The Ed Techie

Games & education - a contrarian view

These are not scripts or courses in waiting...

<image http://www.flickr.com/photos/durka/4879338779/ by Thomas Durka>

It is almost a truism to say that games represent a bold new future for education. The Chancellor of the OU, and one of the wisest people around, Lord Puttnam, has often said as much: "The video game is probably the most powerful learning tool that's ever been created, and if we can only get the software right, as it were 'connect up the pieces', we could create something utterly remarkable." 

And the linkages seem irresistible - games create a structured environment where the player has to learn certain procedures to progress. They are given tips, have the opportunity to practice and have regular rewards. Most attractively, they are highly motivating and engaging, with players devoting hours to solving the problems presented to them. The player learns through trial and experimentation, sometimes collaborating with others, in a structured, scaffolded manner. If that doesn't scream 'Education!' at you then you're not paying attention. And, there has been some success in applying game based approaches to learning.

But whenever the logic seems irrefutable, and everyone is lining up to testify how great it is, then a contrarian tick kicks in for me. It's probably because I've read too much Hitchens, but I want to take an opposing view, just to see how it pans out.

So here are my reservations about games as the future of education:

Discipline suitability - although there are open games, such as World of Warcraft, many games have a very definite structure. You have to follow the narrative, and this may work well for some well structured disciplines, but not for more discursive ones.

Creepy treehouse - games are fun and motivating precisely because they are about imaginary worlds where the player is an elven wizard, or a Miami based drug dealer, or a premiership football manager. Making games about the actual stuff we need to learn about removes all of this, and is an example of creepy treehouse syndrome. When my daughter was young we used to occasionally watch Clifford the Big Red Dog, which always ended with Clifford being read a story, at the end of which the girl would pontificate 'Reading is fun!'. Even as a three year old, my daughter could spot this as a sledgehammer message. I think 'let's play a game about quantum physics' would set off similar alarm bells in any savvy 20 year old.

Inappropriate pedagogy - I think this one is less convincing, as you can have constructivist or collaborative approaches in games, but many of the conventional game engines are based around a fairly Skinnerian reinforcement principle. We would need to be wary about adopting this wholesale.

A misleading metaphor - my main concern though is that the seeming similarities between education and gaming mask more fundamental differences. My argument for this lies in observing another industry that has been seduced by the apparent similarities with games, namely the film industry. Adapting games has proven irresistible for the film industry and the logic again seems sound: games have an existing fan base; they have an easy narrative which can be adapted; they are highly visual; much of the design, look, feel, and characterisation has been done already; they're modern and sexy.

Yet, almost without fail, game adaptations have been disasters, artistically speaking. I don't know if they've returned a profit, and if they have, few have gone onto be the real blockbusters the producers would have hoped. Yet they persist because of that damn irresistible logic. Tomb Raider, Doom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Street Fighter, Prince of Persia - none of these have blazed standards for cinematic achievement. Look at this list of games that have been made into films and tell me of one that you'd bother to see a second time (or even a first).

The danger is that this reliance on games (and comic books, but that's another argument), creates a laziness in film making and a loss of their own creativity. Hollywood (and it is almost exclusively Hollywood that is obsessed with games) has, I would argue, made a mapping error and transferred the wrong elements across from games, and missed what is fundamentally different about films.

Games require less characterisation than films because the player participates in the game. In a movie this participation needs to be achieved through engagement and empathy with the characters. When you transfer a game to a film this lack of character creates a fundamental weakness.

In addition they operate over different time frames - a game that only lasted two hours would be considered light, and a film that endured for forty hours would be a tough sell. In games this prolonged engagement allows the player to become involved, to invest in the game. In a film this has to be compressed so all you are left with is the surface story and action.

Lastly they underestimate the discrimination of their customers. People who play Tomb Raider are quite capable of seeing romcoms or dramas. What they want from movies and what they want from games are quite different.

