Month: February 2017

The Set-up:

Let’s play a game. No, but really, go play this for a few minutes in between writing your dissertation, analyzing data, or procrastinating on youtube looking at cat videos (you know who you are…).

The game, called The End, is structured such that it asks a number of questions that philosophy classes might include in their curricula. For example, this game allows you to work through views on what exactly you are (a mind? A body? Both?), beliefs about death, fate, whether it important to have children, alterity, etc.

It’s pretty much this in game form:

While not all encompassing, it serves as a good primer for the types of philosophical questions we might ask in Knowledge and Reality or in a Killing Things course (No creatures, human or otherwise, were harmed in the course except for fictional blue whale, in a helmet, filled with water, on a trolley track…).

 

Current Approaches:

During my first semester here at Tech and as a TA for K&R, I had my students play the The End at the beginning of the year. But, I never asked them what they thought at the end of the semester and I didn’t ask them to go play it again to see what, if anything, had changed! Alas, I am not currently a TA for K&R and The End doesn’t quite mesh the class I TA for currently.

Lacking a video game analog for Morality and Justice, I have students in all my sections fill in a “I Believe…” form at the beginning of the semester. This form gives them an idea of the types of questions we will be discussing, allows them to share what they think and why (prior to any philosophical reflection), and it gives me a heads up concerning what weeks tensions are likely to run high in each section. If half of the class thinks Bambi is perfect for dinner and the other half are card-carrying members for PETA, the food ethics week is bound to be interesting, for example.

This form is all on paper and, for the most part, I don’t use it again until the last day of class. After reading the pieces this week, I wonder what would happen if, instead of a form that they get back at the end of the semester, they had a character that they had to interact with for the entire semester. What if, as opposed to abstract concepts and relations of concepts that they struggle to link together, they had a center character, an avatar, that they could manipulate, drop into different scenarios, and reflect on critically without feeling threatened? I’ll come back to this in a moment, since I have an idea, but first I want to process through why I think such an approach works in other ways for philosophy and then bring it back to games (video or, as I suspect is more likely, a group RPG).

 

When In Philosophy…:

In philosophy we deal with a lot of complex, absurd, and downright awful ideas and beliefs. A struggle many of my students have at times (and that I still have) is working through a topic when you feel something personal is on the line. If you are a libertarian for example, and are against both taxes and reparations, it may be difficult to separate out the implications of the arguments we look at that say “hey, you can’t be a libertarian and against both taxes and reparations” from what that would mean for you as a person identifying as a libertarian. As a TA I want to support my students as they begin to grapple with the arguments, give them space to start linking the implications of various views together, and eventually let them reflect on how that applies to their lives; but when everything is personal, as many ethics questions are, I haven’t always had success with this and they haven’t always been wiling to reflect.

One approach I currently have that has worked to open up a space for reflection is to let my students play “games” when it comes to difficult topics:

• During the week when we talk about abortion, we play a game where students are divided into groups and given a third of a dialogue that contains common (but philosophically problematic) arguments for/against abortion. They are then asked to describe the problems with each of the common arguments and they historically do an excellent job at zeroing in on the problems even for views that they may hold themselves. In fact, I usually have 3-5 students tell me that they realized that their own view is problematic for the same reasons they found the character in the dialog’s view to be problematic. Without prompting, they reflect on what the game meant for their own views while, if it was open discussion, usually the conversation tends to devolve into ad hominems, polarization of views, and defensiveness.
• For implicit bias week, I have them pair up and do an iceburg activity with one another. They write down all of the assumptions they make about one another, share their assumptions, get to communally guess things about me (it is quite entertaining), and by the end we tend to have an open conversation about the kinds of biases and assumptions we make without the intermediary step of shame and guilt. When I have tried to have more discussion based conversations about bias things have tended to go the “I don’t see color” route and folks get stuck on the carousel of shame. Not so when it’s a game.

Aside from the games, I incorporate two thought experiment animals (Qaly the Koala and Chubby the Whale) in my classes since I have found that they too allow us to have discussions that might otherwise be difficult to process. They also allow my students to visually see representations of concepts (such as validity) and in-text examples that otherwise would be relegated to my badly drawn stick figures on the blackboard. Like the games, I think that Qaly and Chubby allow my students to reach a critical distance from the course material and to conceptualize it in a way that is meaningful, accessible, different, memorable, and ultimately mutable. With this in mind, I want to go back to the games.

