Cognitive Informalist

My New Favorite Website

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 19:29:00 +0000

This website is so terrific: Understanding Science: How Science Really Works, from the University of California Museum of Paleontology along with professors from Michigan and Berkeley, and a small gaggle of science teachers and grad students.

My favorite part? The list of Misconceptions about Science. Not misconceptions about biology, or physics, or other content areas - about the nature of science and how science as a whole works. This is what my dissertation is about, and reading this list it's like someone out there just gets me and my work.

I was especially pleased to see some often-overlooked misconceptions that even scientists themselves might hold, such as:

MISCONCEPTION: "Hard" sciences are more rigorous and scientific than "soft" sciences.

CORRECTION: Some scientists and philosophers have tried to draw a line between "hard" sciences (e.g., chemistry and physics) and "soft" ones (e.g., psychology and sociology). The thinking was that hard science used more rigorous, quantitative methods than soft science did and so were more trustworthy. In fact, the rigor of a scientific study has much more to do with the investigator's approach than with the discipline. Many psychology studies, for example, are carefully controlled, rely on large sample sizes, and are highly quantitative. To learn more about how rigorous and fair tests are designed, regardless of discipline, check out our side trip Fair tests: A do-it-yourself guide.

Is there a social scientist alive that hasn't been bothered by this? The myth that psychology is still largely a Freudian affair that relies heavily on introspection is still prevalent in society and the media. I've seen computer science undergraduates dismiss ethnographic studies as "social sciences bullshit" while readily accepting quantitative studies, seemingly unaware that they're every bit a part of social science.

So it's nice to see that misconception on there, but the entire list is stellar. I hope this site helps a few parents and educators communicate more clearly with learners about how science really works!

The Language Instinct, The Web, and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:23:00 +0000

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

This is another non-fiction book - an excellent pop take on the entire field of language acquisition in a nutshell. Soon after Sphere opened up the possibility of doing research in psychology to me, I came across the term Cognitive Science on a list of majors during a college career fair (I want to say it was at Carnegie-Mellon's booth, but I'm not sure). The person manning the booth explained to me what it was, and much like reading Sphere it made another piece just fall into place. That was it - the specific subfield I wanted to study, what I wanted to major in. Like magic, I'd wondered if it existed and now someone had just given it a name for me.

Knowing this was great, but also challenging as a high school student in the mid-90s. My high school had little relevant information for me - one psychology class generally considered a blowoff. The web was young, but it was still the best resource I had. What little I could find on the topic was from the websites of the various Cog Sci university departments - MIT, of course, had one of the most well-fleshed out websites at the time. And so I read essays by people like Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks on artificial intelligence, and browsed through lab web pages getting an idea of what sorts of research was happening. I also discovered the name Steven Pinker, and then I happened upon his book one day in Barnes & Noble.

Now, The Language Instinct did not lead me directly to my current research interests. In fact, you could say that it caused me to go down a path that was not successful, and was possibly a diversion. But even though I did not wind up researching language acquisition, it was a useful path for me at the time for several reasons. After I read the book, I was convinced that that was it, I wanted to research language acquisition, period. I also wanted to go to MIT to do it (and talked about it endlessly in my admissions essay).

So it led me to MIT, and that is certainly a part of my life that I am thankful for. It also led me to working in Pinker's lab, which is a terrific thing to have on your CV even years later, when your own work is much more impressive than the data entry you happened to do under a famous name. Pinker was even my undergraduate advisor, even after I'd left his lab and language acquisition entirely, and he was a good one who encouraged me to take the classes that interested me over anyone's idea of which were "important." So even though I later decided I was interested in learning much more broadly, and in application and design in addition to basic research, the mere act of reading this book had a huge and undeniable impact on the next few years of my life, and on my career path from there. (It's also just a great book for anyone with a passing interest in linguistics and/or learning and development.)

This is the fourth and final post in a series on the impact that informal learning has had on my life and career. To see all of these, click on the "Informal Learning and Me" tag.

Sphere and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:37:00 +0000

Sphere by Michael Crichton

I went through a phase about my freshman year of high school where my career choices were changing weekly. I read Jurassic Park and wanted to be a mathematician and study chaos theory like Ian Malcolm. I went to the zoo and decided I should design the habitats that zoo animals live in. But then I read Sphere and everything clicked into place.

