An Idea for Introducing Debate in EFL Classes

Debate in EFL has a heavy image. Partly it is the result of formal debating. Politicians and bureaucrats often love the idea, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Teachers are wary of it: most think it is too much trouble for too little benefit. There is always reams of text to get through, dozens of expressions to teach, and long…agonizing…blocks…of silence that need to be waded through. And students, well, they don’t really have any idea about what good thinking is, why it is important, how it can help them, and how an activity like debating can be a way to learn it. In summary, almost nobody is screaming for debate. And yet it seems clear that the skills involved in debate are critical for learning, critical for learning success, and (in my humble opinion) a possible solution for the tragedy now occurring in high level (進学校) English classes.

Teaching debate is teaching thinking. In debating, we verbalize ideas, explain them, and assess them. To debate, you must have ideas about something. You must explain your ideas in a persuasive manner. And you must find and offer support for your ideas. You do this by building up your ideas (making them more persuasive and providing more powerful support), while looking for possible weaknesses in other arguments or ideas. The key words, from Bloom’s taxonomy, are Understanding, Analyzing, and Evaluating. In doing debate, you train yourself in these critical skills. This can help you in thinking, writing, giving presentations, and making decisions. That’s a lot of benefit from one activity! In learning how to debate, these skills are made visible. The process is visible. It can be taught. It can be seen, discussed, and evaluated in a social setting.

So there are good reasons for doing debate. But can it be enjoyable? Many people would say yes. If we believe what game designer Raph Koster says, “Fun is just another word for learning,” there is no reason why it shouldn’t be.

Below is an activity I tried recently as an entry-level activity to introduce debating. The purpose of this activity is to have students generate arguments, evaluate their arguments, and think about ways that they could make them stronger with support. The activity is based on pictures so we can accommodate different levels of proficiency and don’t need to spend time explaining language to students. The goal is for them to get involved in the process as quickly and completely as possible. It is and introduction to debate. And so the next step is to use their performance to see what their needs are and make decisions on subsequent activities and teaching. One of the eventual goals of the course is to have a full formal debate, but first we must focus on the thinking process.

lightbulb

Day One

Step 1 Look at the pictures. Below are some pictures. In pairs try to answer two questions, using just information you can see in the pictures. Do not use any reference materials (dictionaries, websites, etc.). Just look at the pictures and answer the two questions. Try to generate as many possible reasons for your answers based only on what you see in the pictures.

  1. When do you think these pictures were made?

  2. Where do you think these pictures were made?

2000FlyThru

2000HorseCuriosity

2000Learning

2000VidConf

 

Step 2. Look at your answers to the questions. Look at your reasons. Look again at the pictures and try to generate more possible reasons. Then rank your reasons according to how strong you think they are. Choose the two reasons you think “prove” your opinion best. You can use the template at Exploratree to map out your ideas and explore them.

Step 3. Write out your answers to the two questions as two paragraphs. In each paragraph, carefully explain the two reasons you have for your answer.

Step 4. Share your ideas with a new partner and then with a small group. Listen carefully to the ideas of the other students.

Day Two

Step 5. In small groups, review the questions, the answers,  and the reasons you gave last time. Look at the reasons again carefully. They are opinions you have based on things you see in the pictures. Could you do any research to support your opinions? Think about what research you could do. What would provide “proof” for your opinions? Check around on the web or in reference books to find facts that support your opinions. Write these in the Supporting Evidence section of the graphic organizer.

Step 6. Share your views again in small groups. Listen carefully to any opinions that are different from your own. Write them down in the Conflicting Views section of the graphic organizer. [Teachers: you may need to shuffle groups here. It is important that each group contains some different opinions].

Step 7. Assess the different opinions the emerged from your group. Decide which ones you think are “correct.”

Step 8. Rank what you think are the most powerful arguments that emerged during this activity.

Step 8. [The teacher leads a discussion on the process the students have just undertaken. What they have just done is very similar to a debate: they have taken a stance, constructed arguments, and contrasted them with other arguments].

Step 9. [Optional: the teacher talks a little about the pictures. They were drawn by a man imagining the future. It is quite amazing that he got a lot right! In the pictures, he corrected predicted 1, a drive-thru, 2, a petting zoo, 3, e-learning, and 4, video conferencing. The power of human imagination is strong.]

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, the images were drawn by Jean Marc Cote between 1899 and 1910 in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_L%27An_2000

The images are available from many sources on the internet. One interesting source is the Paleofuture blog: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show-the-year-2000-1910.html

EFL Gamification 9: Jr. and Sr. High

trainwreckfrag

In August, I gave–or I should say attempted to give–a presentation titled Gamification and High School EFL. Things did not go well. I tried to condense a previous 3-hr. workshop into an informative and thought-provoking 30-minute presentation. That was problem No. 1. But it wasn’t the only problem.

The day before, a keynote speaker named Kishimoto Yoichiro had talked about gamifying his university class on game design. It was very similar to what Lee Sheldon (another game designer teaching another game design course at a university in the US) had done. You can see my mini-review of Mr. Sheldon’s book, The Multiplayer Classroom, at this page. I enjoyed the presentation. Mr. Kishimoto was a thoughtful presenter and explained his rationale nicely and walked us through his syllabus carefully, explaining the assignments and the interactions. Having read Mr. Sheldon’s book, I understood what he was trying to show and say. But I don’t think many people listening felt that what he said had any relevance to their own classes;  I don’t think many people left with a clear idea of what gamification is and how they could put it to work in their own classes. When I started my presentation the next day, I asked the participants if they had been at the gamification plenary the day before and if they now understood what gamification is. Most of them had: “Um…not really,” was the hesitant reply.

I had hoped to drag them into the light in my 30 minutes. But in the end, speaking too quickly and working on an unfamiliar computer and with one of my pair of two short videos refusing to play, I realized that I had failed. I think I managed to explain gamification fairly well. I think I managed to communicate what intrinsic motivation is and why it is important. I think I even got everyone to understand why narrative is so important. But what most certainly did not happen was enlightenment. Participants did not leave with any sense other than that gamification is a quirky, fringe movement, kind of like cosplay, that some people are doing, but definitely isn’t for everyone.

I was angry that I wasn’t able to show my second video. There was a contrast I wanted to show between two classroom scenes,  a before and after a-ha moment I wanted to induce. At the time, I felt like I had brought them to the cusp of understanding, but lacking an essential component, the whole idea had collapsed. Thinking about it later, though, I realized that the stark truth is that my second video probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The stark truth is that real gamification–what I’ve been calling gameful design–requires a much better understanding and acceptance of the role of formative feedback, and the role of engagement (fun) and involvement (meaningfulness). The stark truth is that a form of gamification already exists in schools. Yup, you heard that right. It’s the way things are: students get points of performing actions. What teachers need to learn is not actually what gamification is, but rather what is the difference between bad gamification  and good gamification. What Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Kishimoto are doing is not replicable in most high school classrooms, not bymost teachers or most normal human beings. That’s not only because it is uber-geeky and requires intimate familiarity with the culture of games (as it most certainly does!), but because those two teachers were willing to throw out the prevailing system of point-giving after teaching and testing, and replace it with a feedback system based on earned points for everything (user experience points). And they were not shy about having learners do unconventionally fun things in the classroom, sometimes things which mimicked game elements (quests, boss fights, zones), and sometimes quirky, fun things for no other reason than because they are fun (everyone wear yellow on project yellow day).

