Psychology: October 2005 Archive Page

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior officer being too friendly in response to a screw-up), slackerism, and even on-the-job horseplay.

Sloane warned that some of the worst principles of brick-and-mortar teaching have moved into distance learning and serious games, and set up shop on CDs and on the internet.

She invoked Bloom's taxonomy, and suggested that behavior won't change unless the affective domain is reached, where emotions and life experiences convince people to apply the phsycho motor skills they've practiced, and the information they've been exposed to through cognitive doman. Affective learning leads to cognitive goals.

Tips to engage the Affective Domain.

• Be learner-centric.
  
• Know your audience
  
• Get real.
  
• Reach out to your learner's world.
  
• One more item I didn't get...

Example of reaching out into the world of the intended audience, from an HIV education program designed to change the attitudes and behaviors of young adults.

Rule #1: Never take medical advice from someone hornier than yourself.

Advised that the learners will have different motives. Simply pass a course? Become a more successful person? Avoid casualties and maintain morale in a war situation?

Introduced "Hate Comes Home," a game about bias and ethics, understanding, stereotyping and prejudice, used in California schools and elsewhere. (I'd call it a modern morality play.. just as doctrinal as Everyman, but filmed with shaky-camera effects and a documentary style - including "artistic" camera effects (slow-mo, etc.) and a voice-over narrative - that one doesn't usually see in a computer game. The military is learning, through the global war on terror, that the old style of teaching military doctrine isn't working. Since lower-level people are now making higher-level decisions in the field, the military needs to develop the critical thinking ability of people in the field, rather than relying on the centralized wisdom and experience of the upper-level officers.

According to a slide, "Generic content no longer works. We cannot rely on the leaner to make the leap to today's realities and unique circumstances. In GWOT [Global War on Terrorism], education and training must depict real events in real environments in order to work."

Today's artillerymen are asked to do peacekeeping tasks and interacting with civilians in towns, rather than "putting steel on target."

Described the characteristics of successful "game-based learning solutions." Based on a comprehensive learning strategy; customizing the game on the fly to meet the needs of the learner; get useful feedback that's not simply a score. Games need in-game reference materials that can be accessed easily during gameplay.

(By the way, that term is a wonderful example of marketese - no real human beings talk about "game-based learning solutions," but I can understand why Sloane wants to use that term in her presentations. Her game philosophy is essentially the same as Gibson's. but where he used Flash cartoons to teach a general point, she used videotape and special effects -- blood, simulated burns -- to create a gritty realistic detail. Having said that, the make-up was not exactly top-notch, and the acting was adequate in the training clip, low-key and documentary-style in the high school diversty game and a hostage-negotiation scenario, and really just adequate in a combat simulation. Sloane says her games are designed to recreate reality, and repeatedly apologized for only being able to show isolated clips out of context. Is it flippant of me to note that the games she showed were only partially successful at emulating the cinematic qualities of film?)

(I just asked her the above quesiton. She responded that her test audiences responded postively to this particular method of instruction. There is a difference, she noted, between educating people in the field to change their short-term behavior in order to achieve results, and teaching a complex concept in the context of a college course. While Sloane is an accomplished and confident speaker, numerous times she ran up against a wall when she realized the information the audience was able to glean from a three-minute clip is completely different from what a player might learn from an extended interaction with the whole training system.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Michael Gibson: Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I picked the wrong presentation to stroll in on a minute before the speaker started. It’s standing room only – three people jumped up and took chairs at the speaker’s table. I’m sitting on the floor, my knee touching the podium where the speaker is presenting.

Gibson promised an inexpensive method, deliverable over the web.

“Failure is the best teacher,” said Gibson, who shared a childhood humiliation – being caught shoplifting candy as a child. The shopkeeper called out “Stop!” and he dutifully emptied his pockets and was exposed before his friends.

The lesson: “If you’re caught stealing candy from a candy store – run!”

That was a life-changing experience (Gibson realized he didn’t want to be a career criminal). The best simulations place the user in the decision-making seat, letting them learn from failures without the career-destroying consequences of failure.

Demonstrated a negotiation game – “The Raise.”

Gibson used the story of the snorkler found dead in a tree ten miles from any body of water – a logic puzzle that leaves out an important detail.

Began with a second-person textual scenario, that leads into a dialogue cutscene, then leads to a multiple-choice sequence. The animation was cheesy, as was the Monty Burns-esque voice for the boss, but the audience clearly enjoyed the presentation. What made the presentation work was Gibson’s articulation of his (not very good) reasons for making choices that lead to amusing failures. I can imagine a student would simply click quickly on the answers – what makes the “game” work is Gibson’s

(Always give a clue in the assessment of the failure. The players who assumed that they were role-playing a competent employee may feel they were cheated by making choices that would have worked in that case.)