I'd been thinking I was interested in how people think, how people learn, what is intelligence, questions like that. But when I heard the word "psychology" all I thought of was Freud and psychoanalysis and therapy - I didn't want to be a therapist. So I wasn't seriously considering a career involving psychology, because I didn't know that anything but clinical careers existed. But the main character of Sphere isn't that kind of psychologist - he's a psychology professor, a researcher. The rest doesn't even matter - what he researches, what happened in the book (though I do love the book). All that mattered to me right at that moment was that people do research, scientific research, about thinking and minds and psychology..

This was such a revelation to me. Having spent most of my life as a working class kid, in a family with no college degrees, I had no exposure to academia and research. Yes, I'd read Smart Girls, but that didn't seem like the kind of thing you build a career out of. That was the kind of research you do to write a book - you interview a few people, that kind of thing. I had no concept that Kerr had a whole ouvre of research beyond that, with dozens of publications in academic journals representing several strands of research.

And so that was that. This wasn't a fad or a phase this time - this completely fictional piece of work had opened my eyes to a very real fact. That thing I wanted to do but didn't think existed? It exists. And I'll do it.

Side note: Now one of my research interests is how people/kids interpret science in fictional media - why did I immediately accept that this character's career was real, while not believing that aliens were living at the bottom of the ocean? So the experience of reading this novel continues to influence my career 15+ years later.

This post is part of a series in how informal learning has personally impacted my career path. For the whole series, please check the tag "Informal Learning and Me."

Play, the BSC, and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:21:00 +0000

When I went to college I had no doubts about what I wanted to do - study language acquisition (more on that later). But after a couple of years of classes and lab work in that, I realized that it was the kind of thing that is fun for me to read about when others have done the research, but I personally couldn't devote my life to it. So, like many college students, I suddenly found myself confused and directionless. I loved my major (cognitive science), loved studying the human mind, but I no longer knew what I wanted to do with it. I thought back to things that had attracted me as a kid - and the answer was obvious. Some might think it ironic that the experiences that led me to the design of learning environments, by and large, were not while I was in school, but I'm sure my fellow Informalists aren't surprised at all.

Claudia and the Great Search (Baby-Sitter's Club #35) by Ann M. Martin

Oh, the Baby-Sitter's Club. I was obsessed from the summer after fourth grade when I got my first one in the Scholastic Summer Book Club pack, til I entered high school and finally grew out of them. This was always one of my favorites, and it had nothing to do with the main plot (Claudia worries that she was adopted and searches for the truth).

The B plot of this BSC book revolves around Claudia and Emily Michelle, the two-year-old (adopted) sister of Kristy, a fellow club member. Emily Michelle is lagging developmentally and Claudia is hired to tutor her in things like colors, letters, and counting. Claudia realizes quickly that simply telling her these things won't work, and has to get creative in her strategies - basically, it's Claudia and the Introduction to Pedagogy. I loved it! I specifically remember one scene where she realizes that Emily Michelle has memorized the numbers 1-10, but didn't understand what counting really means and would count to 10 no matter how many objects you put in front of her. Somehow, that blew my preadolescent mind - who knew there was so much involved in learning to count, or that so much could go wrong? I would imagine ways to help a child through this kind of problem.

Even at that age, I knew that this book fit in neatly with other things I enjoyed. Like many children, I loved to play school. Like many children, I always wanted to be the teacher. I was a bit odd, though - I'd spend hours planning my lessons, writing up worksheets and creating schedules... and then get bored when it was time to actually do the part that most people would consider "playing school." All of the fun for me was in the planning, the devising of things for kids to do. (Because of this, I often wound up playing with my stuffed animals as students instead of other kids, because they didn't mind not getting to actually play their part.)

As I thought back to these experiences, it seemed obvious that designing learning environments was something I'd always wanted to do - I just hadn't realized that it was something I could combine with cognitive research and do for a living!

This is part of a series on the impact that informal learning has had on my life and career. To see all posts in this series, click on the "Informal Learning and Me" tag.

iPad + Real Toys: It's About Time!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:58:00 +0000

I saw something at Target the other day that had me really excited. Not because it, in itself, is a really cool toy - but it's the first I've seen of its kind, and it likely marks the beginning of what I think will be a very cool category of toys and learning tools.