Knowing what I know about high school EFL in Japan–the primacy of the textbook, the tyranny of entrance exams, the necessity of loose coordination of syllabuses between teachers due to sharing of exams while accommodating different  approaches,  my advice for most high school teachers is instead of gamification, think about introducing more gameful design elements into your classes.

gamefuldesigndef

Some of the features of gameful design will work so long as you concentrate your efforts on two things: formative feedback and fun. You must have both of these. If you have only formative assessment, you risk being joyless (though certainly you will still be pedagogically effective). If you have only the narrative/fun, you risk being delightfully ineffective and eventually being seen as old hat and dull. I should add at this point that in my observation, most classes now provide neither narrative nor effective formative feedback. And if you are at all unsure why, you probably have never experienced an English class at a Japanese high school and you need to read up on formative feedback (start here). The hardest thing for most people to understand is how narrative can be used. Simply put, narrative  is a story structure that can be used to add a meaningful context for activities. Activities under a selected narrative assume part of their meaning from the story.  If a Hunger Games narrative, or a Harry Potter narrative, or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer narrative is applied to a series of activities, these activities become embedded in a system in which the heroes, villains, and general story organization and progression are already familiar.

trainbridge

So can any of this be useful to high school teachers? Absolutely. And below I am going to offer some things that can be tried in almost any class and that fit with the gameful design approach. Notice how each one has a narrative element (based on a story), has a play element (competition here, collecting or challenging), and a formative feedback element (students learn right away what to do and how to do it, since it impacts the ongoing play). These are only a few examples, but I think you’ll get the point. All aboard!

General Organizing Narrative Approaches

The Harry Potter Approach: Organize your class into three groups to match the houses in the Harry Potter series: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff (leaving  Slytherin out). The three houses are told that they will compete for the house cup throughout the year. Points will be awarded for in-class effort, assignment, quiz and test performance, etc. Points may also be taken for behavior infractions. Different parts of the syllabus can be re-named according to various classes held at Hogwarts: potions (grammar), herbology (vocabulary), charms (speaking), and defense against the dark arts (writing). Just about anything you can think of doing in or with your class can be re-imagined as something from the Potter series. And the pull of Potter on HS students is strong. This past summer saw a Harry Potter exhibition in Tokyo (with 8000 yen souvenir wands!) and next year sees the opening of a Harry Potter theme park in Osaka.

For Homework or Discipline

The Homework Tessarae: If your high school is like my daughter’s, you have trouble getting students to do homework. Well, in addition to connecting homework to classroom lessons (make sure HW content is “necessary” in the subsequent lesson), try the Hunger Games Tessarae. Tessarae is a system in the book/movie where characters can get more food for their families if they add their name to the Hunger Games lottery (reaping). In the book, adding your name to the lottery increases your chances of being chosen for the games (and probably dying), but we can we can put a nicer spin on this by saying that if you COMPLETE your homework on time and to a certain standard, your name gets added into a pot for a class lottery with a good nice prize. This idea is similar to the speed camera lottery idea tried successfully in Europe. If you do an exceptional job, you can get your name added even more times! This gives the teacher an easy way to acknowledge and reward effort. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be a Goblet of Fire.

The Secret Student: This idea, via Dylan Wiliam, requires that you select and monitor one student each day–secretly. At the end of the day, if the student’s behavior has be sufficiently positive, the student is identified to the class and a point is added toward a future reward prize (a class trip, a class party, a special sweet, etc.). If the secret student’s behavior has not been good (the student has been uncooperative, disruptive, or failed to speak only in English during the pair work activities, etc.), then the class is informed that they didn’t earn a point for the day. The name of the unsuccessful secret student is NOT revealed. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be used just as it is, with the addition of house points also being given or taken away.

For Projects

From Project to Game (extended from an idea by Nicola Whitton in Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching): Ask students to design and make an A-Z school or community introduction booklet. Each pair of students is assigned a different letter of the alphabet and a different topic (a=art class, b=basketball club, etc.). Their task is to take a picture and write a short description introducing that thing. The goal of the project is to make a student-produced photo introduction to the school or community. For the game part, the teacher is assigned the letter X. The teacher makes a cryptic photo card explaining that the X marks the location of some kind of treasure or treasure map or clue to the location of some treasure that students have to puzzle out. Over the next few days/weeks, the students are engaged in solving clues or riddles to find the treasure. See the post on ARGs if you would like to know more about this type of activity.

That’s it for now. I hope to update this list in the future, but I think there is enough here to help you understand what gamification–or rather gameful design–can do for you and how it can do so.

This post is part of a series on gamification:

  1. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
  2. Triggers, Ability, and Motivation
  3. Mechanics
  4. The Downside and How to Avoid It
  5. The Whole Hog?
  6. ARGs
  7. Required Reading
  8. HabitRPG and Other Web-based Systems

 

First Image: Fagment from Train Wreck, 1922. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Train_Wreck_1922.jpg

Second Image: Fragment from Train on a Big Bridge. Source: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:KSR_Train_on_a_big_bridge_05-02-12_71.jpeg

 

EFL Gamification 8: HabitRPG and Other Web-based Services

doors

Gameful design is something that is perhaps better learned from experience than from PPT slides or blog posts. When we start an explanation with motivation (as I did here) or habits (as I did here), it is hard to understand what gameful design should “look like” when it is deployed. One thing in particular, the use of narrative, needs to be seen to be understood. In another earlier post (here), I described what was for me a kind of epiphenal moment in my quest to understand how gameful learning  can help with motivation and learning. It came when I was reading Jane McGonigal’s book. After I read that, I felt like I finally had a workable example of the power of narrative in creating a game from something else entirely. I called the post Mechanics because for me the process of laying a narrative onto a something that would become a game equaled the process of “gamification.” Points and badges are often thought of as the mechanics of gamification, but if we think about making something more gamelike–that is playful, meaningful, delightful–then points and badges are really part of the  details that need to be worked out later. It is the narrative structure, in combination with a workable feedback system (here’s where your points and badges come in) that makes the experience meaningfully gamelike.

In order to see this idea of applying a narrative onto something different, I offer for your consideration today a few examples. You can try them out with your friends or family or by yourself to see how they feel. Of course, it is not the same as laying a narrative on top of an EFL class, but you’ll get an idea of what it is like to work toward your goals within the details of a story. All of these sites require registration and regular participation, so make sure you have the time and the stomach for a month of “play.” And notice first of all how each of these sites works on the same basic idea–nudging you to complete YOUR goals.