I wonder if the same misapplication of gaming is happening in education as it has in film. There are interesting things being done with games, letting town planners play with Sim City seems a great thing to do, and I'm sure people can point me at lots of great examples. But I think it's worth noting these reservations and thinking of games as useful in some contexts, not the great educational utopia they are often proclaimed to be.

My final offer is this: nothing

 

Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image.

Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative.

And this is the problem for any online commodity - there is always a free alternative available. It may not be as good, but it'll do. I apply the same approach to articles and referencing - if I have to pay to access your article, I'll find an alternative which says more or less the same thing, and which I can access freely.

The question for anyone wishing to charge for an online product then is this "are there free alternatives available". If the answer is yes, then forget charging.

In this respect I was reminded of Michael Corleone in The Godfather 2. Senator Pat Geary is attempting to extract a bribe from him and Micheal responds:

"You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing"

Corleone has violence and intimidation to back up his offer of nothing - we have abundance of alternatives. I'm not arguing whether this is morally correct, maybe we should pay, but the point is about behaviour.

The value of content

It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a film that excites comment), so I browsed the IMDB reference, and also came across these interviews with the director on YouTube.

Now on TV you might get a 10 second introduction from the announcer and that's it. Why couldn't they put together some discussion or analysis programme before a film? They'd be dead cheap to make - you get some film buffs in a room and let them talk. This isn't going to be a massive draw, I accept, but if you trailer it enough it pulls in an extra audience for the film, it makes the showing of the film more of an event. And then you have maybe one of the experts interacting on twitter while the film is showing. Making TV an event is the new name of the game. My feeling though is that broadcasters are generally scared of anything vaguely 'intellectual' and underestimate their audience.

Sports TV has been good at wringing value from its content - as a football fan I used to watch a programme in which Jimmy Hill sat around with four newspaper journalists and they talked about the sports reporting in newspapers for an hour. It has to be the cheapest form of television around, and yet for a certain audience, it's worthwhile.

In a world where content is free and abundant I think there is a bigger message in this, beyond me wanting a film-bore bonanza. So here is my content-value advice: When there is lots of content it makes all content seem devalued, but the way to add value to content is to add more content to it, to provide context and interpretation. And if there isn't something in this for educators, then we're all wasting our time.

7 conversation starters

In a post about how twitter had changed my ALT-C experience I commented that we needed to find new social behaviours for when we meet people face to face who we know well on twitter. And Jim Groom is always saying how it's the personal element that makes blogs meaningful. So, in the spirit of those '7 things you didn't know about me' memes, although hopefully less annoying, I thought I'd give 7 conversation starters for occasions when I might meet people I know virtually, and we don't want to talk about blogging or twitter. I think everyone should have a social crib sheet, particularly with the advent of mobile devices now - if you're on your way to a meeting with someone, call up their conversation starters page and you instantly have grounds for a social connection.