They're called AppMates, and so far these Cars 2 toys seem to be the only ones that exist. The idea is simple - you have a physical car toy that the iPad can sense. You download the free racing app, and you can race your real car toy on the virtual race track on your iPad.

Like I said, not that awesome right now. But think of the possibilities! You could theoretically build a manipulative that was not only sensed by the iPad, but also could detect what was displayed beneath it, giving you two-way communication of a sort. I once had an idea for a book that would act as a companion to existing popular Nintendo DS games, outlining activities that combined the game with the real world to simulate scientific activities - for example, using Viva Piñata as a location for doing observations similar to those a biologist would do in the field. That sort of idea plus this technology could do some really amazing things!

This post cross-posted to Hey Hey, It's an iPad Blog!

Smart Girls, Gifted Women, and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:04:00 +0000

A lot of people dismiss informal/out-of-school learning as unimportant or frivolous. Sure, it's always good to learn more stuff, they say, but the important things you learn in school. Out of school, you might learn some fun factoids or pursue a hobby, and of course there's social development, but as far as academic subjects go, school is where it's at.

And for some people, that's true. But not everyone. I knew early on that I was seriously interested in things that weren't covered in school. By the age of 15, I knew I wanted to major in Cognitive Science in college… something I had no opportunity to study in high school whatsoever. Our school offered one semester of psych, but it wasn't even AP and was considered a blowoff class that no serious student would take. Pursuing my intellectual passion was something I had to do entirely on my own time. I'm living proof that what you learn outside of school can be at least as important as what you learn during class.

This month I'll be sharing some of those informal learning experiences that shaped my career choices in small and large ways. And the main focus of each post will be ... a book. A plain, old-fashioned paper book, the kind that gets forgotten about sometimes as we scramble to create new media learning environments. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good educational iPad app, but we should never forget the vital role books play in learning in and out of the classroom.

First up:

Smart Girls, Gifted Women by Barbara A. Kerr

This is a nonfiction book written by a professor at Arizona State (now at the University of Kansas) who studies giftedness and gifted education, a subject that I now have a master's degree in. The author attended a school for the gifted in the early 60s, and at her reunion was shocked to find that while most of her male classmates had advanced degrees and lucrative careers, most of the equally-intelligent women were homemakers. The book explores the research she conducted on her classmates as well as the lives of eminent women to explore the many pressures experienced by intelligent women that impact their career and life choices.

When my mom gave me this book at age 9, I was not part of the target adult audience. I started out only reading some parts over and over but skipping other "boring" bits, though by now I've read the whole thing as well as the updated edition.

This book didn't just teach me about the idea of intelligence, although that was a big part of its influence. I'd read other books on being a gifted kid, but this was the first time I'd read about actual research relating to it - and the first time I'd read anything about gender and intelligence or career choice. It very much opened my eyes to the inequalities between the genders that are pervasive in our society, and how even smart women have historically been pressured to give up their careers when they have children. This book got me seriously interested at an early age in intelligence as not just a thing that impacted my life but as something to be studied, and in the interplay between gender, intelligence, and career/life decisions. You can plot a pretty straight line from reading this book at age 9 and my Master's degree fifteen years later. I certainly wouldn't call it the only influence, far from it, but it was an informal learning experience that had a lasting impact on my thinking and my career.

This is the first post in a series on the impact that informal learning has had on my life and career. To see all of these, click on the "Informal Learning and Me" tag.

What is Science?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:48:00 +0000

Why, Science is big words and diagrams of "molecules," of course!

And Science will make you beautiful! You don't have to understand all the big, hard, Sciencey words we throw at you - just trust us that Science will do all the work for you.

Take a look at the Olay ad, especially. White lab coats? Check. Sterile environment? Check. Clipboards to check things off on? Check.

Lady Gaga, Literary Criticism, and Why the Internet Really Is Changing the Learning Game

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 03:45:00 +0000

On March 11, 2010, the 9.5-minute-long music video for Lady Gaga's new single "Telephone" was released to much fanfare.

On March 12, this blog post went up on the literary criticism blog "Only Words to Play With." The blog's tags include terms like Nabokov, Nietzsche, Academia, and Freud - and now Lady Gaga. The post itself is an extensive breakdown of the symbolic imagery in the Telephone video, with subsections titled "Prison and Identity (Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Technological Entrapment, etc.)" and "Commodifying and Commercializing Murder," among others. (There is now a second part posted, and the blog had previously posted an essay on Gaga as Mythological Trickster.)