HabitRPG is a site to help you to establish positive habits for life, for work, and for study. It’s really a flexible task and time management tool that has a gamelike design. You use the system by deciding your daily routines and one-time to-dos. You also set your rewards and monitor your habits. It sounds a little confusing, but it is actually a fairly easy interface. The system is incredibly flexible and could be used as easily with training learning strategies as with developing good diet routines. Here is a blog article by Nik Peachey detailing how to use it. It includes his assessment of the tool.

Similar to HabitRPG but with more of a focus on healthy eating and living is Health Month. It uses a simple, friendly user interface at which you play turns (set goals and assess yourself). They also nudge you regularly with e-mail messages. It’s a nice system that works on a monthly basis; but it’s not really focused on study goals, and not really flexible beyond its health and lifestyle focus. Within those areas, however, it is quite a nice experience. I tried it to help me diet and reduce my internet time.

For more of a fitness emphasis, try Fitocracy. Its purpose is fitness motivation and it uses a combination of awareness-raising, goal-setting, habit-forming, and social media to get you to understand fitness better, plan your own fitness routines, and network or challenge other Fitocraccy players. It works for all levels of fitness they say, but unless you are fairly familiar with some exercises and terminology, you may find it a little difficult to understand what you should do. Plus the system is quite large with many functions. I found it a little  hard just to get orientated. But if you are serious about fitness, you will probably find this site meets your needs.

Nextup is Chore Wars. Chore Wars is designed for families or couples or any people  living together who find it hard to get the everyday chores of cooking and cleaning done regularly. The solution? Gamification. Each person chooses his/her chores and competes with others in completing more of them more efficiently. The narrative, as the name suggests is a World of Warcraft / Dungeons and Dragons world of adventures (chores) and quests (chores again). As you complete chores, your elf or wizard or dwarf earns XPs (experience points). If you are really using the system well,  you can introduce your own creatively-named rewards into the play.

But let’s not forget the world of education. World of Classcraft is a site offering the service of listing and tracking your class within a World of Warcraft / Dungeons and Dragons theme. According to their website, they are “an educational augmented-reality multiplayer role-playing game.” You really have to be familiar with the play and progression in World of Warcraft to understand what you have to do here. For that reason alone, it may be a little daunting. Recently, they tried (unsuccessfully) gain funding for a free web-based version of the game. If you just want to check it out, there is a nice video at the site showing how a teacher (actually the game developer) uses it in his physics classes.

And finally, in one of the more unusual (and looser) applications of gamification for learning, there is the Teacher Development game. It is a loose collection of online videos and tutorials showing how to teach EFL better. You can find it here.

And that’s it. If you really want to understand gamified learning, trying out any one of these sites can help you learn a little. As you play, however, keep thinking about what works and doesn’t work for you. Is the system accessible? What is the narrative? Does it make any difference? And finally, most importantly: Does the system make it easy reach your goals? How exactly does it do this?

This post is just one of a series of posts on gamification. The others are here:

  1. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
  2. Triggers, Ability, and Motivation
  3. Mechanics
  4. The Downside and How to Avoid It
  5. The Whole Hog?
  6. ARGs
  7. Required Reading

 

Image fragment from Les Portes by Paul Evans http://unsplash.s3.amazonaws.com/batch%208/les-portes.jpg

 

 

 

Fine-tuning Your Classroom Skills: Doug Lemov Catalogs How to Teach Like a Champion

Teach Like a Champion Book Cover

Hey! EFL teachers in Japan! No disrespect, but you probably need this book.  If you  are a native speaker EFL teacher in a country where there is more interest  than accomplishment in learning English, you probably need this book. You might be one of the few educated, trained, and disciplined among us, but chances are, you are not. More likely, you belong to the majority– by and large and by most accounts, a ragtag bunch of misfitsMost of us fell into this profession and were not trained as teachers exactly; I mean, not in the sense of teachers who went to teachers college, studied theory and techniques, did practicums, and got jobs in school systems run by school boards, with standards, supervisors, paperwork, and training. Many of us were waiters, travelers, English majors, or other such mostly unemployables who began teaching EFL and then learned how to do it in a combination of certificate courses, graduate courses, conferences, and keeping our eyes open on the job. Or you may be a Japanese teacher of English as a foreign language, teaching in senior or junior high school after gaining a license that required only a few extra undergraduate courses, completion of a two or three-week placement at your old school, and passing the tests for the prefecture you are now employed by. You know your basic grammar, have a fairly good vocabulary, and are pretty confident that with a little prep time can explain anything between the covers of a textbook. But you have gaps in your knowledge of English usage and classroom management almost as impressive as the unwarranted overconfidence your native English-speaking colleagues bring with them into your school, so full or self-righteousness and irresponsibility. Both you groups of teachers would benefit from this book because not only were you never trained specifically for classroom and learning management, a lot has been learned about teaching and managing classes since you were at school. There is now a good mass of knowledge and techniques that I bet you never took a course in and most likely are unaware of. 

This book is not aimed at EFL teachers, not even a little. But it will tell you, and show you, how to do things with your students that will get them to pay more attention, learn more deeply, and make the most of the time you are now probably doing a good job of frittering largely away. This book by itself will not solve your problems, and you’ll likely find it pushes more regimentation and rigor than either  you or your students need, but man ‘o man there is a lot to be learned here. 49 techniques, roughly half of which you can adapt very nicely for an EFL classroom, are presented by Mr. Lemov. He gleaned them from observing teachers who were getting better-than-expected results in schools whose demographics made those results look almost miraculous. These are techniques that took chunks of a doomed demographic and put them on the Path to College. Some of them are techniques you might indeed be using. But I have managed enough native-English speaking teachers and observed enough Japanese teachers of English in high schools that I can say with quite a bit of certainty, you (and your students!) will benefit from this book. Mr. Lemov provides us with clear explanations, warnings against pitfalls, and short illustrative video clips to make the points easy to understand. Putting them to use will be more difficult, but not impossible, as most of the techniques require only slight adjustments in timing or language. But it is those small changes that can make a huge difference. Techniques such as Cold Calling (picking the student after you have asked the question), Pepper (asking a rapid sequence of questions as review), and concepts such as Ratio (getting students to do more of the thinking) and At Bats (maximizing practice opportunities) can transform the one-way slog of some English classes or the whimsical frivolity of others into real learning environments.

The book has a website. Go there first and look around.  http://teachlikeachampion.com/ Learn a little about Uncommon Schools or Mr. Lemov himself and what he does. Watch some of the videos and see the control and confidence and learning on display. I am quite certain you will begin to see where you may be falling short now. These are schools and teachers who refused to let demographics get in the way of success, who challenge their learners to perform at a higher level, and demand their attention and effort. If you don’t know how to get to that point with your learners, then you probably need this book. It is not a panacea, however, and you will still need to adapt the ideas to fit your subject and classes. In general, the techniques are very cognitive and very behaviorist and so Japanese teachers of English will likely find them more immediately appealing as they will mesh more nicely with current practices. Teachers would do well to not forget the affective and emotional when planning lessons, something Mr. Lemov spends too little time on (from a language teacher’s perspective). But this book can give you a lot of help learning and improving techniques you probably were never exposed to in your education and your own training. It can help you make whatever you are doing more efficient and more effective.