1. As a child I was a bit koumpounophobic - I had a fear of buttons. Couldn't stand them being separate, or to touch them. If someone said 'I've lost a button' then that room became a no-go zone. I was also not very keen on jewellery. Of course it doesn't bother me now, I can do up a shirt with the best of them. Interestingly, although I've never mentioned or displayed it, my daughter doesn't like buttons either and won't wear clothing that has them if she can help it. This is, to me, an example of the strange subtlety of genetics.
   So I'm happy to talk about childhood phobias, genetics, nature versus nurture, etc.
2. I like most non-offal based foods and am constantly amazed at how fussy a lot of grown-ups are. But I have never been able to stomach baked beans and hate the insidious way they infect a whole plate of food. And celery of course, but then no-one really likes celery do they?
   We can chat about the nightmares of organising a dinner party with a range of fussy eaters, food dislikes, disgusting things you have eaten, etc.
3. My favourite authors are Graham Greene, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Dickens, William Boyd, Nabokov, Conrad. The sharp ones amongst you will have spotted that this is an entirely male list. This is not the result of a deliberate policy - it's not as if I boycott women writers. I read and like a lot (Margaret Atwood, Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, Zadie Smith are all good, although Austen and the Brontes don't do much for me) but my favourites are all men. This can't just be coincidence can it? There must be something in their writing that appeals to me. So if we discount blatant sexism as the reason for my tastes (of course, you may not), it might be interesting to consider why this is so? You could maybe convince me away from my male preference in literary tastes.
4. I grew up in the age of the home video-player, and this was probably the most significant technology in my formative years (far more than early computers). As a teenager there was a group of us who used to occasionally bunk off school and go to someone's house to watch a range of video nasties: Driller Killer, I Spit on your Grave, Rollerball (game scenes only), The Thing, Quadrophenia (we were mods), Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine. These were the staple diet, and yet I didn't grow up a disturbed individual and later went onto be a fan of 'nicer' cinema (I cry at It's A Wonderful Life every year), so we can talk about the impact of violence in films, influential technologies, etc.
5. I like to drink tea, beer and wine, not necessarily at the same time, and probably in that order of preference. I have a vague mistrust of people who drink 'flavoured tea'. I have the potential to become a beer bore. I once had an exchange with Alastair Campbell on the merits of tea over coffee (we were in agreement). I don't like spirits, except gin and tonic naturally. I thought when I reached 40 I would suddenly develop a taste for whisky. Recently someone poured me a very fine whisky but I had to concede defeat - every minuscule sip made me want to gag. I fully accept this proves I am a wimp.
6. The first gig I went to was The Beat at the Rainbow Club in London. I was thirteen and it was full of burly skinheads. When The Beat came on it erupted and the whole floor was bouncing. I had grown up in the suburbs and found it both exhilarating and frightening. I spent about 4 years going to lots of gigs after that, but now I don't get much from them. Martin Amis once commented that at some age all men stop going to football games. I disagree with that, but I do feel that about gigs - I don't want to stand at the back and clap politely and I certainly don't want to be down the front anymore, so I'm not sure I see the point in them. Good bands I saw in that period: The Jam, New Order, Happy Mondays, Echo and theBunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Billy Bragg, The Cure. Embarrassing acts: Ultravox, Toyah, King.
7. I once won a film review competition judged by Mark Kermode. I wrote a critical piece on Rodriguez' Sin City. My argument was that people loved it because it was 'stylish', but for me it wore its style too obviously. Martin Scorsese once complained that the Oscar for Best wardrobe or similar always went to a costume drama, but as much detail went in to a film set in the 1950s. I think the same is true of Sin City, other films have better style, it's just not as blatant. I also argued that Hollywood continues to make the mistake that graphic novels make good films because they have similar elements - strong visual style, linear narrative, often based around good vs evil, etc. But the results are nearly always poor, maybe because as with traditional novels, the differences between the mediums are underestimated, or because graphic novels are a bit rubbish to start with (ducks).
   Happy to discuss Sin City, novel adaptations or to have you defend graphic novels.

If none of those work for you, pick one from: Spurs, running, Wales/Cardiff, daughters.

The demise of should

This is a difficult post to write, I'm trying to think some stuff through, so if it comes across like I'm a cross between Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield, then assume this is because I haven't articulated myself well, and not because I am such a hybrid of bad science and curmudgeon. (If I did I might look something like this:)

 

(Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield morph photo via morphthing)

In general, you will know that I think the internet is GOOD THING. I like it. I spend a lot of time there. If I could drink beer with it, I would. But one should consider that even good things are rarely all good. There are downsides to most things.

One of the downsides it seems to me about the net is the commonly quoted echo chamber effect. That is, we spend time with like minded people, and not listening to different voices. I don't buy this completely, stuff comes across my screen everyday that I didn't know, that challenges me, etc. But what I think the net does do is legitimise everything. In general this has been a good force too - people no longer feel isolated because they are different, they can find others like them. Of course, this can be negative, if you are a rabid racist, you don't have to suffer being told you are wrong by everyone, you can find other nutters online who will share your view.