But what is really cool is what happened on March 13.

On March 13, Gaga herself posted the URL for this blog post to both Twitter and Facebook. She had at the time over 3 million Twitter followers and over 5.5 million Facebook fans, and a link to this analytic essay was provided to all of them, and then reposted to Lady Gaga fan sites all over the internet.

In other words: Every 15-year-old girl who danced to Poker Face on her iPod was given a link to this essay, personally endorsed by a young, fashionable pop icon.

That is not something that would or could have happened even ten years ago. It's easy to say (as many have) that the internet is changing things. It's changing how knowledge is created, exchanged, consumed. But sometimes that gets translated in a very superficial way. For instance, there is simply more information available, from more sources, so it's more important that people learn how to evaluate that information and know what is trustworthy and what isn't. I've used that argument myself, but it really is superficial compared to what's really going on. And this is an actual, tangible example of how the internet is (or can) change the meaning of knowledge in our society.

This is a possible thing that people can do.

That's the first thing that kids and teenagers are being told when they click the link to this site: Symbolism exists, metaphor exists, allusion exists, and someone other than the artist can sit down and figure out what it all means without being explicitly told by the artist. Some of them may have been told this in school, some won't be told about that for a few more years. What's more, it can exist in something like a video for a pop song you hear on the radio. Maybe even in the song itself! (In fact, the telephone in the song is a metaphorical one, according to Gaga.) Again, some may have been exposed to this in school - many teachers use pop song lyrics as a way to get students interested in poetry. But some haven't been.

What else can you do? Well, if you read the extensive comments on the blog post, you'll find that you can debate about the meaning of these things. You can have conversations and agree or disagree or posit your own interpretations. You can also claim that because this is a pop song, there's nothing to analyze and people shouldn't try - but somehow, those comments seem insubstantial when compared to the mini-essays they're surrounded by.

School game vs real world game

As I said, some kids have been exposed to these ideas already in school, some haven't. But even for the people who have done this in school - played the Analyze A Text Game or even the Analyze a Pop Song Game - this is something new and different. We all know how hard it is to get people to apply their knowledge learned in school to the real world. Whether it's in science, math, language arts - transfer is a hard, hard problem. So being told in school by a teacher that art is symbolic and metaphorical and open to interpretation is all well and good, but it doesn't at all mean that anyone is going to take that out into the real world and use it the next time they encounter something full of symbolism and metaphor, whether a movie, a novel, or a song.

But here is someone doing it. This is something that some adult, out in the world, decided to do on their own. Probably not even for pay! Of course, it's clearly an academic blog, so there's still a sense that the adult doing it is one of "them" - a teacher, or equivalent. Not me, not a teenager who listens to Lady Gaga. That's where Gaga's own actions come in. By posting this link to her millions of fans, she's telling them that this is of value to her, and that she thinks it should be of value to them.

Suddenly, this has become a real world game, not a school game. This is something that anyone can read, anyone can participate in: in the comments, in one of the Gaga sites where the link was reposted, or on their own blog. They may not even realize that this analysis is connected to the way they discuss poetry in English class - and if they did, they might be less interested in it. But it's now a part of their life.

So what is knowledge?

I spend most of my time thinking about science learning, science knowledge, and science epistemology. So I don't know a whole lot about the epistemology of literary criticism or current research on it. But I do think that this kind of experience, especially if it is a commonplace part of a kid's life, would impact their beliefs about what knowledge is and how it is constructed in this domain. For one thing, it could help them move from an idea of "artist defines the meaning of a piece" to "artist has intentions, but the audience constructs their own meaning."

They might also start to see the criteria that this domain uses to construct knowledge/meaning. For example, if they read and participate in enough online debates about the meaning of a piece like this, they could start to see that while there is no "right and wrong," you're more likely to convince others of your interpretation if you can support it with evidence from the interpreted text and related works. Again, these are things that they might be taught in school. But because it's a school game, they may see it as only applying to school knowledge. When they see real people engaging with popular media in this way, it shows them that it applies to knowledge and meaning everywhere they look.

It's not so much that it changes the nature of knowledge, but it changes people's perceptions of the nature of knowledge. Makes it easier to see knowledge as constructed, to see that different fields have different sets of criteria for constructing and evaluating knowledge, etc.