[Note – This is very different from the way educational games are presented in K-12 environments, where protecting the student’s self-esteem is an ideological position that limits gameplay options.]

The assumption in The Raise game is that we deserve a raise; the mistake is assuming that the other party has a similar goal.

A good educational game will be built around exploiting a false assumption made by the user.

You don’t win “The Raise” by getting a raise – you win it by convincing your employer that something else you can do is worthwhile to him, and you get another source of income.

When designing an educational game built around this kind of gameplay, start at the end and work backwards.

What are the learning outcomes?

Avoiding and identifying unprofessional conduct
Non-disclosure of conflict of interest
Pushing biased solutions

What assumptions inform the above bad actions?

1. Everyone does it, so it’s OK.
   
2. Speaking out will hurt my prospects.
   
3. I don’t need to disclose the conflict of interest because I can be neutral.
   
4. Silence means consent.
   
5. Pushing one solution locks the other parties out of determining their own results.

What are the failing outcomes?

1. Everyone gets caught.
   
2. All are tarred with the same brush.
   
3. You’re told, by a supervisor or judge, that it is important.
   
4. One of the silent participants is non-compliant in a settlement.
   
5. A better solution exists.

Gibson demonstrated a web-delivered flash game designed to train financial consultants for Canadian farmers.

Early questions sort participants out into groups that are happy-go-lucky and those who are more cautious. The early decisions we make lead to consequences in later chapters. (How you respond to a worker who speaks disrespectfully of clients on one day affects how you should behave in front of the boss when he behaves that way again. Antagonist characters try to drive you towards the outcome of making an unethical choice, which leads to one of six failure outcomes.

One of the design principles was informed by the fact that users who choose an early solution close off the possibility of learning new information that leads to a better solution.

The take-home message: Play to the assumptions of players, by leaving out crucial details that drive the consequences.

The uncanny valley itself is where dwell monsters, in the classic sense of the word. Frankenstein’s creation, the undead, the ingeniously twisted demons of animé and their inspirations from legend and myth, and indeed all the walking terrors and horrors of man’s imagining belong here. In essence, they tend to be warped funhouse-mirror images of humanity, and many if not most share one or both of a pair of common traits. --Dave Bryant --The Uncanny Valley

Bryant presents the work of Masahiro Mori, who noted that people like dolls and toys that represent humans, but that as these items start to look and behave more human, there is a sudden drop in the graph. [Correcting that last bit, which got cut off.]

Now, I'd have to look into Mori's work more closely to determine exactly what he was measuring, or why he chose to see a connection between these objects:

1. industrial robot (slightly positive)
   
2. android (more positive)
   
3. moving corpse (most negative)
   
4. prosthetic hand (somewhat negative)
   
5. handicapped person (neutral)
   
6. bunraku puppet (most positive so far)
   
7. unhealthy person (higher than the previous one)
   
8. healthy person (even higher)
   

When you list them in that order, you get a positive "emotional response" curve from the industrial robot to the andriod, and then you get the "uncanny valley" -- that is, the huge drop in the graph -- for "moving corpse," followed by an upward sweep towards "healthy person."

But what is it about a moving corpse that necessitates that it should be placed to the right of an android on the above scale? The "valley" disappears if you simply sort the items in a different order, like this:

1. moving corpse (lowest)
   
2. prosthetic hand
   
3. handicapped person (netural)
   
4. industrial robot
   
5. android
   
6. bunraku puppet
   
7. unhealthy person
   
8. healthy person (highest)
   

My point is not that Bryant is somehow being dishonest, or that Mori's work was somehow unscientific. But the choice to arrange objects in order to create a visual "ucanny valley" in the graph of emotional responses is a rhetorical device, designed to draw attention to a particular measurement and to control the context in which that measurement is presented.

I wonder how an English professor would feel spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing interaction between students and peers, post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and interaction with scholars at other universities around joint research. --Gina Hiatt --We Need Humanities Labs (Inside Higher Ed)

I agree that academic life in the humanities can be isolating and lonely. While my Ph.D. is in literature, I found myself hanging out in the library's Java programming lab, where I put in most of the hours of a research assistantship, and drinking in the collegiality in what was at the time the school's Engineering Writing Centre.

Those were great experiences. I also had an experience that was, if not actually hellish, like a visit to the world of "Office Space," and a living lab in which I learned how managers can alienate and undercut the work of the managed. Of course I liked the money, and everything worked out for me in the end, but quite frankly, most work in the humanities IS solitary. I realize that hard and serious work is done in group environments, but in the humanities we don't first *do* research and *then* write it up -- typically the writing *is* the research, along with the requisite reading, and most of us need quiet and some control over our schedule in order to get that work done. I can't imagine going to an office 9-5, and punching in, just so I could start reading "Hamlet".