We probably have an echo chamber continuum that goes something like:

• Wilful ignorance - these are people who know they are wrong, or at odds with society and deliberately seek out others of a like mind: Creationists, racists, conspiracy theorists, people who think Dan Brown is a good writer. That sort of thing. The point is you have to go out of your way to find similar viewpoints.
• Accidental ignorance - people who labour under a misapprehension, because their community, network or peers also possess it, or it is a subject they simply don't come across.
• Lazy tastes - people who are generally aware they could move beyond their comfort zones, but don't.
• Occasional venturers - this is probably most of us, we do occasionally stretch our beliefs or tastes, but also we enjoy the stuff we know and like.
• Radical explorers - those who always seek different ideas, and tastes.

My point is not about the first or even second of these categories, but more about the middle - we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay. Again, this is largely beneficial to people and society. There is no pressure to say, get married because you feel you 'should' (or live a conventional lifestyle). Saying goodbye to should is one of the great social forces of the 21st century.

But as we wave goodbye to it, we should also ponder what we lose by its demise. The loss of any sense of artistic quality is one aspect which I will miss. The notion of 'quality' in any artistic endeavour took a serious blow with postmodern relativism - everything was valid as an artform. And, again, this has been positive - I like that I don't have to hide my penchant for horror movies and can engage in pretentious discussions about the merits of various 1980s trashy movies with Jim Groom.

But I was always aware that there was more, that one 'should' try and read classics. It was 'should' that led me to Joseph Conrad and Flaubert. Should suggested I try listening to jazz. And should sat me down and made me watch  Nouvelle Vague cinema. All of these have been good things and have pushed my appreciation of cinema, literature and music across genres: that is, I have become a better reader of all novels because I have read Flaubert; and I enjoy Japanese horror because I learnt from French cinema, and so on.

My feeling is that what started with postmodernism has been exacerbated by the net. People's current tastes are always legitimised and there is no compulsion to go further. Thus we have a society that thinks Harry Potter is literature. It's not - maybe (and I am really stretching my maybes here) it's okay as a read, but there is more. And there is more to cinema than comic book adaptations. So, while we might cheer the demise of should in general, we should perhaps mourn the passing of it with regards to society's artistic sensibilities.

But all this is just a vague feeling I have, maybe there's nothing to it.

Ownership ain't what it used to be

I recently signed up for Spotify, a music service that allows you to find, and listen to, whole tracks and albums. It's less social than LastFM, say, but more focused around the specific music you want - whereas LastFM uses the artist you like as a springboard for finding other artists, Spotify uses it just to give you that artist's music.

It brought back to me some considerations I'd had about the nature of ownership. My generation will have a distinctly different concept of ownership to that of my daughter's generation. For my generation you partly constructed your identity around what you owned - your bookshelf, record collection and DVD archive were important aspects of who you were (as anyone who has read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity will appreciate). But for the digital generation this strong link with ownership has been broken.

It took time and money to build up any of those collections. Therefore they demonstrated a commitment which was worth exhibiting. In a digital world this effort is greatly reduced, and as a result so is the emotional attachment one feels towards them. How often would people say that their book collection or record collection would be the things they would want to save from a burning house? This simply doesn't apply anymore - you can just download again (iTunes keeps a record of what you've purchased or you just download ahem, free, versions from BitTorrent).

But even more than this, the need to own anything is reduced. Imagine a service like Spotify greatly increased so you could find any artist, and with mobile devices, get access anywhere. Why do I need to own any of these tracks then? I can get them whenever I want, and isn't that the point of ownership, to have access under your control?

Obviously there are some things you still need to own (clothes, cars, phones, etc), but if so many previously coveted items move to cloud services, what will the next generation cherish? I think the answer is evident already in where they spend their time - it's in their identity. This was one of the functions of owning these items in the first place after all. For the digital generation things that cannot be easily duplicated will be important - this will be the MySpace or Facebook page they have generated over a long time, the network they have created. These represent the 'things I'd save from a fire' in an online world.

As for us? Ownership is a hard habit to break.