But who knows

Of course, all of this is possibilities and what ifs. I have no proof that a single teenager read the blog, let alone that it had any impact on their epistemology. But it gives me big ideas for future research. And it serves as an excellent example of the possibilities - of how the internet might change learning if we let it.

Thanks, Gaga! :)

I am on the ballot.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:35:00 +0000

I passed my dissertation proposal on Monday, so I am now officially a doctoral candidate. I hope everyone will vote for me when the election comes up, which probably won't be for another two years.

My dissertation is on the connection between science literacy and science media - in particular, whether engaging in authentic scientific practice in the classroom leads to changes in how middle school students interpret representations of science they see in various media. I'll be looking both at non-fiction news-type media and fictional television shows that contain "scientists." I'll certainly be posting more about this in the future!

TV Fandom and Participatory Media

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:40:00 +0000

The International Conference for the Learning Sciences was held here in Chicago this summer. It was my first chance to attend (couldn't quite make it to the Netherlands last time), and I have to say it was the most solid conference I've ever been to. Much higher signal:noise ration than AERA, NARST, SRCD, or NAGC.

One great thing was that the poster sessions were scheduled with no talks to compete and with very tasty food in the room, the combination of which led to higher attendance and, from what I could see, more in-depth conversations than I've seen at other poster sessions. I certainly had more good conversations than usual (as an attendee, not a poster-giver). One person I had the pleasure of meeting was Sean Duncan, a student of Constance Steinkuehler's who is now a professor at Miami University.

He was presenting a poster about video game players (of WOW, Zelda, and Kongregate) posting in online forums. We got to talking about conversations he saw where game developers/designers were interacting with the players online. We had a great discussion about this breaking down of the divide between creator and audience, which is something I've been thinking a lot about with respect to TV shows because I see it in my own fandoms. For example, the executive producers and cast of the show Bones (a show I'm likely to post more about here in the future) often take to Twitter to answer fans' questions, give teasers and semi-spoilers, and post behind-the-scenes photos. It's often unclear how bidirectional this interaction truly is, of course - the power is still in the creators' hands, and they could choose to ignore everything fans say and just use it as one more promotional medium. Or they can, like the creators of Glee, include fandom shout-outs in the episodes (to the delight of some fans and chagrin of others) and otherwise take fan input into account in their creative process.

Overall, this means that kids growing up today are going to see television as a very different medium than it was even when I was growing up in the 80s. Not only is there much more choice now - between DVRs, DVDs, Netflix, Hulu, and a million other ways to watch what you want, when you want it - so that the decision to watch TV is a more active one, a TV show is no longer something to simply sit and watch for one half-hour or hour. You can still do this, but the possibilities for participation before, while, and after you watch an episode are nearly limitless now. Spoiler-hunting, liveblogging, post-episode analysis, recaps, fanfiction, Q&As with creators: all of these and more are a standard part of nearly any TV show fandom. Take a kid who grows up participating in this, and what will their viewing, participation, and even creation habits look like as an adult?

Because one of my dissertation studies involves TV (though not fandom specifically), I've been looking into the literature on this. I've got a long way to go, but one study I'm currently enjoying is by Mark Andrejevic: Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans. It mostly stays at a descriptive level, like a lot of current writing about this sort of thing. It'd be nice to see people pushing methodology and analysis a bit further, though this stuff is enjoyable. Reading recommendations are welcome!

Response to Cultivated Play: Farmville

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:43:00 +0000

I've got a few posts saved up that I've written while trying to decide what to do with this blog. It's gone through a few different hosts (ultimately back to Blogspot), a few different titles/URLs, and dozens of different templates. I think I'm finally happy enough with it to start posting for reals, so I'll be posting some of that backlog. So that explains why I may sometimes, like here, be commenting on articles from months ago.

Quite a few blogs have linked to this piece. There are a few critics, and a lot of people who just seem to like the idea of criticizing Farmville.

There are many things to criticize about these games, but I don't think that Liszkiewicz's criticisms happen to be valid ones, so I feel the need to rebut most of his points individually. Specifically, I'll just focus on his assertion that Farmville is not a game. Now, I haven't read Caillois, though I really should. But I will go ahead and take his definition of game at face value rather than debate the definition itself - and I still think that if Farmville doesn't count as a game by this definition, many other things commonly referred to as games don't count either.

