From Newb to 1337: Expertise and the Learning Experience

A few nights ago, my learning theory class found itself on a brief tangent about the famous psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, known not only for his tremendous work as a researcher, but also for collecting the majority of his data from psychological experiments he conducted on himself (which, for obvious reasons, would probably cause your department head to laugh you out of the psych lab by today’s standards). I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that Ebbinghaus’s strategy is more or less the same thing I’m now doing with my World of Schoolcraft project, except (to complicate matters) I already have a boatload of prior experience with the work I’m doing, thus making me a confound within a confound within a confound.

                      

Who knew I'd end up sharing so much in common with a guy who had a beard this rad?

The reason I bring this up is because I've finally started tanking dungeons now that Sententiosus has passed level 15, and, in doing so, I’ve realized that a major conflict in assessing my learning is that I’ve long-since moved beyond what could be considered a novice in the field of gaming. I briefly touched on this during my entry on levels 1 – 5, but because I have so much prior knowledge about games and, more specifically, World of Warcraft, I can’t provide a terribly accurate account of what it’s like to learn from the perspective of a complete “newb." To anyone unfamiliar with the field of educational psychology, we call anyone who cannot see inconsistencies, trends, and information in a given situation a novice and any one who can an expert; in a classroom environment, this might include a master teacher recognizing chatty student groups as being off-task and requiring intervention while an amateur teacher assumes those same groups, because the students are talking to one another, are on task and the project is going well (an especially common misperception by new educators). This expert-novice dichotomy may be best explained if you consider any task in which you could be considered an expert (from skydiving to tying your shoes) and assess how the following fit into your ability to react to novel problems involving that task (borrowed from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School):

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts of propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.
4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

If you can successfully connect a skill you possess with the above points, I'm sure you can understand how my prior knowledge in the gaming “subject area” has produced an inescapable, underlying impact on my ability to play as a “new” warrior. My six-year, on-and-off again relationship with World of Warcraft has long-since taught me how to recognize patterns of information that would not be recognized by novices (like how to rapidly change my attack strategy when fighting two enemies instead of one) and readily recall gaming experiences that would help me overcome seemingly novel challenges (like protecting my allies in combat). Even though I did not play the warrior class through my WoW learning process, the hours I spent raiding as a warlock and death knight from 2005 through 2009 afforded me many, many opportunities to hone my tanking skills by protecting my "guildies" in combat (often against much more challenging enemies than those Sententiosus is facing at level 20). As a result, I already have a basic understanding of the most fundamental skills and priorities necessary to be an “expert” tank: how to generate threat and keep enemies attacking me instead of my peers, how to group enemies together so my peers can maximize damage, how to use my special abilities like Shield Block to make healing me significantly easier, and how to generate the most damage output while serving my primary purpose of maintaining enemy attention.

No one said our guild logo was emotionally sensitive to those affected by the explosion of the Death Star.

A novice learner would not inherently possess such skills and would much more likely fumble his or her way through half of the game before developing an expert foundation onto which he or she could construct a better understanding of what to do and how to do it. This could, in essence, make or break the player’s ability to successfully navigate content with his or her peers, especially when faced with sudden increases in content difficulty.

                                                                                                                  

For example:

Three days ago, while running through the Wailing Caverns (a dungeon on the Kalimdor continent), my group and I found ourselves in a room with several magic-casting enemies scattered about in a semi-circle. When, in the midst of combat, our party’s warlock feared one of the magic-casting enemies, the mob’s frantic running alerted all twelve of the enemies in the room to our presence, leaving our party with nigh insurmountable odds of survival. Because our healer was ill-prepared for the massive onslaught, she was unable to keep me alive for more than a few seconds, which was barely enough time for me to get the rampaging magic casters under control; I promptly died when I became overrun, leaving the rest of the party to fend for themselves. However, because the healer was a WoW “expert,” she successfully resurrected me in the midst of battle, thus allowing me (as an “expert” tank) to immediately jump back into combat, begin taunting the enemies off of my companions, and help reorganize our battle strategy to save us from a wipe.

Expert knowledge ensured our survival in the bowels of the Wailing Caverns.

Generally speaking, this is not at all how a novice group of learners would or could react under the same conditions; a less-experienced party would most certainly wipe and learn (through the trial and error process) that fearing an enemy magic caster in a crowded room is not a preferable, or safe, option.⁽¹⁾ Had the healer and I not been experts in our respective fields, our group very likely would have taken a much, much longer time to finish the dungeon since we would not have had nearly the stream-lined efficiency of chain-pulling enemies (fighting one after another with little to no break) and would, in all likelihood, have faced many more situations where too many enemies were drawn into combat at once. One could safely assume that our combined expert familiarity with the game (and games in general) saved us a lot of time, energy, and headache in completing what we saw to be a minor exercise in a field we already understood.