 

EFL Gamification 7: Required Reading

With a few gamification/gameful design posts and much of what I want to say out of the way,  I thought it might be a good time right now to offer a reading list. If you are interested in games and learning and you are just pulling in the occasional article or presentation from your PLE, you are likely getting your info on gamification in less-than-comprehensive bits…and bits…and…bits.  It takes some sifting to see if you get anything good and useful, and that sifting requires a little knowledge and/or experience.  For that reason, and to give yourself a little thinking time, I recommend you try reading a few books. The books mentioned below each contain a diverse range of combinations of theory and examples. Reading through them is like a taking hot air balloon trip over unfamiliar territory, or just climbing up to a high place to get the lay of the land. That said, unfortunately there is no one book that’ll do this completely; you’ll need to read a couple at least. The downside is that books, even the most recent ones, are dated. These are the best of recent books on the topic, but the ideas within them stretch back a decade in some cases. You’ll need to keep trawling your PLE for recent developments. I recommend following a few key people: Nicole Lazzaro, Amy Jo Kim, Gabe Zichermann, and Sebastian Deterding.

I’m working from a few assumptions here: you are a classroom teacher; you work with large classes that often display less than optimal motivation; you have searched online and found lots of short blog articles (particularly business-focused ones) with lots of opinions but not much that is useful for you or your learners; you are interested but skeptical. If this is a reasonably accurate description of you, you’ll likely find my recommendations helpful.

Reality Is Broken (book cover)

One of the things I’ve noticed is that you really ought to try to avoid the term/idea “gamification” and think instead of gameful design or something like that. If that distinction doesn’t mean anything to you yet, Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken is a good way to learn that it is more than just the choice of term that matters. This book will help you make that important change in perspective. She does a great job explaining what games are and why and how they are effective for enjoyment and change. Part 1  of the book is really great–very passionate, very eye-opening, and very clear. She is really does a fine job explaining  intrinsic rewards, unpacking what she sees as the four major categories: the need for satisfying work, how success must be possible, the social environment of our activities, and the craving we all have for higher meaning. She shows how games provide these things and in the process helps you understand how important it is to make use of these things in just about any situation. She challenges your assumptions with arguments that are both passionate and sensible, if a little revolutionary in perspective. As the chapters continue, she covers happiness and her ideas for how games can be a force for good in the world. She does get a little weird in places and you will likely see her more as a zealot than a voice of balanced pedagogy by the time you reach the end. But don’t skip this book. You might not know it, but you need to understand the mindset of gamers/game designers, and Ms. McGonigal is a great guide.

 

Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching (book cover)

Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching is a rather ambitious little academic book edited by Nicola Whitton and Alex Moseley. It is ambitious in that it tries to do many things at the same time: provide rationale for the greater use of games in education; show how games can be designed and deployed; provide a theoretical framework for the evaluation of games for educations; etc. Some of these are done better than others and one might question the reasoning behind the inclusion of a couple of chapters. However, the chapters entitled “Good Game Design Is Good Learning Design” and “Narrative: Let Me Tell You a Story” are particularly good and helpful for teachers who want to know more about what games offer to education. Also, the several sections dealing with alternative reality games (ARGs) really help you to see the the pedagogy and design of such activities. The many examples included and the authors’ experience with campus-wide ARGs make these parts of the book very interesting and practically useful if you would like to try it yourself. Oddly, despite the focus on education, there is little attention to using games for individual classrooms. If you are looking for some ideas to bring into your own classes here, you’ll find a few, but you’ll still need to do the specific designing and construction work yourself. One of the strong points of this book is that points are backed up with citations and references to academic papers. The authors are researchers / practitioners and they manage a good balance between theoretical support and practice. It might seem seem strange to praise a book for including references, but academic literature reviews are something the other authors on this list didn’t  seem to worry too much about.

 

The Mulltiplayer Classroom (book cover)

The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon is what it says it is. If you are looking to set up your course as a game, this is the book for you. See my post on this topic for more details. One of the take-aways from this book is that trying to do so will require a serious re-thinking of how you organize content and a lot of tweaking to get it right for your group of learners. The book is particularly aimed at college teachers who have more control over their curriculum, but various high school and other teachers who have changed their courses into games are also presented as case studies.

 

For the Win (book cover)

For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter might seem a strange choice for a list of gamification books for education, but it is included here because it is a succinct overview that can get you up to speed on the topic. The focus is on how gamification can be used for businesses with a web presence especially, but the Mr. Werbach, in addition to designing and delivering one of the first courses on gamification and another that is available as a MOOC from Coursera.org, does a good job introducing the genre, explaining motivation, the elements of games, and the steps for deploying gamification. There are thousands of  businesses trying really hard to make their websites and businesses more fun, and Mr. Werbach knows a lot about them. Understanding their challenges and how they are meeting them helps in conceptualizing the somewhat parallel problem schools have with engaging students. But that’s about as far as it’ll get you. Recently, Mr. Werbach was asked to recommend a short, humorous video that gives a nice introduction to gamification. This one from PennyArcade is what he suggested.

 

Seductive Interaction Design (book cover)

 

Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen Anderson is a book that will help you understand gameful design. The sub-title, Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences gives you a better idea of what is in this book but Mr. Anderson is a unique thinker with an interesting perspective. The book is not at all about education, it is not even really much about games or gamification; rather it is a book on user experience design from someone who is an expert in web interface design. So why would you want to read it? Well, education begins with getting attention and trust and Mr. Anderson has a lot to say on those topics.

 

The Art of Game Design (book cover)

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell comes highly recommended. Sebastian Deterding, for example, says it is the one to read (along with A Well-Played Game by Bernard De Koven, an old book that is soon to be re-released in an updated version). Mr. Schell, of Carnagie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, and of The International Game Developer’s Association, has both the industry experience (he designed Toontown Online for Disney, for example) and the academic position to be taken very seriously. This book, at more than 500 pages, requires a serious investment in time.  It is theoretical, it is practical, and it will help you to see things differently through different lenses.

 

Embedded Formative Assessment (book cover)

Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam is a book that is not at all about gameful design, and yet what is contained here is very important if you are interested in making learning happen. “Fun is just another word for learning,” said game design guru Raph Koster. And learning happens with feedback–lots of it, in a social context, from peers, teachers, and the learner herself. This book will explain why. This book will sell you on the need for feedback in education. This importance of feedback, for learning, for fun, is at the heart of gameful design. That, and the playfulness that Mr. Anderson talks about (see above). Without good feedback, games become an end unto themselves; the feedback only helps the learner get better at the game. In educational game design, the trick is to use the game to build knowledge or develop skills that go beyond the game. Mr. Wiliam will help to keep your one foot planted squarely in pedagogy. And some of his ideas for providing feedback, you’ll notice if you’re looking through your ludic lens, are pure gamification.