Disclaimer: I play Farmville. As well as several other Facebook games.* So yes, maybe I'm a little defensive about the whole thing, but who am I kidding? I know these are a waste of time, just like a lot of what I do on the web. However, if I'm defensive, it is only because the essay is clearly written by someone who has never played Farmville (nor likely any Facebook game) and whose main purpose seems to be justifying his annoyance at family members who want him to play.

From Liszkiewicz: Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe.[12] In comparison:
(1) Farmville is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility;
(2) Farmville encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it;
(3) Farmville is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill;
(4) Farmville is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Facebook and Zynga depend for their wealth;
(5) Farmville is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect;
(6) Farmville is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief.

(1) Farmville is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility; Only as much as any game is bound by an obligation to play the game. If you allow your friends or family to bully you into playing chess, that's no different from letting them bully you into a Facebook application. Yes, you can have social obligations within the game, to send gifts or fertilize crops - but all of those are optional and I personally don't know any of my 30 FV neighbors who would get honestly upset if I did not do them. Zynga has now introduced co-ops, where you work together to meet crop goals, but these are totally optional and if you don't want the extra level of commitment you never have to do one. And yes, to do well in the game you have to check your farm regularly, over a long period of time - but there are many other video games based on this premise (Animal Crossing comes to mind). And let's not forget World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, where commitment to regularly do "raids" or other multiplayer events is central and really does take over some people's lives.

(2) Farmville encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it; Again, no more than many other games. Yes, I interact with my real friends and family when playing FV. As I do when I play Monopoly or tag. Other than that, it is quite separate from real life - if a crop dies in FV, nothing happens to me in the rest of my life. If I buy a cow, it does not impact the rest of my non-Facebook life in any way. I may sometimes interrupt another activity to check the game at a certain time to ensure that a crop gets harvested or something along those lines, but again, no different from many online games in that respect. And completely optional.

(3) Farmville is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill; This one is the closest to validity. (I will note that it is also not present in every definition of games in the literature, but we're sticking with Caillois here.) However, anyone who has actually played the game knows that there is an element of chance, albeit a small one. For example, there are certain items that you can only get from other players. Some of these (in FV, often animals) must be posted to the FB wall by other players, and you must be fast enough to be one of the first to get them. I know it took me months to snag an elusive black sheep! Others, such as building materials for a barn, must be gifted from your neighbors. Not only that, but these are randomly distributed - you may need five different items, and if the neighbor who has one of them is out of town you will just have to wait or hope that someone else has it. These are both minor parts of gameplay, but there is some chance involved.

(4) Farmville is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Facebook and Zynga depend for their wealth; This is just ridiculous. If this counts as a "productive activity" then every game that adds to Hasbro or Mattel's bottom line certainly falls short as well.

(5) Farmville is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple cause-and-effect; I think that this is only true for Farmville if it is true for nearly every video game. In a traditional board game, it's possible to break the rules, and you may be punished by other players for it. In a video game, the computer is there to ensure that rules physically cannot be broken. You could say that this reduces a rule to a simple cause-and-effect, but that doesn't make it less of a rule. Whether the rule is "If a player touches a goomba, he loses one life" or "If a player fails to harvest the crops within the allotted time limit, he loses the crop" doesn't matter - they are rules, and you must follow them. You have no option not to. That said, just like any video game there are "hacks" for Farmville that will let you mess with the code to bend/break the rules. Is this cheating? Well, for it to be cheating there must be rules.

(6) Farmville is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief. Well then, I guess I'll be going to buy my green shamrock sheep and pink cow that gives strawberry milk at the state fair this summer. Not to mention that every single aspect of farming is simplified and stripped down to one or two actions - if this isn't make-believe, then neither is any game set in World War II.

One last bit of the essay that I'd like to rebut: Even Zynga’s designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville.

Again, this is clearly not true if you have actually bothered to play the game. As you progress, your farm gets larger, necessitating more time spent harvesting more crops, trees, and animals. Harvesters and other shortcuts like coops, barns, farmhands, etc actually allow you to continue to spend about the same amount of time playing each day at level 40 as you did at level 5, while reaping more benefits. Zynga knows that although Farmville is enjoyable, most of its audience is made up of casual gamers who do not want to spend several hours a day on any game, including this one, and so helps you keep your time in the game to a reasonable level. In addition, Zynga knows that the actual act of clicking on things is not the fun part. Meeting your self-set goals (mastering a crop, getting a ribbon for an achievement or a medal for a co-op, completing a building or getting a rare animal, etc) is the fun part. Clicking is just what you have to do to get there.