For this reason, some of my friends and family have suggested that I conduct this experiment with a game I have no familiarity with (perhaps something like Star Trek Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, or EVE Online); however, I've come to believe that even with different titles, graphics, and quests, my expert familiarity with WoW would ultimately taint any attempt for me to learn and master another MMORPG because, at their basest level, all MMORPGs are constructed with the same framework.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I toyed with the idea of blogging about game-based learning midway through the summer when I played around with a 10-day trial of Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) at the behest of my colleague, Roger Travis. It didn't take long before I found that I was less enamored with the game's narrative than Roger and his Fellowship (meaning that I had no real desire to continue playing), but (rapidly waning interest aside) I quickly recognized  and latched onto the game’s World of Warcraft-like gameplay elements (making me more acutely aware of my expertise with MMORPGs in general). Even though the character class I chose (Runecaster) was vastly different than any I had used in my WoW days, it took me only a few minutes to translate my expert WoW skills into a language appropriate for LOTRO.

I think the same is essentially true of the way students translate their experiences from one class to another in school: after taking more than one math class, they come to  expect the same kinds of lectures, homework problems, and tests that they’ve seen a hundred times before, even if the content differs from algebra to geometry to calculus. While my experience with LOTRO was nothing to write home about, it did make me wonder whether or not my ability to translate one game's skills to another meant something about how games can affect expert learning in the long-run. If that’s the way schools already work, why don't more students seem to have as much success at shifting their attention from one class to another as gamers do between games? Would “expert” ability in a game-like course transcend the gaming elements and improve a student’s ability to think and answer questions with greater speed and precision in all disciplines? ⁽²⁾

What are the odds that Ferris Bueller found the things he learned in school to be dynamic and applicable across all academic disciplines?

A lack of engaging elements in the courses we teach, or any way for our students to see the relevance of one class to the next, makes it impossible for kids to cognitively switch between biology  and English the same way an expert LOTRO or WoW player cognitively switches between MMORPGs. Consider the way standardized testing has compartmentalized subject matter: math is taught to be exclusively math-y, science science-y, and English English-y, all because government mandated teaching objectives focus on having students meander through the rote memorization of isolated facts rather than adequately spending time on broad conceptual thinking skills. With respect to the CAPT, the transferable skills of scientific observation, persuasive writing, and logical problem solving  are only minimally overlapped in any meaningful way, which discourages students from thinking about their courses as being multi-lateral and dynamic. As a result, we generally do not challenge students to use math skills in their English classes or science skills in their history classes because it's seen as too much of a burden compared to what standardized tests are actually testing.⁽³⁾

In order to overcome this struggle, school districts might consider encouraging pedagogical deviations from the norm that make courses more interdisciplinary (thereby encouraging students to develop more practicable and valuable academic expertise). For instance, a chemistry teacher could develop a class taught with an overarching, MMORPG-like narrative that shapes learning such that becoming an expert at the “game” is equivalent to becoming an expert at mastering laboratory procedures, balancing equations, and analyzing data (which would inevitably improve how students recognize patterns, trends, and problem solutions). Borrowing from World of Warcraft's soon-to-be released Archaeology profession, the students could go on an "expedition" during class to find examples of a given phenomena (ionic bonding, perhaps), log their findings in a journal (which chemicals ionically bond and why they do so), and use their learning to piece together a more complex puzzle (a laboratory experiment) in order to receive a chemistry "artifact" (a chemistry-related prize for successfully completing the lab). Through this lens, the students would be prompted to view the research-observation-experimentation process as a mystery in need of solving instead of just another isolated event in their academic lives, thus forging an element of engagement that supersedes the scariness of chemistry-based math.

Students could keep a log book that includes several categories of chemical phenomena, all of which could be tied to course objectives.

As students uncover new information and add it to their journals, they can refer back to it in order to help them with laboratory experiments focusing on the categories listed in their logs.

Soon, the daunting periodic table becomes a useful mystery-solving tool instead of a boring, uninspiring compilation of numbers and letters.

Though this example is simple, increasing student engagement by using the periodic table in conjunction with dynamic problem-solving also increases the likelihood that students will foster a cross-subject area expertise not dissimilar from that which I used to transfer my MMORPG skills from WoW to LOTRO (particularly in the form of scientific observation and critical thinking). The addition of a game-based layer, as I've argued before, paints the content such that it becomes relevant to disenchanted and already successful students, invariably turning the task of learning something difficult into learning something fun and useful. The expertise developed through logical problem solving can then be transferred to other subject areas, making the process of using a tool like the periodic table seem helpful in untangling all kinds of puzzles.