 

 

 

 

Ratios for English and Thinking

I’ve been reading Doug Lemov’s wonderful Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. It’s not because I want to put more of my students on the path to college necessarily–actually the only students I teach these days are college students. No, I got interested in this book because Mr. Lemov did (and still does) something really interesting. He looked at schools that demographically-speaking should have been doing poorly but were actually excelling and he looked into the classrooms for reasons why. His studies of these outlier teachers (videoing and cataloging their techniques) led to this book.  (I find that much of what he says lines up nicely with what Dylan Wiliam recommends as well –see my posts about his Embedded Formative Assessment). I think he is onto something important for learning and teaching–promoting more thinking and more thinking about thinking. Some might argue that that this is an L1 issue, but I don’t think so. And some might argue that it is a little regimental, but again, I don’t think that is the case with most of the techniques. Instead, I find the bulk of techniques are academically healthy and do not preclude more interactive, humanistic approaches. I also find that many–very many actually–of the techniques can be adaptable for EFL and some can be used just as is. This post is about Ratios, an idea–a lens really–that Mr. Lebov uses to talk about cognitive work, but I think can be useful  to consider in EFL teaching.

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The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology (MEXT) has been pushing for greater use of English in the classroom these last few years but especially starting this year in high school. Many teachers accept this and are trying to follow this directive to some degree; but many teachers have already decided they’ll be using much less English than MEXT wants. At my institute, we’ll be observing classes and measuring the percentage of English teachers use with students to produce a ratio. Some teachers will try to up the percentage of English they use in the classroom while we are there, no doubt. Some will just go ahead and teach the way they’ve always been teaching, explaining things in Japanese mostly. The simple ratio of English to Japanese used in the classroom is too simplistic, some teachers argue. Some things are more efficiently taught in Japanese, some say. Students won’t understand if English is used, some say. They’ll complain and shut down, some complain. But the official MEXT line is for teachers to just do it and let the pieces fall where they may. And it was with this English-in-English issue on a back burner in my mind that I came across the technique labelled Ratio in the Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons section of Mr. Lemov’s book.  Mr. Lemov has a lot to say about ratios, not in language teaching, but in thinking teaching.

One of the most important goals as teachers is to cause students to do as much of the cognitive work–the writing, the thinking, the analyzing, the talking–as possible. The proportion of the cognitive work students do in your classroom is known as your Ratio  (pg. 92).

I really like this idea because it addresses something I see happening all the time in classrooms: the teacher is at the front working really hard; yet many, if not most, of the learners are not engaged and not thinking. A failure to keep learners engaged  at all  is one of the shortcomings I regularly observe, and when we talk about it, some teachers come back that it is not their job to “entertain” students. This misses the point in two ways. First, engagement and entertainment are  different things (though there is overlap). Without the attention of learners nothing can happen. You can “hook” them in many ways. You can bring in a little multimedia, do something unexpected, react to the content of the text,etc. But that is not the only thing missing from many lessons. There is also a definite lack of cognitive engagement in most classes, a point that many teachers seem to miss as well. Learners sit, minds passively waiting for the answer, for the chance to enter info into notebooks, with as little cognitive effort possible. “Thinking is hard,”Daniel Willingham says in Why Don’t Students Like School? “Unless the cognitive conditions are right, [people] will avoid thinking” (pg. 3). Mr. Lemov acknowledges that students need to be trained to think more actively. They need to be engaged in that thinking process as the teaching happens, as the lesson unfolds. He distinguishes between thinking ratio and participation ratio, two related but not exactly the same ratios. The goal of increasing  the participation ratio is to have students apply and consolidate their knowledge as often as possible. But challenging students to think and actively wrestle with unfamiliar ideas is also important. By just giving the information to students, a chance to make them think is missed. Students need to be encouraged to think whenever it is possible. Making them think and vocalize their thinking gives a good thinking ratio.

A successful lesson is rarely marked by a teacher’s getting a good intellectual workout at the front of the room. Push more and more of the cognitive work out to students as soon as they are ready, with the understanding that the cognitive work must be on-task, focused, and productive (pg. 93).

So how is this done? Well, Mr. Lemov provides 10 methods for integrating this while the teaching is happening. Instead of just giving the information, ask questions to pull it out of students. Break problems into smaller, more answerable parts, facilitate deduction with examples, ask for reactions or whys, and just generally teach the habits of discussion–the process, the language, and the need to support statements and opinions. This leads to better participation and thinking ratios, and ultimately to better thinking habits and better, more active, learning.

classroomheads

Back in the EFL classroom, we can see a problem right away with the Teach-English-in-English ratio. It is too teacher-centered. It assumes that simply using more English in the classroom will result in more gains in proficiency. Um…it might over years of English classes with various subjects and instructors, but  I’m not sure most teachers buy into this cumulative effect aspiration.  It also ignores the thinking ratio and the participation ratio, which are very important because they focus on what is going on inside the learners. It can be argued that without a better thinking/participation ratio, more English will not necessarily result in significant English learning. Most of the gains will be exiguous at best. Students will get used to hearing some commands, some comments, some greetings, some procedural language–all important, yes–but they will not get used to engaging with an interlocutor in English, understanding ideas, reacting to ideas and feelings, evaluating and forming opinions, soundly supporting ideas, etc.  in English. Not unless there is engagement and thinking on a regular basis.

Teaching English in English effectively involves engaging learners in English and making them think. It is communicative in the most personal/academic/cognitive/affective way. That’s why I like the lens of thinking ratio. That’s why I think Mr. Lemov has something to offer for EFL classes. If teachers try to improve their thinking ratio and English ratio at the same time, I think there will be an improvement in both.

 

 

Brain-friendly Teaching in Practice: Nick Bilbrough Introduces Memory Activities for Language Learning

Memory, or rather its quirks and limitations, in language education is sometimes like the weather in that old joke: everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it. Yet memory limitations affect every aspect of what we as teachers and programs are trying to do. In the last few years, “brain-friendly” teaching, “brain-targeted” teaching and “neuroscience-informed” teaching have all been tossed around. In this blog, I’ve covered several books that deal with this (here, here, and here, for example). There are programs and resource sites like the Neuro Education Initiative at John Hopkins University, The NeuroLeadership Institute (associated with author  David Rock), USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute,  Harvard’s Mind / Brain / Behavior initiative, and an Annenberg Learner Resource called Neuroscience and the Classroom.  But none of these are by or for language teachers specifically. I’m sure there are  teachers who putting all this new knowledge to good practical use in the classroom, and I’m equally sure that much of what is being sold as “brain friendly” is what has always been done by good teachers anyway. But if you visit a lot of language classrooms, you might be amazed at how brain unfriendly some are.