Games:

Games, much like Qaly and Chubby, would offer my students an opportunity for initial impersonal engagement with philosophical materials and concepts that will eventually come into conflict with one another. In “Four Things Lecture is Good For,” Robert Talbert says that lecture can be great for giving context and to see relations of ideas. I see games as a means to achieving that end. In fact, I wonder if the slightly impersonal nature of the avatar would allow my students to recognize the inconsistencies in the views of the avatar and then later reflect on what that would mean for their own views without feeling threatened or forced to reflect. I wonder if it would allow them to recognize the context of their views and engage with the context and connections more so than traditional methods of presentation.

Concerning personalization of curricula, I think Lacoste (whom I initially misread as Lakatos) is on to something that could be implemented in a philosophical game. While the set up proposed in their article, “Teaching Innovation Statement,” may not work as-is for all classes, I think it is adaptable to the philosophy classroom and a philosophical game. What if, for the subjects a student was actually interested in for a philosophy class, the game spawned additional areas to explore that would go deeper into the questions about, say, the Problem of Evil and the connections that issue has to other areas in the discipline. In current courses we spend a week on each topic at most, but I think a gaming platform would give students the license to continue to explore areas that they are actually interested in and to see the connections they may not have seen before. In seeing these connections, what would it look like if they were building their world with one another outside of the classroom in a forum where they were invested in the communal creation of dialogue and conversation about our more central, sacred, and deeply held beliefs?

Lacking any coding ability, I don’t think a video game like The End is the route I intend to take in furthering the inclusion of games in my classroom. But this idea of a community space and forum where folks are building a community, engaging in intellectual discussion, and being accountable to one another for the space and content has given me an idea of sorts.

The Idea/Initial Musings: 

Most of my students are not philosophers and take the course as a distribution requirement. However, there are groups of students that I can group together based on major or area. With a bit of tinkering, I think that at the least I can sketch easily mutable outlines for the topics that can be personalized to hit on questions that are relevant for their areas and, in being so relevant, make the things we talk about more meaningful and applicable to their lives after the course. This is not a full blown game, of course, and nothing compared to what Mark C. Carnes describes in “Setting Students’ Minds on Fire,” but I think it will lay down some important groundwork for an eventual game.

Starting points:

• The students will do the “I Believe…” forms just like they normally do but then they will be asked to make an avatar (probably a pretty fantastical one) to use/edit the rest of the semester.
• Much like they all have personalized validity animals, they will have personalized philosophy avatars. Maybe the validity animals can be companions for their main characters.
• As we progress through the course and the landscape each week, their avatars will be asked to address this problem, go on that adventure, relate this new thing back to the old thing, and ultimately they will have to decide the path their avatar takes.
• For certain topics, there will be major specific events or prompts that relate the material of the week to their lives and professions.
• While not a video game, it can also have additional content that can be co-created by the folks in the class with the facilitator of the course and passed on to the next generation of gamers.
• They will be asked to contribute content and reflection in a co-authored “rule” book throughout the semester.
• ??????

I don’t think I can get a more solid sketch of the idea done until after I try implementing a few things this semester (such as major specific prompts to understand the concepts of utilitarianism vs deontology) and see feedback from my students. But, it’s a start.

Thinking about how best structure a class and what kind of assessments work best and why that is the case can make a person go crazy. This week I was reading through Mark Canes article ‘Setting Students’ Minds on Fire’ when I came across the last paragraph in his article it made me reminisce about my first years as an undergraduate student.

But research shows that the strongest gains come from pedagogies that feature teamwork and problem solving. Experience also suggests that teams work harder when they’re competing against one another, and that students learn more when they’re obliged to think in unfamiliar ways.

Makes me think of when I little freshman student in undergrad. During our freshman year as mechanical engineering majors we were required to take Statics 1, a relatively boring class since things don’t/ aren’t supposed to move. But, the professors that taught the class liked to spice it up every year by having a team project at the end of the semester. This project would change every year to keep it more interesting and I’m guessing reduce cheating. My year we had to design a linkage and figure out a counterbalance for a crane in order to hold a specified weight that was hanging off the boom of the crane (the picture to the left helps illustrate what I’m talking about).

All of the teams were pinned against each other and the winning team was decided based on the team that made the lightest link that didn’t break and specified the smallest amount of counterbalance weight that would prevent the crane from tipping over.