I can understand how expert familiarity in a game like WoW may seem useless in a non-game context, but when the same degree of critical thinking (for instance, the healer and I working in tandem to salvage our near-wipe) is applied to constructivist assessments in a mathematics, science, and other classes, it becomes much easier to see the value in creating novel problems that bridge all subjects and encourage interdisciplinary, longitudinal thinking. World of Schoolcraft may not be considered scientifically valid given my previous familiarity and expertise with the MMORPG genre, but it's certainly worth evaluating how a gamer's familiarity and expertise with games could be valuable in a classroom setting. If we can get Johnny and Sally interested in knowing why some elements are more electronegative than others by giving them cool mysteries to solve,  I think we'll be much closer to achieving our goal of cultivating more expert, life-long learners.

____________________________________________________________________________

(1)   Incidentally, the novice warlock in our group indirectly received positive reinforcement when all of this happened; we survived the mess he caused and everyone spent a few moments congratulating one another on doing such a good job (thereby conditioning the warlock to think that the same poor gameplay will be acceptable in the future). For the safety of other players, it may have been educationally more valuable if someone had reprimanded him instead!

(2)   A recent study indicates that this is biologically possible. A research group tested several dozen 18 – 25 year old non-gamers and tracked each participant’s ability to problem-solve after playing fast-paced games (Call of Duty) or slow-paced games (The Sims 2) for a number of hours. Gamers who participated in fast-paced, group-oriented games were able to come to faster conclusions with accuracy matching their peers’ because they had increased the efficiency of their auditory and visual information collection processes over the course of playing the game (Green, Pouget, & Bavelier, 2010).

(3)   I'm not advocating that English educators start teaching their courses in terms of addition and subtraction for the sake of using math outside a math course, but instead encouraging them to find ways for students to analyze course content from different, interdisciplinary perspectives (i.e. "After reading Act III, Scene II, how was Hamlet's forensic investigation similar to something you've seen in a movie or television show about criminal investigation? Was his investigation scientifically sound enough for him to reasonably assume Claudius's guilt? Why or why not?"). Teachers need not do this continuously (for obvious reasons), but it would go a long way in prompting multi-lateral student thinking that will lead to much more widely applicable academic expertise.

Works Cited

 

Bransford, J. (Ed.). (1999). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Retrieved September 14, 2010, from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160

Green, C., Pouget, A., Bavelier, D. (2010). Improved probabilistic inference as a general learning mechanism with action video games. Current Biology, 2010; 20 (17): 1573-1579 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.07.040

Total Newbage: First Impressions at Levels 1 - 5

So far, so good.

After making my post about World of Schoolcraft earlier this week, I finally got the chance to sit down and begin losing myself in WoW as though I'd never played the game before. Perhaps the most challenging part in this process has been purposely forgetting what it's like to be an experienced WoW player (or game player in general) since there are so many fundamental bits of knowledge that we gamers take for granted. If you, like me, grew up in the years where games had minimal in-game tutorial information (for instance, most every Atari, NES, SNES, and SEGA title), then you probably became accustomed to learning through trial and error experimentation, teaching yourself the game's mechanics by mashing buttons until something happened on screen. Sometimes the results were positive and you decided to continue provoking them; sometimes they resulted in  massive explosions that forced you to start over (I'm looking at you, Lemmings). After playing several titles this way, the frequent gamer became readily aware of what to expect from all sorts of games as long as the format was roughly consistent (platformers like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. were generally similar in their controls, as were role-playing games, first-person shooters, and others).

Super Alfred Chicken is just one example of a game that provided the player with no guidance whatsoever.

In an effort to expand upon the self-teaching days of yore, WoW's game designers have combined this long-time, "do-it-yourself" philosophy with a much more detailed pedagogical scaffolding that I refer to as supplemented sandboxing (or, in other words, the inclusion of areas where the player receives helpful, pointed tips while experimenting with the game's controls in a "fail-free" environment). Like digital flight or surgery simulators, there is no discernible risk of "losing" while the player toys with the various key commands that make his or her avatar perform actions within the game. When those commands are too confusing or the player feels ill-equipped to tackle gaming experimentation, the game's built-in tutorial menu provides pop-up descriptions of what to do and how to do it (which for some new players may include tasks as "simple" as running and attacking). From an educational perspective, this is incredibly important in shaping future learning as it encourages the player/student to take academic risks that enable more complex reasoning and experimentation in the future, thus improving the learning process itself.

The game's interface possesses several help settings for new and experienced players.