I had some issues with other bits and pieces of the article, but these were the main ones. I acknowledge that Farmville is possibly on the outer edge of "gameness," and perhaps at some point I'll write my own critique of it. But this critique really just smacked of someone looking for reasons to feel superior to their friends.

* I mostly play games made by Zynga - why? Because I've tried many others, including ones that Zynga has ripped off (such as Farm Town and Pet Society), and every time, I wind up preferring the Zynga games or Zynga versions of the games. So I just think that Zynga is quite good at making this particular type of game.

P.S. In the couple of months since writing this post, I have actually stopped playing Farmville and all of my other Facebook games. Not for any particular reason - I just got burnt out on them and stopped altogether. I haven't deleted any of them, though, and will likely pick them up again sometime when I'm sufficiently bored. To my knowledge, none of my friends or family has abandoned me or badmouthed me because I haven't replied to their requests or accepted their gifts. So much for obligation!

A couple thinky videos

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:21:00 +0000

Neither of these is all that new, but they both make some interesting points about the future of education.

The first gets a bit alarmist in spots, but I like what it has to say about the changing face of knowledge, learning, and education:

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

The second is a talk by Philip Zimbardo, of the infamous Stanford prison experiment, who apparently is doing stuff about perception of time now. As my husband put it, it comes off as he's found his hammer and is now turning everything into a nail, but I don't think that makes it any less interesting. Anyone studying cognitive, behavioral, or social sciences knows by now that there are a million factors involved in any action and a million lenses to view it through, and every lens gives you a bit more of the whole - so viewing all of this through a "perceptions of time" lens certainly won't hurt.

I do take issue with his characterization of time spent playing video games as "alone" - Reed Stevens, Constance Steinkuehler, and plenty of other scholars will tell you that video game playing is very often a social activity, whether with others physically present or online. The point remains, though, that many of these interactions are different from "traditional" socialization (especially those that happen online, often semi-anonymously) and so might be changing the ways that young people view social interaction.

Revamp

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:06:00 +0000

When I created this blog, I was intending two things:

1) That it would be about learning through play, games, and toys.
2) That it would mostly be a place for me to make note of publications and other resources I've found for later reference.

Since then I've realized two things:

1) That kind of learning is one thing that I study and am interested in, but by far not the only thing (I knew that already), and I'd like to post more general stuff as well.
2) Focusing only on what other people say without ever saying anything myself (except brief comments on what they say) doesn't make for an exciting blog, nor does it really make me excited to update it.

So this blog just got a new URL (from play-learning to cognitive-informalist), a new description, and will now have both more general learning content (but toys and games are still a big focus!) and possibly more original content. Possibly.

Interaction Design and Children Proceedings

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:48:00 +0000

Last year, the Interaction Design and Children conference was held here; unfortunately, it was during finals week, so I was only able to attend a couple of sessions. The ones that I did go to were excellent. "Interaction design" was used very broadly, and I saw sessions both from academics and toy industry types, about television, video games, software, and physical toys (like an interactive Barney doll).

I just found the full proceedings from this conference online - warning, I'm not sure right now if you need a university login to view this or not. I now have quite a lot of reading to do!

D is for Digital

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:39:00 +0000

More things I found months ago and never posted!

And this one is even publicly available, no university login or journal subscription required.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, part of Sesame Workshop, has a postdoctoral fellowship each year. Last year's fellow, Carly Shuler, produced the report D is for Digital, on the current state of the market of interactive digital learning media for kids ages 3-11. If you're used to reading heavy, dense, academic articles, it makes a nice light read that's nonetheless very enlightening.

Here is a list of other recent publications from the Center.

In Game, In Room, In World

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:52:00 +0000

I read this article months and months ago - about the same time as the last time I updated this blog, and meant to post it but never did.

In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids' Lives, by Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie McCarthy. I was very excited to find an article that is looking at the social interactions surrounding video game playing. It's really just scraping the top of what I'm guessing there is to find, but you have to start somewhere.