Top film titles in Wordle

Whilst watching one of my favourite films last night, John Carpenter's The Thing, I took the top 250 films from IMDB and ran them through Wordle, using English translations of titles where appropriate, and setting it to ignore commonly used words. Here is the result. I'm not sure it tells you much, except that sequels will bump you up a bit, and feminists might like to note the prominence of 'man', 'men' and 'Lord' (the last one all from the Lord of the Rings) while the only female terms that arise are Princess and Bride. In truth though it shows that in the top 250 there is little commonality in titles.

I hypothesised that this would not be the case for a genre, where you would see greater use of similar terms, so not to let a half-baked hypothesis sit idle, I took the top 100 horror films from Best Horror Movies and put them through Wordle. And yes, look at the size of 'Dead'! Which sure proves something. I think.

My 7 stage plan for the film industry

<Image Last Curtain is Falling by Alex//Berlin http://flickr.com/photos/15082599@N08/2710899029/>

Alan Parker, Kenneth Branagh and assorted British film people wrote an open letter to the Times warning that piracy is undermining the creative industries. On the radio yesterday I heard the producer of Quantum of Solace stating how in the far east they don't make any money on DVD sales because everyone watches illegal copies. He bemoaned all the promotion and distribution costs they have to bear.

Sigh. They still really don't get it do they? They have one model which they keep returning to, again and again. They're supposed to be creative, so get creative about your own industry. Interestingly, they put forward the opposite argument back in the 1980s when home video first came on the scene. Then the argument was that it would detract from cinema revenue and result in the collapse of the film industry. Then they realised that they could make as much, if not more, money from video rentals and sales and now they see it as some hallowed right to retain. Just as they were slow to understand the potential for home video so they are being slow to appreciate what the online world offers. Their only response to the internet at the moment is to think of it as another distribution medium - DVD online, for the same fee.

So, if any executives want to hire me on an expensive consultancy, here is my seven stage plan for what they should do.

1. Accept the inevitable, don't fight it. When content becomes digital it will be freely distributed online. It's not as if they haven't had enough advance warning from the music industry about this. So don't waste your energy in trying to invent ever more restrictive DRM (which some teenager will hack the following week), or more aggressive legislation (which alienates your audience and can never be fully effective), or putting political pressure on Governments (who understand the issue even less than you do). Instead put your effort into finding a workable solution in the new landscape.
2. Look at some of those costs. Distribution? Packaging? They're going to disappear. Marketing? Will need to be redirected. Actors? Well, maybe they are demanding $20million per picture because they know the profits you are making. If you're making less, they'll get less. A lot of your current costs are based on your current model - the model shouldn't exist just to justify these costs.
3. Be the iTunes of film. Develop a super- cool, massive bandwidth, good social interaction site with a huge database.
4. Make downloads or streaming cheap enough that some people will pay over downloading pirates eg. $1 a film. 
5. Use advertising. Make downloads free, but with some obligatory, can't be skipped adverts at the start.
6. Offer subscription service which gives extra functionality - commentaries, webcasts from the crew, sneak previews, invites to pre-screening, etc.
7. Make the cinema the experience - films still have the cinema as their main source of revenue. This is not a zero-sum game: A lot of people who download a film have either already seen it in the cinema, or wouldn't go and see it there anyway. Not every download is a cinema seat lost. Cinema going is still a social activity (what else would teenagers do on first dates?), and they should utilise this even more than they do currently.

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Thunderbirds are go(ish)

Ellen (my daughter) has a new favourite film, Thunderbirds. This was widely panned on release, and in truth it's not a classic. But I understand why she likes it. This is a tough sell, but I'm going to argue that Thunderbirds is a better film than The Incredibles. Well, it's a better film for kids. Ellen didn't really get The Incredibles, but Thunderbirds is aimed directly at kids. Which is why of course adult film reviewers don't get it. Kids apply a different set of criteria. All the adult in-jokes that have become the stock in trade of Pixar films are lost on kids. This has a secret island, lots of kids beating adults, some cool machines, etc. So what if the characters, script and dialogue is rubbish?

I've not convinced you have I?