The game AI provides on-going guidance once the help settings are turned on.

When novel events like killing an enemy or gaining a level occur, short blips inform the player as to what has happened and what the implications of that event are (for instance, how to loot an enemy corpse or find out more about statistical changes due to level progression, respectively). In a way, this makes the first five levels of World of Warcraft mimic open-ended laboratory experiments typically reserved for middle or high school classrooms; all the learning taking place is done through student constructivism with the guidance of a knowledgeable "teacher." The teacher (the game's AI) recognizes when the player is struggling with a given task and adds parameters that simultaneously encourage student-centered experimentation and temper challenge with enough guidance that the game does not become an overwhelming experience. Even though incidents of death are still possible (I encountered that problem myself when I attacked two enemies at once to see if I could defeat them at the same time), the game provides the player with constant feedback about how and why death occurred, thus prompting him or her to try a new method of play without the pressure of following any one path to meet the learning objectives (thereby leaving playstyle completely up to the player). Overall, this  fosters a self-improvement system in which the player can see his or her strengths, troubleshoot weaknesses, and revisit problem areas with an informed perspective on how to do a better job next time.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

In-game assignments, known colloquially as "quests," are structured such that the player receives all necessary information to accomplish his or her goals without being forced to spend hours wandering aimlessly searching for whatever he or she has been tasked to find. Interestingly, the game designers have chosen to simplify the questing process by providing the exact location of the materials or enemies being sought (even going so far as to add shiny sparkles to desired quest items).

Here we see a list of quests, a description of the task at hand, and the location of where said task must be completed.

The quest items being sought are often marked with sparkly visual effects that attract the player's attention.

A few quests in, I began to wonder about whether or not these guidance tools watered down the game's content too much to merit a comparison of WoW with a real classroom environment (in which the teacher's job is to ensure that students are both engaged and learning at an appropriately challenging level). With that in mind, I turned to several other gamers and educators to hash out a reasoning as to why apparent stretches catering to intellectual laziness made sense in the context of the game's embedded pedagogy. After much debate, we concluded that WoW's designers are actually quite clever for having done what they have here: because Blizzard Entertainment is more interested in telling a captivating story than the process the player goes through to complete individual quests (which generally take a simple verb-number-noun format like "Gather 12 Acorns," "Kill 20 Pirates," or "Place 5 Flags"), they have created their own brand of calculator and spell-check-like tools that prevent mindless, redundant tasks from getting in the way of macroscopic theme acquisition. While calculator reliance is an area of debate amongst math teachers and spell-check's effects on long-term student spelling is an area of contention amongst English teachers, both tools (from a "big picture" standpoint) provide a much more efficient way for students to draw conclusions about major learning objectives than do long-hand division and dictionary use. In the beginning of a pre-Algebra course, it may be helpful to have students read and memorize portions of their multiplication tables in order to learn the process by which two numbers are multiplied, but by the time that same student reaches calculus, the multiplication process is worth far less than the time saved by utilizing a calculator to complete basic mathematical steps. Blizzard is essentially shaping this philosophy of education for their own purposes, teaching the player relevant, overarching story elements without worrying about the finite mechanisms involved in each quest. From my standpoint as a "new" player, I've found the system extremely helpful in that it has afforded me the luxury of worrying more about my effectiveness as a fully-immersed Night Elf warrior and less about where I should wander around looking for irradiated crystals, grizzly bears, class trainers, and dragon eggs. To a student, this could mean the difference between understanding how to use the periodic table in complex, problem-solving situations and missing the point because he or she was forced to memorize contextually useless facts about the 118 individual elements instead.

Short blurbs about objectives save the player time and effort that would have otherwise been wasted wandering around often substantial land areas.

Using the tools afforded to me by the game's designers, Sententiosus can get his training without getting lost in a sea of buildings and non-player characters.

Because I've run into so few individuals in the Teldrassil starting zone (where my Night Elf began his journey), there have been equally few opportunities for me to assess the social implications of playing a game like WoW thus far. Luckily, I found one other player killing the same woodland spiders I needed to for a quest and got to chatting a little bit about how long he'd been playing and what had kept him doing so since WoW's release in February 2005. He, like a few others I've interviewed since then, indicated that the game has retained its potency due to the fact that there are always new, unexplored areas of play that he has not yet tried or mastered, leaving him wanting for more. I strongly believe that this speaks to the unique nature of games in fostering player intrinsic motivation, compelling them to continue learning more and more even after doing so for days, months, or years. Even though the same tools and game elements are being utilized over extended periods of time, the game's narrative format keeps it potent enough to ensure players are logging in day after day. Perhaps, then, this reinforces the message from my last entry in which I highlighted how the ability of teachers and school districts to incorporate more game-like elements may indeed help keep students hungering for learning in the way players like the gentleman I spoke with hunger for more epic gear, bosses, and  refining of his in-game skills.