In my job as a teacher trainer, I just don’t see all that many approaches and activities that show an appreciation for the finickiness of human memory. There are, as I see it, two possible reasons for this. One–a failure to take note of the mountain of research and how it sometimes screams out the need for pedagogical change–I would like to lay squarely at the feet of language teachers and language teaching programs. The other–a general lack of published materials and accepted classroom techniques–has and continues to be a problem; but Nick Bilbrough’s 2011 book Memory Activities for Classroom Learning begins to correct this problem. Much of what has worked in language classrooms over the years has done so because it has been sensitive to the cognitive limitations of learners and has leveraged the affective and social elements of content and classrooms. What is needed is a new lens, a new way of interpreting  successful activities that will inform the selection of activities in a task sequence or syllabus. That’s what this book does.

 

Memory research has advanced greatly in the past few years and Mr. Bilbrough does a good job of summing up and presenting what you need to know in short executive summaries at the beginning of each unit. If you don’t know why Ebbinghaus, or Craik & Lockhart, or Sweller are important for  your job, or  if the terms phonological loop, visio-spatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer don’t mean much to you, this book will provide a good introduction. And if you are familiar with all these, you’ll find the way Mr. Bilbrough turns this theory into actual classroom activities very interesting. It is my belief that even if you don’t use any of the ready-made activities directly from the book (most of which are very well-chosen by the way), your perspective on your own approach in your classes will change. Because once we start to think of why some things are better held in working memory or why some things are more likely to be stored in long-term memory, we’ll naturally feel the need to adjust our explanations, our pace and timing and selection of activities. Learners and teachers both want variety in lessons; but they both also want to see learning happening. This book will help you understand and apply some ideas for making things easier for learners to remember, which means easier to learn.

I think Mr. Bilbrough has done a very nice job identifying the key points connected to memory and how it affects the learner and the classroom. If you look at his unit headings, I think you will agree. There is enough flexibility here in the topics covered to meet the needs of teachers who are wedded to textbooks and those who use a more Dogme-ish approach.

  1. Mental Stretching
  2. Making Language Memorable
  3. Retrieving
  4. Repeating and Reactivating
  5. Memory Techniques and Mnemonics
  6. Learning By Heart
  7. Memory Games

This book is a nice start. I think that Cambridge may want to revisit many of the wonderful old books in the Handbooks for Language Teachers series and reorganize some of the content in line with more recent research and pedagogy. Books on affect , arts integration, skill mastery and transfer,  learning environments, challenge, fun, formative assessment, etc. are all needed. But for the time being, Memory Activities for Language Learning is a step in the right direction. And if I may be permitted to expand on my suggestion a little, a little more attention to relevant research would be a good idea, I think. One problem with this book is its sporadic use of citations. Some areas provide good references, others are devoid of references, and at least one reference is kind of puzzling. I love Chip and Dan Heath’s books, but calling them “educational psychologists” gives them more academic gravitas than they warrant. Teachers who are interested in finding out more about research and findings in memory will get precious little help from this volume beyond those good unit introductions to the basics, I’m afraid. The choice of online resources is also disappointingly limited.

But these criticisms are very minor. I highly recommend this book. Every language teacher should read the chapter intros and browse through the extensive list of suggested activities.

A year ago I wrote this post on working memory that you may find interesting if you are looking to further explore the topic of memory and learning.

 

EFL Gamification 6: ARGs

This is the 6th post in a series exploring the use of gamification (to use the buzzword) or gameful design (to more accurately represent my intentions) in the teaching of English as a foreign language, particularly in secondary school settings. Earlier posts  dealt with (1) motivation, (2) habits, (3) mechanics, (4) pitfalls and misunderstandings, and (5) turning your course into a game. This post will look at ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games, and for a definition I’d like to turn to Whitton & Moseley from their 2012 book, Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching, the best resource I’ve found for designing this type of game activity:

“ARGs use narrative, community and problem-solving in a game that unfolds over weeks and months, combining the real and virtual worlds. The players work together to solve the puzzles and develop the story themselves through [the interaction with and/or] the creation of artifacts, both digital and real world, and the mythologies that surround the game” (pg. 143).

ARGs are often interactive narratives in the form of a mystery/treasure hunt (see National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code if you are somehow unfamiliar with the genre) and players work together to unravel  clues or collect items. The AR part is that the story is just a story, while the clues are placed in the real world in the form of e-mails, websites, letters, maps, audio tapes, graffiti, or just about anything that can convey information. In the book, Ms. Whitton discusses what ARGs are and  how to set one up, and mentions several examples. She  describes her involvement with the ARGOSI project, the design and creation of an ARG at a UK university. The purpose was to help new students get used to an unfamiliar new city, the campus, and the library system. In terms of process, they first decided on the learning outcomes they wanted to aim for and considered the limitations they had to work with (time, money, etc.); then they drew up the initial concept for the game and sketched out a narrative; next they designed the challenges (puzzles) and created the artifacts (letters, maps, etc.). In some ways, the process is similar to Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter (covered in this earlier post–you’ll need to scroll down a little). Both are organized by narrative. If you have a gripping story, the rest should flow along. For SuperBetter, the story was personal recovery. It is obviously important to the player. For an ARG, the artifacts (and how they fit in the story) will probably be key.

And for language learning, the artifacts are what you’ll be directing your learners towards and so you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions as you plan and create them:

  1. Are they intrinsically interesting? Do they have good ‘face validity’? Do they fit with your narrative?
  2. Are they accessible/doable for your learners in terms of level?
  3. Is feedback built into each task so learners know when they are successful?
  4. Are they in the right mode (reading, listening) for the skills you want learners to practice?
  5. Are they accessible to learners inside and outside of class (web-based, snail-mailed, copied)?
  6. Will interaction with them result in learning? How? And how will you know?
  7. Where will learners interact with artifacts? Will it be homework or group exploration and/or discussion in class?
If we think about the content we need students to learn, it shouldn’t be hard to design the artifacts. You can use textbook language (or even the textbook itself) for puzzles. You can make recordings on cassette tapes  to make clues seem quaint or dated (and so students need to use school players!), and you can create letters and websites using target language that students will need to read and re-read. The only limitations are your creativity and the amount of time you can dedicate to the project. For the sake of keeping appearances real, it will really help if you have a graphics designer or some graphic design skills yourself. But with a few tools (MS Word, for word processing and image processing, Audacity for sound recording and editing, WordPress.org, Edublogs.org or some other blogging service), you should be able to make most of the artifacts you want. Ms. Whitton’s team based their story on the blog of a fictional character. The other artifacts they made and used are available from the ARGOSI website (click the Resources tab). And you can see the blog and game itself at violaquest.org (if/when it is available again–it wasn’t at the time of writing). Other ARGs can also be found online and they may provide you with some ideas for creating your own. One similar to the ARGOSI project, Who Is Herring Hale?, is presented as a case study here. And another ARG, created to raise money for cancer research, can be found here. For something more language-focused, please take a look at the work of Paul Driver, an educational designer based in Portugal. At his website you can find information about his Spywalk game and other “location-based urban games.” There are links to academic presentations and articles and Youtube videos showing the game in action.