I enjoyed this project mainly because of the challenge of figuring out how to design the link and the weight necessary, but also because of the competition part of it. By ‘pinning’ us students against each other it helped push us further and made us want to do better. One important key feature is that the team rankings only a small effect on our grade, meaning if you were the last place team you could still have a chance at getting a B on the project if you did everything else perfectly. For this reason, you had many teams that designed on the edge using factors of safety of 1.1 or dare I say 1.01 when determining the thickness of the link and the weight necessary to keep the crane from tipping. Us students weren’t playing it “safe”, we were building the edge. We wanted glory or catastrophic failure!

I think that projects like this really helped make what is typically a boring class more interesting. In addition, being completely honest, I feel like I learned more doing this project than I did sitting through the couple hours of lectures every week.

So, to try and tie this long-winded story back to the topic of assessment. I feel that project based assessments can be of more use than exams. When working on projects you have the ability to test if students actually learned the information without putting a stiff timeline on them. Additionally, when it comes to projects the project can typically be designed to push a student’s knowledge further and ensure that they are capable of connecting the dots between things.

I don’t completely agree with using grades as an incentive for getting better work because students either play it safe or if they do try to push the limits and fail they just drop the class and take it later to avoid risking their GPA. But if only a small part of the grade is used as an incentive than students may be more prone to pushing the limits, kind of like how the team rankings was done for my statics project.

Lastly, for projects to truly be useful they need to be properly constructed. I think the critical part of a good project is one that covers multiple topics that are used in the class. Working in teams can also be a useful, but I don’t find it to be as critical as the multi-topic criteria.

Before I found my way back to the academe, I worked as a programmer and systems analyst. One of the fond memories I have of that “era” was being invited to my daughter’s school for a sort of show-and-tell about what I did at work. At this time, I was rarely home; these kids barely knew who I was, and the last thing I wanted to do was to embarrass my daughter. But how do you explain COBOL programming, data processing, and If-Else structures to 8-year-olds?!?!

Needless to say, the days leading up to my talk were stressful. Suddenly, all the PowerPoint slides that I throw at the newcomers to my team were of no use to me. Thankfully, an idea finally came to me – how it managed to pop into my usually methodical and no-nonsense brain I cannot recall now, but I certainly am glad it came just in time.

I turned to what I though 8-year-olds will find more appealing: playing a game. We did a modified version of “Pass the message,” having the children form two groups and form a line, simulating a computer program. The “Message” is the data input that the child at the head of the line received, and passed on to the child behind him. The “Message” was “processed” by a group of two or three children, following “commands” that were given to them, before passing the processed data to the next group behind them. The “Output” was produced at the end of the line, and the children (thankfully!) had fun looking at how the initial message has changed, and how each group has contributed to that change. When the teacher facilitated a discussion afterwards, it seemed, at least to me, that the children did understand what was going on – and they had fun doing it. My daughter smiled proudly at me. I didn’t embarrass her! My day was complete.

This memory reminded me of how opportunities to learn are present in many different forms, and it does not necessarily mean sitting quietly for hours on end, listening to a teacher, reading books (or PowerPoint slides). Learning is not a solitary activity, and does not consist of receiving information, but constructing knowledge from experience. Which means that playing can give just as much – if not more – opportunities for learning as sitting in a classroom. Mark Carnes talked about active learning, and Jean Lacoste talked about giving students more autonomy and allowing them to take an active part in the learning process; all these point to a shift to a more student-centered paradigm that focuses on creating environments that produce learning, as opposed to simply transferring information.

Mark Carnes wrote an article where he talked about his learning concept called Reacting to the Past. Carnes description of Reacting to the Past is in alignment with the established descriptions of active learning. However, I have found the term –active learning–lacking clarity. So I have started to refer to [what would be] active learning as lived-learning…with the outcome of lived-knowledge. We are more likely to reach students if we can immerse them in the material. One way to do this is to move the stories we teach closer to their realities and their experiences. Let them touch history. Let them change the outcomes outlined in a lesson with contemporary tools. I purchase this approach.

Now, a slight left turn from active learning. Last semester I wrote a paper asking the question Is education the key to a better quality of life. In particular, I wanted to know if college completion would yield an improvement in the areas of labor and shelter. What I found was a significant difference in the success outcomes and these differences were based on race. After running a few comparisons between racial groups, I found that–even with an increasing rate of college completion–markers of success had not improved for Blacks since 1964.

Carnes is concerned with students completing college, and the anecdotes he provided are great examples of how we can re-engage students. In addition to Carnes’ concern, I am concerned about what happens after college. Keeping students interested and engaged is just one step towards preparing them for success in life. There are other hurdles our students will have to overcome, and we can help them by finding ways to address the aforementioned disparities.