I got through it all just fine, and I welcome the collegiality in play at my current job. I think of all the grad students whose work I know of via the blogosphere, and I imagine how different my own grad experience would have been if I'd had access to the kind of online support groups I see in action everyday online.

Currently I work a very WIDE room for my freshman composition class. I'd estimate it's about four seats deep and ten seats wide. When I lead a standard class discussion, I have to march the length of the room -- from the door to the window at the far end -- and project my voice rather loudly when I'm on one side or the other. But that doesn't bother me. What's troubling is that it spreads the students far apart from each other. It divides them; and there is a sort of "faction" mentality that seems evident to me when debates get hot: one side argues against the other, from the comfortable distance of the double-wide trailer sized room.

You don't have to be a communications theorist to recognize that students tend to territorialize their space in a learning environment. --Musical Chairs (Pedablogue)

Last fall, whenever a student got up to give an oral presentation, I would sit in their vacated seat. I enjoyed the chance to see the room from so many different perspectives.

This great entry on classroom space got me thinking a little more about how my students' relationships with each other in the blogosphere affects the in-class dynamic.

In the past, when I've offered a free, no-bad-consequences draft review, I'm always disappointed at how few students take me up on it. I did notice that some of the same students who wouldn't submit rough drafts would have at least something prepared for an oral report. Perhaps they don't mind getting a zero on a rough draft when I'm the only one who knows they didn't do the work, but when I call on their name for their oral presentation, they didn't want to have to say "I'm not prepared" in front of their peers.

I thought I'd try to put this phenomenon to use, and started planning informal oral presentations a day or two before a rough draft was due. I eased the freshmen into it by letting them present on a personal topic of their own choice, so they would feel more comfortable presenting. For all my classes, I made it clear I wouldn't mark them down for saying "um" or for fidgeting.

While I saw the oral presentations as a way for students to try out new ideas without necessarily churning out pages and pages of detailed support, and while I thought the student papers improved markedly after we workshopped the thesis statements and supporting ideas the students floated during their informal presentations, too often the students were simply focused on getting through the presentation.

Displaced from the comfortable anonymity of their accustomed seat, students felt too vulnerable to appreciate constructive criticism. I graded the oral presentations very generously, because I wanted to reward and encourage the process rather than evaluate the product, but the anxieties students felt about performing made their way into their evaluations at the end of the course. Students didn't mention how much better their writing was as a result of their oral ordeals. Some even complained that their peers' presentations were so lame and repetitive that they would have preferred me to lecture more. My efforts to create a more student-centered learning environment seemed to invite a backlash. So a little reorganization was clearly in order.

This term, I've drastically reduced my reliance on formal student presentations. I let students know I don't want them to enter the classroom as a blank slate. In my lit classes, I've been distributing the teaching task, diffusing it among the whole student body, making it part of the routine environment of the classroom.

Each student needs to prepare an "agenda item" they have prepared in advance, and that they will be ready to share if called upon. I ask them to post a brief entry on their blog, 24 hours before class, in which they offer a quotation from the assigned reading, and state what their "agenda item" is -- that is, what they plan to talk about, when called on in class. Then, they bring to class a 200-word reflection, that mentions by name a student whose blogged idea has helped them develop their ideas about the assigned text.

Friday morning in "Drama as Literature," we were discussing the first two acts of Hamlet. Because I checked the student blogs before class, I already knew the students were talking about Hamlet's madness, Gertrude’s complicity, and the dramatic effectiveness of the ghost. The first student who spoke mentioned being inspired by a second student's blog entry. The second student then mentioned being inspired by a third student's entry. This went on for a string of six or eight students, for about fifteen minutes, each building on what the previous student had said, before the first pause in the discussion.

During that pause, I called attention to what had just happened, and praised the students for sustaining the conversation on their own.

When the students in this class give informal presentations, I split them up into small groups, and send them out to a courtyard or patio. I float around and try to listen in on the discussion, but my physical absence reminds them to think of their peers as their primary audience. Several students blogged about how much they enjoyed the experience, and the informal reflections they submitted afterwards were overwhelmingly positive.

Once when I was late to class due to a domestic incident (I told the class it involved a shower curtain, a large spider, and a potty-training toddler), I sent word via the division secretary that I'd be a bit late, and the students went around the room and shared their agenda items. When I did show up, they seemed quite pleased with themselves for having been so productive on their own.

