Teaching creative writing with Elegy for a Dead World

In my last post, I made reference to a number of games I consider pedagogical in nature, including Never Alone and Mass Effect. Today, I stumbled across my new favorite example of a pedagogical game: Elegy for a Dead World. The goal of Elegy is to serve as a scaffold for creative writing. Check out the trailer below to get an idea of this rich and beautiful concept piece.

Now, what are some of your favorite pedagogical games?

Gamifying the curriculum

The intersections between gaming and school as usual are a subject of continual fascination for me. In class this week, we talked about two possible intersections: bringing games into the classroom (my presentation) and using virtual worlds to bring the classroom into a game environment (Gabe's presentation). There is a third alternative as well: bringing the game paradigm into the classroom and allowing it to restructure the academic experience. 

Both parts of the preceding description are important to understand what I mean. The first part, "bringing the game paradigm into the classroom" makes a reference to the millennial practice of allowing cultural practices from the world of gaming to "leak" out into the non-virtual world. The second part of the description implies that we are not simply making reference to these cultural practices, but also enacting them, letting our conventional ideas of what learning "looks like" to be deeply influenced by all that we have learned from the gamer community of practice.

To be get a big-picture view, I've drawn a simple Venn diagram:

It is possible to conceive of virtual classrooms without game elements, video games without pedagogical elements, and gamified classrooms without virtual elements. Further, we can conceive of gamified virtual classrooms that combine all three elements. A project like Edorble (beta signup here) which is currently in the virtual classroom stage - there aren't any gamified elements in it yet - could move into the center of the diagram by adding some elements of the game paradigm.

Naturally, I would be remiss in my academic duties if I didn't complicate this picture a little bit. Because of the strong influence of gamer culture on virtual worlds, there should be quite a bit of purple bleeding into the red circle on the top. Most users of virtual worlds will expect a few of the affordances of video games: a menu may appear when I press "esc", a graphical overlay may give me information about the world, and some of the avatars with whom I interact may be non-player-characters (NPCs). Likewise, video games often engage in pedagogy. Never Alone teaches us about Inupiak culture, Mass Effect is a veritable primer in ethics and sociology, and the Bioshock Infinite is a parable about the confluence of religion, nationalism, and racism in American history. Such high-concept video games, while increasingly common, remain the exception rather than the rule. Finally, while gamified classrooms may offer alternatives to the traditional classroom paradigm, they are still structurally embedded in a system of social promotion, report cards, and killjoy bureaucracies.

In my own experience, gamification of the classroom can produce both positive and negative results, depending on a number of factors, including the rules of the game and the group with whom you play. I have seen team competitions propel performance, but I've also seen them degenerate into petty arguments. Posting public scoreboards seems to motivate everyone at first, before demotivating those who continually find themselves at the bottom of the list. For some tasks, such as rewarding speaking in a foreign-language class through Class-dojo, I found gamification almost universally helpful. More extensive attempts at gamification seem like they necessitate a high level of teacher autonomy and organization in order for the class to really play. For example, take a look at this rule sheet:

More character skill trees can be found here.

While I applaud the design of this rule-sheet, I'd love to talk to the professor who designed it about how s/he keeps track of everyone's progression in the game and their accompanying position on the skill-tree (read: is this what I get to do after tenure?).

If gamifying your curriculum, even in some limited way, interests you, then I encourage you to check out this article from last year's Education Weekly, which lays out eight principles for successful gamification. I like this article because of its emphasis on the fact that on a conceptual level, gamification is just good pedagogy.

Coding as an L2

When people ask, as Carlye did this week, whether we should view coding as a second language, I tend to answer with a resounding yes. As a foreign language teacher, I always want to position myself as a pluralist on this issue, mostly because of guys like this who think we shouldn't even bother to teach languages. Economists like this, aren't going anywhere either. A little learning is a dangerous thing, indeed. But, as ridiculous these folks may sound, they have encouraged me to defining what I think the role of languages should be in the curriculum. Having taught in a school that allowed students to take two elective language courses every semester and seen a number of formerly monolingual students graduate tri-lingual as a result, I know what's possible. So, how could we reorganize the curriculum to accommodate this fundamental similarity between constructed and natural languages, as well as responding to the urgent skills gap for coding?

Short answer: I would institute a training program to create positions for linguists in high schools and then train foreign language teachers in linguistics. The default course in which students would be enrolled would be Linguistics, not Spanish, French, German, etc. Within the linguistics track, students could choose a language (or languages) to study as a “specialization.” Constructed languages, such as Python and Esperanto, would be taught alongside natural languages, and all languages studied would be taught using the native language/dialect of the student (where possible, obviously I don’t speak Tamil or Tagalog) as a basis for comparison. Prescriptivist “grammar” would no longer be taught, and “English” classes would be reserved for ESL. “Literature” courses would teach presentational academic writing and would be language-neutral, i.e. native Spanish speakers would become proficient in academic reading/writing in the Spanish as well.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Language, like math or biology, is a fundamental category of phenomena. Our K-12 curriculum should explore it in all its depth and at least some of its breadth. 

So, what do you think of this audacious plan? Can you improve it?

Invisible culture

Reconsidering Lara Ducate and Nike Arnold's "Technology, CALL, and the Net Generation: Where are We Headed from Here?" (2011) following our discussion about transcultural literacies with Grace Kim, I am struck by the extent to which we are dealing with more cultures than we typically acknowledge when discussing the C2 learning. In fact, I think there are always at least three, and probably four, cultures in play: the C1, the C2, the IC1 (internet-culture 1), and perhaps the IC2 (internet-culture 2). As Ducate and Arnold point out, the culture of educational technology and its intended users is a "foundational but invisible culture" with its own practices, norms, and values. Assuming that internet mediated communication is an interaction between C1 and C2 can erase the IC1 and the IC2 with which participants also interact.

Although it was not an explicit goal of her talk, one of Grace Kim's activities for our class demonstrated this point clearly. Showing screenshots of profile avatars and their accompanying captions, tags, and flair from her research on online discussion forums about Korean dramas, Kim asked us to say what we noticed about these online "artifacts." Quickly, it became apparent that what we were exploring was not just a C2 - in fact, Kim reported that there were probably no Koreans on the site - but an highly specific internet subculture operating in the brackish of Asian and Western contact, all for the glory of fandom. Hence, there are C's and IC's. In our Cultura-stye exchange with our University of Crakow counterparts, two cultures are interacting indirectly, mediated by two internet cultures.

One of the key aspects of any discussion of C's and IC's will be the recognition that there is no such thing as a unified "internet culture." There are certainly mainstreams, and norms from internet subcultures sometimes trickle into them in surprising ways, but in general, IRL cultures tend to create their own ICs rather than borrowing whole cloth from somewhere else. Where there is not yet a strong internet culture (in Papua New Guinea, only 2.3 percent of the population has net access, for example), new users may tend to assimilate to the internet culture most commonly reflected by the language in which they navigate. But, in time, I imagine that PNG internet culture will acquire a distinctive identity as well, probably incubated in spaces devoted to discussions in Tok Pisin. I leave open the possibility of a C1 and C2 mediated by common practices from an IC1 because of the increasing cosmopolitanism of the internet, capable of hosting semi-permanent intercultural communities as well as any international city. Large communities like Reddit and Tumblr, which do not have a separate domains for different geographical locations will be key to the construction of these cosmopolitan spaces. I hope to expand further on this idea of L's, C's, and IC's during the coming weeks of our Tech & SLA course.