I would love to hear your thoughts about lived-learning and success beyond college.

When digital learning and social media usage become new trends in higher education, we start to hear so many good things about digital learning, and we begin to get showed by “Big Data” about how powerful social media is. People start to use digital learning on line to deal with long distance. On-line courses are offered more and more frequently to give both teachers and students time and location flexibilities.

However, according to my personal experiences, on-line courses are not always so effective. I took two on-line courses among my two-year PhD study here. Both of them are offered by great teachers, and they both prepared a lot judging from what they offered on line. The way these two courses have been taught in is similar. Teachers offered video lectures on line with the slides and their voices, they assigned a lot of readings according to different topics, and they set up a weekly due day for the assignments.

But I went through so much trouble when I tried to learn from on-line courses. First, I find it is difficult to gain a clear knowledge structure or thought process after I watched the lecture videos. It was usually the case that I tried so hard to follow the content on each slide, but I couldn’t get a big picture after I watched the whole thing. I agree with Robert Talbert, “modeling thought processes” and “sharing cognitive structures” are two important things in-person lectures offered, which are hard to describe or pursue in the video lecture.

Second, it is hard to make deep impression of knowledge and create engagement using video lecture and discussion section. Lack of context and stories, video lectures can be kind of boring compared to in-person lectures. And the engagement of students dropped a lot when we can’t talk immediately face to face. Using the discussion section seems like a solution to the communication problem, but the talk lack of tone and expression tend to lose some of the original meanings.

Third, it is always unspeakable intension in the on-line course. Since the teachers would like to make sure students put enough effort to the courses, they give more readings and assignments to students comparing to in-person courses. The due time is very strict that students always need to submit a lot of materials at the same time every week. So that due time, that day every week suddenly become nightmares. At least for me, nervousness was always there since I took the due time and assignments as the only chances to prove that I learnt. Even after the submission, new kind of intension began because of the grading, and sometimes an unexpected low score came out and limited reasons would be offered on line. That would be so different if students could talk to teachers to see what happened and what could be improved.

Picture Source: https://meduza.io/feature/2016/05/02/net-tolko-ne-eto-ni-za-chto

In general, I feel that the knowledge gained from the video lectures is like being fed by a puzzle piece of other people’s brain set, which would make you so confusing and nauseous even if you try so hard to swallow it. And the communication difficulty and higher expectation of yourself always make you nervous and shaking, and did worse in on-line courses.

In addition, some students around me also hold weird thoughts that if you choose on-line courses, you are trying to take the easy cut to get credits. I would say that is not the case at all.

Call me old fashion, but I will say do not throw away the in-person lectures. New media can be used in the classroom to help with the in-person lectures, I think that should be a better solution to bring in the benefits of social medias and digital learning. Creative lectures, activities and interactions should always be the core of the course, I call that my “teaching innovation statement”.

 

References

Jean Lacoste. “Jean Lacoste’s Teaching Innovation Statement”. Retrieved from https://canvas.vt.edu/files/2741612/download?download_frd=1

Robert Talbert. (2012). “Four things lecture is good for”.  Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/13/four-things-lecture-is-good-for/

When you see a traffic light                                                                                                                                                           There is something you should know                                                                                                                                           Red means stop                                                                                                                                                                                     Yellow means get ready                                                                                                                                                                     Green means go, go, go and go

When I was in nursery, this is the rhyme I was taught. Considering the fact that we had no traffic lights in our town, this might have sounded ridiculous to our parents who could not stop us from reciting it back at home. When I turned 17 years and went to the city and saw the traffic light for the first time, I knew exactly what to do. Of course, I didn’t recite the poem out loud but you bet I recited it all the same. I wasn’t ready to let anyone know I was fresh in the city…Funny enough, when I came to the states where traffic lights are within 100 meters of each other (I hate the main street), I still do recite the poem whenever I get to one…just so you know why my lips are moving when you stop by my car in traffic.

In primary school, there were some subjects that everyone was bound to make an A in. Everyone got an A not because the classes were easy, we did well because the classes involved some form of activity. For Math for instance, every child will go around after school to collect Coca Cola bottle caps. We went in search of these bottle caps in groups and always had fun seeing who will get the most caps. After we have brought them all to the teacher, the teacher distributed the caps as evenly as possible among the students. These are what we used to learn our Addition and Subtraction problems. For instance if we were asked to solve ’13 +12’, we would just count 13 caps to one side, count 12 to another, and then add the two sets of caps to get an answer.