I'm a little spoiled, since all the students in that class are English majors. I'm also teaching two sections of a lit seminar and a news writing course that includes students who are less than thrilled to be there. While some students are enthusiastic and dependably well-prepared, it's clear that some students haven't made the class a top priority. That's okay -- I got a C in my college Latin course, and it wasn't because I disliked the subject or the teacher, it was just because I chose to put my time and effort elsewhere.

The news writing class is changing the focus from a series of short exercises to some longer, more in-depth units, so I'm hoping I can use some of blog-enhanced classroom discussion techniques. In the next five or so weeks, we'll work our way chapter-by-chapter through two books, and I plan to have the students sign up for a particular chapter, and let a different student take the class through the "agenda item" sequence each time. At 32 students, that's large by SHU standards, but as a writing class, it's large by any standard. I'm going to let students know I expect them to participate regularly, and I'll start asking them to evaluate and reflect on their own contributions to the online and in-class discussion.

When I switched places with the students who gave oral presentations last year, I was trying to send a message that, for the next 20 minutes, I was just one of the students. But the act of trading places with the students emphasized the difference between us. When I wasn't sitting in a student space, I was The Teacher.

By asking all students to prepare agenda items, I am distributing the authoritarian role of the agenda-setter. It is sometimes stressful for me, since I have to work twice as hard weaving connections between the student agenda items, filling in gaps with 5-minute mini-lectures on catharsis or the role of the raisonneur.

I still haven't worked in "anagnorisis" or "the fourth wall," and earlier in the week, three students in a row asked me a question that stumped me. There were three high school seniors visiting the classroom that day, and I kept having to admit my ignorance. I'm teaching without a net when I let the students set the agenda -- but the 24-hour lead time really helps. I have time to prepare those 5-minute spurts of info, when I notice the students are hungry for background information on the Protestant reformation, or if they're puzzled by a mythological reference, or they're curious about the author's biography.

Rather than letting the students take turns being the "sage on the stage," I'd like them to take turns being the "guide on the side," and shouldering the responsibility. In a typical class, some student has usually checked the Wikipedia entry for an author's biography, or has read the author before, or got inspired and did some outside research.

Musical chairs is a good metaphor, but I'd like to think of removing the empty chairs that separate the students, until every student is connected with his or her peers all the time. If we all swap roles and trade ideas as rapidly and smoothly as my lit students did in Friday morning's Hamlet class, I think we'll all enjoy the result.

I like the two-tiered set of goals described by my colleague Cynthia, a professor of psychology. "I approached my sabbatical with two sets of expectations: the must-do project and the wish-I-could-do projects," she said. "I accomplished the former, but didn't get to the latter, unfortunately."

I happen to know that, if I set low goals, that's all I will achieve. So I'm aiming high, but trying to find balance between my work and my personal life in a couple of ways. --Lee Tobin McClain --Going on Sabbatical (Chronicle)

Lee is my colleague down the hall. Since she's not been coming to English faculty meetings this year, we're giving her all the tasks nobody else will volunteer for. (Just kidding!)

I've been planning to ask for a temporary teaching load reduction to invest time in an open-source educational videogame concept I've been kicking around for a year. It's time to get cracking on that proposal -- once I've turned in next midterm grades.

For the rest of the week, it's marking, marking, marking.

The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society.

From iPods filling commuters' ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like cellphones and Blackberry handhelds, media is everywhere in the United States, like much of the rest of the developed world. --Media, media everywhere, and no time left to think? (Breitbart | AFP)

We're reading selections from Thoreau's Walden in my American Literature class. Thoreau's desire to shed his ties to material possessions and live simply in the woods appealed to several of the students in my morning class.

Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went off relatively close to me, etc. I remember running through this long sort of corridor where explosives went off every few feet, things were on fire, etc. I cried hysterically in my dad's lap and begged him to make sure I wouldn't have to do it again, but I did. I think I did it quite a few more times. I remember the terrifying scene where we were in the boat and the horse jumped out and ended up surfacing a plastic explosive that went off right under my face. I remember being half trampled by a mob of extras and then repeating the scene several times. I remember working very long hours.

I know I had some fun as well, but it's pretty much obliterated by the sense of fear, and exhaustion, and of not being protected by the adults around me. And again, the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you. This, of course, took some time to arrive at. I admit I was pretty furious at you for a lot of years. --Sarah Polley --Polley recalls trauma of Gilliam set (Toronto Star)

The little girl who starred in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen writes director Terry Gilliam about the trauma she remembers. Gilliam gently points out that she may be constructing memories from having seen the finished film, but Polley responds that that's part of the point -- he had no idea how the film would impact her, overall.