see how that might bring interaction and collaboration into the game in ways that were nonexistent as she played by herself. I hope that we can bring a friend or two in to play with her sometime soon, and if so, we'll write about that.

I also think it's telling that when I asked her about whether she thought she'd learned anything, she had already positioned "learning," "not learning" and "things educational" in a very specific category, and "fun" wasn't in that category. Meeting challenges doesn't count as learning in her current paradigm. This is exactly the problem that our competition addresses: How can we make it so that learning is not segregated to specific subjects and situations, but is more integral to everyday life? And maybe even fun.

2010 competition kicks off, featuring The White House, Sony, EA, and YOU

Today HASTAC re-launched the website for the Digital Media and Learning Competition (dmlcompetition.net) with the long-awaited details of the 2010 Competition! This competition builds on two successful years of supporting projects that advance and DO participatory learning.

Each year, the competition addresses different themes. In 2008, 17 projects won Innovation or Knowledge-Networking Awards. In 2009, 19 projects won Innovation or Young Innovators awards. This year's theme is Reimagining Learning and has brought some exciting new players to the table. We have been given the opportunity to participate in National Lab Day - part of the White House's Educate to Innovate Initiative - on our Learning Lab Designers awards. And we're also collaborating with videogame makers Sony and EA on the Game Changers awards.

Another new element of this year's competition is you, dear reader. We will host public comments on the applications as soon as people begin submitting them in January, and in May we will invite you to vote on your favorites to select the winners of the People's Choice Awards. (See our timeline for more details about this process.)

We'll be writing more on this blog about learning labs, game changers, and participatory learning. So keep reading, and visit the re-launched DMLcompetition.net, to learn more about this year's competition. Put on your thinking caps and start developing ideas now. The initial application period will be open from January 7th to 15th. We can't wait to see what you will do!

Making as learning

Originally posted on Cathy N. Davidson's Cat in the Stack blog on HASTAC.org

I've been thinking about the ways we learn when we make things and how differerent that experience is from learning in order to answer exam questions (especially multiple choice) about things, subjects, or ideas that other people have made.   What is most different is that, when you make something you learn about failure and from failure.   When you "get the answer wrong," you fail.   Therein lies all the difference.

Whether you are making a robot, a sweater, a poem, a research paper, a mod of a video game, or a donut,  the first time you do it you draw from and build upon a range of similar experiences, some of them successful, some of them not.  Trial-and-error is part of the process but so is your own, personal toolkit.   Some of those tools might be actual, physical, material tools.  Others are bodily repertoires of gestures or words or sounds or experiences.  And still others are histories of past successes and failures, some of which have direct relevance to what you are making, some of which are important simply because they remind you that you survive and even thrive after failure--and success does not stop the process of learning. In all of these settings, actually doing the process becomes a learning lab, a place of experimentation and process and exploration and (dare I say it?) fun.

Tests Hamper Teaching Students to Think Like Einstein

by Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University

Reblogged from the Durham Herald Sun, December 11, 2009

I often lecture or blog about grading, arguing that the way we now assign grades is an antiquated system that may have worked well for the Industrial Age but that undercuts what is valuable, exciting, or potentially useful for interactive thinking in the Digital Age. I’m often critical of so called "standards-based education" such as No Child Left Behind, with its reduction of evaluation and assessment to standardized testing.

But I’m actually criticizing here a much broader way of thinking that reduces the process of thinking to “a result,” even to “the best result chosen from among a select number of choices” (i.e., multiple choice exams).

That concept of grading seems the exact opposite of critical and daring thinking, and inconducive to the kind of integrative, creative, innovative thinking our era demands, in all fields from the arts to the theoretical sciences and engineering.

HASTAC Network Joins White House Campaign

This piece was reblogged from The Herald Sun, http://heraldsun.com/bookmark/5030564/article-HASTAC
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A network of educators and digital innovators is playing a role in the White House campaign to encourage students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The HASTAC network will administer the third-annual Digital Media and Learning Competition.

The competition will award $2 million in support of participatory learning experiences that incorporate STEM principles.

The competition launches Monday and winners will be announced in spring 2010.

HASTAC (an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) was founded and is primarily operated at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke and the University of California Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Duke's Cathy N. Davidson, who co-founded HASTAC with David Theo Goldberg of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, said, "We are proud that an interdisciplinary humanities-inspired network like HASTAC has a leadership role in administering the Digital Media and Learning Competition. We are honored to be so central to President Obama's vision for education in the 21st century."

Awards will be given in two categories:

- 21st Century Learning Lab Designers will receive awards for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through STEM-based activities.

- Game Changers awards recognize creative new games or additions to Sony's LittleBigPlanet(TM). These games and game expansions should offer young people engaging game play experiences that incorporate principles of science, technology, engineering and math.

The HASTAC competition is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the University of California, in collaboration with Duke University.

On the Web: For more information about the competition, visit dmlcompetition.net.

Digital media = engaged, civic minded kids

Just one reason we are so proud of our Digital Media and Learning Competition winners and their participatory learning projects?  Engagement with digital media makes kids productive offline citizens!

We can't wait to see what the next round of the Competition brings. In the meantime, check out the great Digital Media and Learning Competition projects that are doing their part to encourage engaged, excited and civic-minded students!

From the MacArthur Spotlight Blog:

Research by education professor Joe Kahne shows online experiences—such as participation on fan sites—can help make kids more active offline citizens.

Joe Kahne, professor of education at Mills College and director of the school’s Civic Engagement Research Group, has studied the connection between students’ participation with digital media and their level of civic engagement. He finds that kids who participate in community activities online are more likely to later get involved with civic actions offline, even if their online activities appear to be only social or for fun.

Kahne notes that young people who use digital media are picking up skills on how to find, assess and share information. New media provides opportunities for young people to be active participants—as opposed to old media, such as newspapers, which provide learning opportunities but no way to immediately share or add input.

More good news: Kahne also found that participation in online communities doesn’t isolate or distract young people from other forms of social life.

Joe Kahne on Civic Participation Online and Off from Spotlight on Vimeo.

21st Century Literacies by Cathy N. Davidson, reblogged from www.hastac.org

I've spent the morning rereading some of Howard Rheingold's ideas on 21st century literacies, the skills required to navigate the digital age. Attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption of information are the key skills he discusses. Where do we teach those skills? How do we learn them? For starters, we learn them from reading Rheingold. I highly recommend his blogs for the San Francisco Chronicle Check out Twitter Literacies http://tiny.cc/vvD8s and Attention Literacies http://tiny.cc/MHBfS

Besides being the author of the classic Smart Mobs, Howard was a winner of our 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition. He's a master at participatory learning and he built a Social Media Classroom for his project. You can check that out here:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com/