 

An important point to consider is learning outcomes. The ARGOSI project had a fairly short and straightforward list. The designers wanted the new students to learn a little more about Manchester and how to use the university library. As a language teacher, you’ll need to decide where to put your focus. ARGs are probably best for introducing learners to content or behaviors. In order to maintain the illusion, novelty and fun of the game, you can’t really add drills or require repetitions of behavior, though if you get the challenge level right, you can get learners to repeatedly interact with the text. In contrast with a game like SuperBetter which could be used to establish positive learning habits, an ARG might best be used to have learners explore resources and language. Of course, you could in your design of artifacts steer learners to all sorts of practice–intensive listening or reading, skimming or scanning, dealing with different accents or genres, etc.). How you design the artifacts and how learners will interact with them in the game are really crucial for pedagogic success. This is especially tricky given that you are trying to balance the narrative and fun with the pedagogy. It all comes down to design in the end. Without a clever story and appropriate-challenge-level artifacts, the game won’t fly; without pedagogically sound tasks with appropriate language level/skill focus/strategy focus, the game won’t teach.

 

To finish here, I’d like to add a few cautionary words (summarizing from Ms. Whitton’s unit on ARGs from her book). You really need to test out your games. Get feedback from everyone you can and plan on tweaking it for all eternity. You also need to have realistic expectations. All of the ARGs mentioned above–funded, backed by unis, and made by teams of talented professionals–were underutilized (to be polite). The Herring Hale game saw only 42 people play even one task and only 12 participants finish the game. Violaquest was similarly ignored en masse. As a teacher you have a captive audience. You’ll likely need to build participation into your course instead of relying on the Field of Dreams approach (if you build it, they will come). That said, one of the most successful (highly rated and attempted by the largest numbers of people) activities/tasks were those that were designed for action–planning and taking pictures and uploading them, for example. These tasks drew more interest, engaged more participants, and got them to collaborate and share more. Make sure you include some of these; don’t just make your ARG a series of puzzles. This may beg the question of whether you want to aim for more of a game with project-based elements or project-based activities with more game-like elements…

 

This leads to the final question of whether it is worth it. If done right, I guarantee  you’ll give your learners an education experience they’ll never forget. But it’ll cost ya. It will take a lot of planning and production time.

 

Also in this EFL gamification series:

Part 1: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards

Part 2: Triggers, Ability, and Motivation

Part 3: Mechanics

Part 4: The Downside and How to Avoid It

Part 5: The Whole Hog

 

Photo Credit: Detail from Look at the Map, or Play Some Checkers by Dr. Roy Winkelman,  at http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/look-at-the-map-or-play-some-checkers.html

EFL Gamification 5: The Whole Hog?


This is the fifth post on gamification in EFL. The first was an attempt to understand motivation. The second considered changing specific behaviors. The third looked at mechanics, or the structure needed to make game-based learning engaging. The fourth was about some of the problems that can happen when gamification (especially just pointsification–the casual addition of points and other game elements) is put to use for manipulative purposes without enough attention to the underlying motivations and personalities of learners. This post will look at  turning your whole class into a game, or put more metaphorically, going the whole hog. There are really two ways of doing this. One is to design the course as a simulation. That means to create an immersive and realistic environment that requires learners to play a role. It  is a kind of extreme content-based form of learning and requires considerable flexibility with curriculum content and probably works best if you are aiming learners at a specific career. An example might be simulating planning and opening a store for business students. The instructor would then need to create all the websites, documents, etc. needed to support the simulation. The second, and the one I’ll focus on in this post, involves re-imagining the present content using a role-playing game structure. Traditional content (including textbooks and teaching modules) are used, but a wider variety of tasks and assignments are used. Game genre details and a  narrative structure are employed to make the progression through the material seem more like a game. This is more possible in institutional EFL courses, but still comes with a few conditions, the first being your familiarity with the genre of games.

Are you a gamer? I’m not talking about a little Angry Birds while commuting. I mean, have you spent huge blocks of your life immersed in World of Warcraft or Halo or The Sims or one of the many other places/pastimes where gamers spend time? Ask yourself how much you know about games and how much you really play. If you play 13 hours a week, you can consider yourself only an average member of the gamer sector of society; if you are up to 20 hours a week, you are officially “hard-core”; and if you can somehow cut your working, sleeping, and social hours down far enough to manage 45 hours a week, you are (by any account) “extreme”  (McGonigal, 2011, p. 3). Of course, you don’t need to be a fanatic about games to turn your classroom into a game, but you do need a certain amount of familiarity with the genre. You will need rather intimate knowledge of the structure and pacing of games–the way items are acquired, the way quests go down, the types of challenges, the way characters interact, the reward systems, etc.–and you will need to be able to retool your classroom and syllabus in a way that mimics this. You will need to know the lingo: guilds, raids, wipes, (point) farming, experience points (XP), etc.  Unsure of yourself? Back away from this idea now. But if you are a gamer and game lover, it is an option to embrace whole hoggedly. I speak as a researcher/observer here. I have not done this myself and so I will be only reporting on what I have read, pointing you to other sources and egging you to go out there and give it your best shot if you are interested.

There is, admittedly, something of a square peg in a round hole fit when taking the immersive multimedia world of a game and using it for a brick ‘n mortar face-to-face classroom. First of all, students are not sitting at computers interacting with audio/visual/narratives made by teams of talented professionals with an average production cost of $10 million (Whitton, 2010, in Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching). But if everyone is up for a bit of pretending, or suspension of disbelief, it can go well. Both Jane McGonigal in Reality is Broken, and Lee Sheldon in The Multiplayer Classroom believe that game culture is second nature for the students in our classes. They have grown up playing games and are very comfortable with the way games engineer player progression. Ms. McGonigal states that the members of the gamer generation have more problems with reality–including most school work–because it lacks interesting challenge, the satisfying work, promise of success, and actionable feedback that is usually the norm. In other words, most courses aren’t engaging for many learners and they are likely to be up for a change. Or as Mr. Sheldon optimistically puts it, “we have yet to discover a class that cannot be taught in this way” [as a game] (pg. 9).

Mr. Sheldon’s book is the best resource I’ve been able to find for designing coursework as a game. Indeed, that is the sub-title of the book. In addition to being a trial-and-error account of his attempts to do this with his own university game design courses, the book contains several case studies by different teachers, the closest one among them to a high school language course was Denishia Buchanan’s  high school biology class. If you really have no idea where to begin, this book and in particular Ms. Buchanan’s case history, will help you out.

Mr. Sheldon will help you understand basic class organization and his unique (to the world of institutionalized education) approach to grading. By setting up coursework as a series of group and individual challenges and by creating a point system where students start with “0” and have to climb up through the levels towards their final grades, he manages (albeit not without a lot of tweaking) to make a grading system that mimics that of game progression.

