Melanie McBride is Toronto educator, speaker and researcher at Ryerson University’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) lab. See her About page for more information.
My second Machinima: Epic Journey: Travel forms in WoW
Have you ever wanted to fly (like a bird)? This is just one more thing you can experience in a synthetic world that you can’t do in reality. And I stress the word “experience” versus activity – because the brain doesn’t distinguish between “real” or “unreal” but rather generates emotional and physical responses based on our sensory perceptions of real or unreal. Check out the PBS video from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction lab to learn more about the science of virtual perception.
Hurrah! The other day the New York Times feature “Learning by Playing: Videogames in the Classroom” was the big talk among many of the Twittering teachers I follow. While many edu-gamers have long known the value of games for learning (and I’m not talking “educational” games), the really interesting story for me is the sudden reversal in perspective from non-gamers now ready to adopt. Synthetic worlds and gaming scholar Edward Castronova also remarked on the article’s “gee whiz” factor and challenged some of the biases and misconceptions that inform it:
Given the mainstream acceptance of tech panics that preceded this development, I think we need to reflect on an educational culture of deference, legitimacy and authority that prevented us from getting here sooner. We also need to ask whose voices and perspectives really matter when it comes to understanding games and gaming cultures.
“The reward, in other words, doesn’t have to be a useful or fun thing in itself, it need only be an obvious outward sign that the wearer of it has done some difficult work to get it.”
- Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds : The business and culture of online games (2005)
This is a screengrab of my wow avatar (my “main toon”) and my brand new staff I acquired from Festergut, a challenging boss in the Plagueworks wing of the ICC raiding series. It is worth noting that my guild has spent two weeks (well, 4 evenings over two weeks) completing this wing via watching videos, sharing strategy, improving our gear and rotations. Today’s guild message confirmed the significance of our achievement along with a reminder to “study” the next wing in preparation for next week’s raid. I’m proud of my accomplishment though it is not “real” in somebody else’s notion of accomplishments and this got me thinking about the value of grades in learning. If you’ve read Edward Castronova (or play videogames) you already know why this “unreal” achievement is meaningful to me. But let me explain it in my own way – and as it relates to education.
After a wonderful and reflective summer I’m readying myself for a new school year at a new board in a new city. Though I will be shifting to part-time teaching in order to write a book, I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to meet diverse learners in varied learning communities throughout this region. In the absence of curriculum and course planning for the year, I’ve been meditating on different “back to school” priorities and missions – our own, our boards and those of our students.
My first-year teaching at an inner city school was one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, of my life. Despite five years instructing post-graduate industry tech courses at the college level, I was very much the noob high school teacher. But it wasn’t just any high school but a program for at-risk learners, aged 18-20, who had been out of school for several years and dealing with significant academic, life and social issues. As a formerly at-risk youth, I saw it as a chance to make a real difference as a teacher. As a media teacher with a computer lab, it was an opportunity for innovation.
My first big insight transitioning from post-secondary to secondary was that all my cool webby projects wouldn’t fill an empty classroom where chronic attendance issues weren’t so much a matter of compelling curriculum as serious social crises. Every week, I worked overtime to create the most differentiated and meaningful lesson content for students who arrived up to an hour late for my 2.5 hour class. I drew on their lived experiences, interests and backgrounds – from designing Photoshop “Wallpapers” that mixed real and fantasy worlds to remix music videos – I found myself struggling to accommodate problems that had nothing to do with my curriculum.
Every day I read the tweets of fellow educators it’s clear that the battle for technology adoption is still going strong. It’s also clear that endless panics – moral and otherwise – are a part of the problem. Just today, wired educator and author Will Richardson described the challenge of teaching critical (technological) literacies without access to the tools and services our students actually use:
I’m with Will 100% and feel this literacy extends to video games and virtual worlds as well. For example, as a media teacher, it’s difficult to address questions of representation and racism in Grand Theft Auto or the violence of first person shooters without the actual texts. Because Facebook, World of Warcraft and Xbox are all, quite properly, primary media texts rich with opportunities for inquiry-based learning. They are also corporate spaces and products with enormous ideological, social and cultural consequences, which leads me to the question of HOW we’re teaching with technology – not just the what or why (which we’ve all more than spoken to).
Advocacy or promotion?
The good news is, there’s no shortage of open pedagogy circulating throughout the web. The bad news is there is still a profound absence of critical inquiry, equity, differentiation and other, more fundamental, objectives collectively referred to as “critical pedagogy.” Sign in to Twitter and you’ll read far more chatter about the latest apps than any real problems, challenges and issues in education.
For some time now I’ve been arguing that genuinely “emergent” pedagogy has little if anything to do with technology. That the vital priorities for digital education concern largely social, cognitive and civic engagement – not the absence or presence of a particular device in your classroom. This informs how I use technology in my own classroom and my desire for a more expanded notion of what we call “classroom2.0″ beyond products and panics.
In my ongoing quest to locate the pedagogical value of games (via game play, research and dialogue), I have come across an interesting example of situated learning in WoW: The random dungeon, or “PUG.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, here is an excellent and educator friendly overview.
Rather than duplicating this description above, I’d like to talk about some of my own, personal, observations and experiences in PUGS and why I think they have value as a form of (radical) gaming-focused PD for educators. Yes, this post is about our / your learning – not that of our students. And when it comes to gaming and education, I feel that it’s educators – not students – who are most in need of emergent “literacy.”
And before I say anything further, the first and foremost reason you should explore PUGs? they’re F-U-N.
After close to ten years of watching my other half blast his way through massively multiplayer worlds (MMOs), I decided this was just too big a phenomena for me to avoid. Not only that, but I felt I couldn’t really continue to call myself a “gamer” if I hadn’t played an MMO – let alone the most significant MMO of all time. So I joined wow and started living part of my life as a Night Elf Druid.
As you may know, I am enthusiastic about the virtues of games and virtual worlds for learning and I have been advocating on this for some time now. But before I write about all the fun things I’ve seen and done in wow, I want to explore some of the ideological and ethical questions around the use of a corporate gamespace for learning. I’m particularly interested in examining wow through the lens of critical pedagogy.For those unfamiliar:
“Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach grounded in critical theory. Critical pedagogy attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate. In other words, it is a theory and practice of helping students achieve critical consciousness.”
I am focused here on what the game creators have produced, not the alternative player cultures that have emerged around that (the subject of my next post). Without question, any space can be transformed by its users. But that does not negate questioning the architecture – particularly the ideological architecture – that players must inhabit.
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