Moving on, I know for sure I’m not the only one who forgot an answer to a question in the examination room only to remember right after submission, sometimes, right outside the door. Whenever I got that happen to me, I will ask myself how I learned that particular thing or how I was taught. I realized that those questions are the ones that I never discussed with my friends. Prior to examinations, my friends and I formed study groups where we discussed questions and their answers. There was no way I missed any of those questions, I always got them right. But those I didn’t discuss, although I had learned them, were always hard to remember.

The point I am trying to make is, the normal straight forward lectures do not always produce the best results. It takes rather unconventional and creative ways to keep students interested in boring lectures. It also takes a lot of interaction between students and peers, and among peers in order to get information across to leaners. The onus lies on both teachers and students to make learning fun….

It’s interesting to know about the currently available schools that educate children differently than the traditional ways. Those students are educated in a way that gives them the opportunity to explore, and provides them with the tools they need to participate and reflect on their everyday life. They are challenged to become more innovative, re-invent, and create, which all requires a great deal of thought and creativity by us, the educators. This can be done by using technology, gaming softwares, social media, watching and uploading videos, hence allowing the students to do well in the global and diverse system. Even though those innovative ways of teaching are becoming more available in certain countries, but they remain a challenge.

The main 3 barriers to education in my opinion are:

1. Awareness

Young students are always using social media for texting, tweeting, posting, gaming, uploading videos, and more which defines who they are through those changes. There are different ways of education that allow students to become more engaged in the teaching and learning process, such as blogging what they learn, or interacting through online discussions. There are many institutions around the world (such as my previous employer) that are not aware of those innovative teaching techniques. They have rules to prevent the usage of technology in classrooms such as mobiles, laptops or other gadgets. They fully support the traditional method of learning which includes borrowing books from the library and taking notes in class. Therefore, awareness in and of itself is an issue that needs to be addressed in institutions worldwide.

2. Acceptance

Introducing different ways of learning does not mean we abandon formal learning techniques. In fact, it only means we diversify that different methods and give students the opportunity to express their opinions on what they believe benefits them the most. Parents have a large role in this perception. They need to understand that these digital media platforms are not distractions from studying anymore, in fact they can be an instant connection to the vast resources on the internet.3. Funding

Finally, funding could be another barrier especially in the poorer locations that cannot afford the technologies and skills required. This is the world we live in and we should accept that there are places where this is easy to achieve, and others that need more support than just continuous advice. From a worldwide perspective, this might not be achieved as fast as we want it to be.

Conclusion

A growing number of researchers and educators are excited about the opportunities facing the new generations, but as long as there are barriers it will be hard to see any improvements. More attention needs to be given to those barriers facing education before we continue to criticize the traditional methods of teaching and learning – it is a battle worth fighting for.

References

New Learners of the 21st Century

 

I really enjoyed all the reading assignments for this week and the video on Digital Media – New Learners of the 21st Century. They have given me a renewed energy on education and learning, a renewed interest in getting involved in the fight against standardization of the educational system towards a system that embraces change and is ultimately centered around the learner.

Through conversations with some of my colleagues, oftentimes what some express as the reasons not to go into academia involve the frustrations with the current state of education and how much it has been influenced by politics and a previous cultural setting to adopt an industrial model. But instead of feeling discouraged by the status quo, we should feel empowered and even more motivated to join “the fight worth fighting” as one educator referred to it in the video. It was very inspiring to see all the educators, from different parts of the country, come up with creative and engaging ways of teaching their subjects. I particularly liked the project Reacting to the Past presented in the article by Mark C. Carnes which teaches history through role playing and allows them to develop it and experience it by themselves. This would certainly equip students with a long-term understanding of the deeper issues instead of being asked to temporarily remember certain facts and dates. The article paid tribute to its title by setting my mind on fire. It got me thinking about how such a creative approach could be adopted in some of the subjects related to my field or even how I could better communicate what I do to a broad audience; I think that to this day, a few members of my family still do not quite understand what I do.

Lastly, the book by James Paul Gee on “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” sparked my interest not only to read the rest of the book beyond the introduction chapter provided, but also to play some video games again. I used to play video games in different consoles growing up (I shared one with my sister, and we used to play at our friends’ and cousins’ as well) and some of the best memories of spending time together with friends and family involved video games. Now that I have read all the positive effects it can have on mental agility and how maybe one day doctors will prescribe video games instead of pills to treat certain disorders, it makes me even more inclined to play them again. Dr. Adam Gazzaley has given a few talks and interviews on his research using video games to improve brain health which seems pretty compelling.