In addition to just renaming groups as guilds and assignment as quests, both these teachers managed to make use of narrative to envelope the course and allowed learners considerable choice and flexibility. Narrative pulls the players/learners forward, making the course a story–their story; it creates in learners the desire to achieve hero goals; and it keeps everyone looking forward to what will happen next (Dansky, 2007). For this to work, however, there must be challenging but achievable things to do. Adoption of an inquiry-based curriculum that provides both variety and flexibility and lets the learners put their creativity to work seems a prerequisite. The balance, however,  of choice and rigorous requirements seems to be a tricky one to manage (Whitton, 2012).

And even if you get that right, you’ll need to spend some time designing to facilitate greater interaction. Though it is often touted as a great feature of online games, the  forming of groups to combine strengths to overcome particularly difficult challenges is not as common as game proponents might suggest. Ducheneaut (2006) studied World of Warcraft and found that players only begin to start grouping at the latter stages of game play at higher levels of the game, after they have found what they cannot do alone. That means that you can’t expect learners to collaborate on their own; you’ll have to design your activities so that group sharing is facilitated. Mr. Sheldon, for example, required both individual and group assignments during his courses, a practical way of ensuring both accountability and collaboration.

But finally, even if you get everything right, you still might not make everyone happy. There is considerable research that suggests that not all students like to experience courses as games, especially as one of those role-playing types of games that can can sound so hokey to the non-fan (Bekebrede et al., 2011).

Well, there you go. It’s obviously a challenge. It’ll take a lot of time to design all the quests and restructure the flow of lessons. But reading the stories of teachers who have done it can help you see the attraction of going whole hog with turning your course into a game. If you think you might like a little help with creating the structure and rule details, there is now a web service to help you. Called World of Classcraft, it provides roles, progressions, and rules of acquiring experience points or taking damage hit points.

And finally, you can read about an attempt to turn a language course into a large-scale alternate reality game (ARG) in Europe in Connolly, Stansfield, and Hainey (2011) linked below.

June 2013 Update: I recently came across a blog post from a teacher who had tried to gamify her class (as in turn the classroom experience into something closer to that of a game). Titled How I Turned My Classroom into a ‘Living Video Game’ and Saw Achievement Soar, the post explains (frustratingly) briefly how Ms Joli Barker, a second year elementary school teacher used technology (Skype, QR codes, GoAnimate, Voki, and Xtranormal), project-based learning narratives (?), and some  international exchanges to boost the scores of her students quite dramatically. She created a  basic structure of tasks and levels, challenges, and avatars, and re-tooled her assessment in a way that matches video games (similar to Mr. Sheldon). Without a little more detail, it is hard to picture what classes were really like, but the idea is very interesting and the results impressive.

Another June, 2013 update: Here is a geography class taught as a zombie survival game.

 

Bekebede, G., Warmelink, H., and Mayer, I. (2011). Reviewing the need for gaming in education to accommodate the net generation. Computers & Education, 57/2, 1521-1529.

Connolly, T. M., Stansfield, M., & Hainey, T. (2011). An alternate reality game for language learning: ARGuing for multilingual motivation. Computers & Education, 57(1), 1389-1415. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.01.009

Dansky, R. (2007). Introduction to game narrative. In C.M. Bateman (ed.) Game writing: Narrative skills for video games. Boston, MA: Charles River Media.

Whitton, N. (2012). Good game design is good learning design. In N. Whitton and A. Moseley (eds.) Using games to enhance learning and teaching. New York: Routledge.

 

Also in this EFL gamification series:

Part 1: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards

Part 2: Triggers, Ability, and Motivation

Part 3: Mechanics

Part 4: The Downside and How to Avoid It

Part 6: ARGs

 

Are MOOCs Disruptive? They Are Where I Live

A recent post in the Mind/Shift blog on the dismal completion rates of MOOCs ends with the question of whether or not they are disruptive. For education policy people and trend-watchers this seems to be an important question. But as the article states, and as a little consideration suggests, completion rates may not be the most important thing to think about. I think their very existence is indicative of their disruptive status. From the perspective of an EFL teacher trainer in Japan–and I’m guessing I can speak for many people throughout the world hungry for better-quality education in English–MOOCs are a very significant development.

People in North America (where I hail from) may not be conscious of a few things that we expat English teachers have been noticing for years. The world is getting smaller is one way to describe this major sea change over the last two decades. I can divide my 26 years in Japan into roughly two periods: the age before and after the Internet became available. Yes, before the Internet arrived, I had access to three English newspapers, a dozen or so magazines, lots of  movies, and even taped US television–all of which were precious resources we used to build lesson activities with authentic English. But now, everything seems to be available, only a few clicks away. The problem these days though, is that content is not organized and is often not accessible as it is for people from other cultures or with less-than-native English proficiency. In countries like Japan and China, there are large domestic populations and armies of translators and local businesses all too willing to repackage and charge locals for more comprehensive packages of content. This has often created an artificial barrier to access on of content on the web by individuals.

At the same time, however, it has become easier and more common to travel and study abroad and meet and interact with people from other cultures, both in foreign countries and in Japan. Inbound tourism, mostly a collection of international businessmen and their families twenty years ago, has become more frequent and more diverse. What I want to say is, everyone is aware that the world is getting smaller and will continue to do so in the future. They’re just not sure what to do about it exactly.

What does this have to do with MOOCs? Well, the availability and institutional trust value of schools offering MOOCs means a great deal to a great many people in various corners of the world. Anyone can go on the web and practice writing, but a comprehensive course offered, for example, by Duke University is a completely different thing. MOOCs give access to higher education opportunities that can be trusted to people who normally couldn’t or wouldn’t access such opportunities. And what about completion rates? I just don’t see that as an issue. Many people are trying this system out, taking a few cars for a test drive as it were. They are testing both the courses and themselves and getting a better idea of how the combination of these can work. Schools are becoming more sensitive to the needs of such learners, too. That writing course I mentioned is a relatively recent addition to the catalog and obviously aimed at entry-level students.

The signs I see mostly point to positive improvements. The screenshot above is from Coursera‘s website. More courses in more languages, and the option to get real credit for your work. I think we are moving into a new phase here. I regularly recommend courses to friends, colleagues, and students here in Japan, regardless of their nationality. Not taking advantage of these courses is criminally stupid in my opinion, even if that means just watching the videos and lurking around a little. There is much to learn in many different ways. If you haven’t tried it yet, please go to the website and take a look at the offerings. I guarantee you’ll find something that interests you.

Recently, some courses have begun to offer Signature Track registration. It’s a paid service that allows you to experience courses in a way that allows you to earn a verifiable certificate. It seems MOOCs are moving toward a more standard e-learning model. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but completely free MOOCs may be on their way out. Get ’em while you can.

May 1, 2013 Update: Here is a nice blog article with current stats and comments on MOOC users.

 

Photo credits: Top, screengrab from NASA video (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130331.html ); Bottom two from Coursera’s website (https://www.coursera.org/ )