I spoke with Tom Satwicz during a symposium at AERA this year, and he mentioned this newer article written from the same data set, on kids' understanding and use of quantity in the games. I haven't read this one yet, though.

New DS, Cool Master's Thesis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:25:00 +0000

I am a big fan of the educational possibilities of the Nintendo DS. It's got everything going for it - portability, networking, many types of input (writing, typing, voice). This little machine has so much untapped potential!

Today Nintendo added to that with the announcement of the upcoming DSi, which will also have a camera, the ability to download games via Wifi, and an SD slot. What can't you do with that, I ask?

In celebration I went looking for what I knew was nearly nonexistent research on the educational use of the DS, and found a new Master's thesis that also got me very excited, though I've only read the abstract. I love problem-based learning, I love the DS, whatever this guy did it must be awesome! If the author, Michael David Lipinski, ever happens to read this (maybe by googling your name and ending up here?), please contact me, I'd love to talk to you!

Motivation in games

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:25:00 +0000

Not published research, but an interesting essay on using reward systems to keep people playing. Very familiar territory in terms of zones of proximal development and motivation - rewards have to be challenging in order to be motivating, but if they're too difficult or too rare, the motivation drops. Always interesting to note where game design intersects learning theory.

MMORPGs: Play or Work?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:01:00 +0000

An interesting little piece from Games & Culture by Nick Yee at Stanford on how online games (MMORPGs in particular) blur the line between play and work.

I know from experience it isn't just MMORPGs that do this - Animal Crossing is an essentially single-player game that many people experience as walking that line. AC always felt fun for me, though, even when it veered into work territory - I recently bought Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for my GameCube, and although I'm not far into it, it feels more like work than play so far. Even the DragonWars application I recently installed on Facebook feels more like a routine than a game... but I keep going back, because I want that most expensive dragon, darn it.

Also, as often as you see play referred to as "children's work," is it really surprising that the boundaries would continue to be blurred into adulthood? Is playing house really that different from playing at a career later? How can this fact (that play can often include the same actions as work, but retains some kind of difference motivationally) be used as an advantage in an educational context? If you convince a child to play at being a scientist, will the lessons learned during the game apply elsewhere? It's not obvious that they would - I doubt the people running pharmaceutical companies in Star Wars Galaxies are out thinking about new drugs in real life... but do they learn something about running a business?

Yee also has an article up on the risks and benefits of kids playing MMORPGs.

Ethnography for Protoyping Educational Toys

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:10:00 +0000

Just found this paper from the 2002 Human Factors Conference in Australia (pdf), on using "rapid ethnography" as a development tool for a new web-enabled educational toy. I'm always interested to get a look at the toy design/development process in industry.

Here is a link to the jaredRESEARCH page on their work with LeapFrog.

Video games at APA

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Science Daily has an article up about what seems to be a symposium on video games at APA.

The first study is by Fran Blumberg of Fordham University, looking at middle schoolers' problem solving strategies while playing video games, finding that their goal orientation affects how they approach problems in the game. Here (journal, subscription may be needed) is a related 2000 study by Blumberg on the relationship of goal orientation to performance (in video game playing).

Another study by Constance Steinkuehler at Wisconsin - Madison analyzed posts to World of Warcraft forums and found that a majority were using scientific reasoning skills in their approach to the game. You can find many previous WoW (and other) articles by Steinkuehler here. I have to wonder how much the scientific reasoning found generalizes to other environments; are these gamers able to analyze scientific arguments found elsewhere in their daily lives?

Welcome

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:55:00 +0000

I'm starting this blog as a repository for research about learning, play, learning through play, designs for learning and playing, playing at learning, learning to play... as well as development news regarding educational toys, games, video games, etc. I'll likely also throw in news and info on other informal learning environments occasionally, such as TV, books, museums, etc.

I'm starting it for my own edification - as a graduate student in the Learning Sciences who is very interested in informal learning environments, I'd like a place to collect thing things I find around the internet for future reference. Hopefully, though, a few people out there with similar interests will find this useful as well.

If you would like to point me toward any resources to include in future posts, please leave a comment!

A few more things about me: I like toys. I've been a Barbie doll collector since about the age of 12, I love video games and am rarely found without my Nintendo DS. I spent most of my childhood obsessed with educational toys, and only in the past few years have I come to realize that this is a valid area of research interest. My background is in Cognitive Science and Gifted Education.