Non-player characters are awfully trusting with their goods. Why would you give the elements of your livelihood to a complete stranger?

Even though this post mostly refers to learning affordances up to and including level 5, my experiences up to level 14 (where Sententiosus now rests) have included more of the same. My proficiency with the rage resource system has grown rapidly, and I already feel much more competent than I did when I started this journey on Wednesday (a great benefit since in one level I will be able to tank dungeons for other players using WoW's Looking For Group system). Once the process of defending others begins, I anticipate I'll be asking them a number of questions about my effectiveness as a group leader and warrior, as well as how they believe WoW's learning affordances have affected them with regard to the tools I've mentioned above, social interactions (in pick-up groups, raids, guilds, and trade), and other gaming elements I have not yet considered. I can only hope that their responses will yield consistent trends that enable me to better shape my research and seamlessly implement stronger, more effective game-like courses for the benefit of 21st century learners.

Again, if any readers wish to come on-board and join the experiment, I'd be happy to have you! I appreciate your ongoing support and look forward to your future responses as Sententiosus marches down the path to victory!

For the Light of Elune!

World of Schoolcraft: The Rationale Behind Games as Learning Tools

I'm crazy.

Well, maybe not me personally.

All of us likely appear crazy to outsiders (us, of course, being educators looking at our long-time enemy as a source of pedagogical inspiration). Exploring the benefits of student gaming is certainly the road less traveled in educational research, and I think it's worth noting that people like James Paul Gee, my advisor Dr. Mike Young, my colleague Dr. Roger Travis, and all those involved with the Games + Learning + Society conference are doing a great service for students, school districts, and parents who aren't sure what else to do with our floundering public education system. The interesting thing about video games and learning, beyond the affordances I've described in my previous entries, is that the notion of useful game-based education is not without supporting psychological research. In fact, there is a rapidly building body of empirical evidence that explains how and why games and learning blend so well together; a fortunate development for those of us trying to utilize games as tools in the ever-churning sea of curricular design.

That being the case, I thought it would be worth explaining how I came to support game-based education in the first place. In the interest of saving you (the audience) a substantial headache, I'll explain my rationale with a TL;DR version first (that way anyone who doesn't want to sift through a wall of technical jargon and citations can still get an idea of what I'm talking about).

Current research in the area of game-based learning can be summarized in the following bullet points:

• Games are useful for teaching students specific skills but less successful in teaching broad, macroscopic knowledge that transcends several different content areas (unless they are designed as well-guided lessons where metacognitive discussions between students and their instructors take place regularly).
• The skills students acquire from games closely match the overarching game objectives (meaning that games in which the objectives are predominantly violent are successful in teaching aggressive, anti-social behavior, while games in which the objectives are predominantly pro-social are successful in teaching leadership, team-work, and collaboration).
• MMORPGs are an effective means of fostering team-building skills amongst players/students, particularly since they overcome challenges that would inhibit growth in a traditional classroom (such as disability, racism, geographic distance, or other cultural, economic, and societal hurdles).
• Students with addictive personalities suffer (academically) from game usage, but those without addictive personality traits show few to no academic side effects that can be associated with gaming.
• Uncontrolled/unbridled game usage has a measurably negative influence on student academic performance (SATs and GPAs); however, this is true of any single activity (soccer, horseback riding, and chess could all produce the same result if no behavioral parameters are set by the parent, teacher, or guardian).
• Much more research is needed in the area of game-based learning. This does not mean there is no research available on gaming, but the areas of interest are so varied that there are few educators examining the same kinds of things (making the research pool appear very small). Similarly, there are only very broad, generalized uses of the terms "video game," "good," and "bad," making it nearly impossible to equate one research finding with another.

 So what does this mean?

I am convinced, as are many other educators, that affordances discussed in the game-based learning literature are not only the same good practices teachers have exhibited for decades, but that video games are capable of stream-lining those practices in a way that encourages much more efficient, engaging scholastic achievement. Because of the way games delicately superimpose highly-stimulating narratives on top of their underlying learning objectives, they serve as a natural basis for conveying a message in the same way most every other art form does (and I would argue that games are, in fact, better because their narratives cannot progress without player participation and understanding of the fundamental learning objectives).

"97% of children, both male and female, have played video games by the time they reach high school."

However, the articles I've cited do little to explain exactly how video game learning affordances are structured within individual games; they focus on more broad explanations in hopes of establishing trends shared between all video games. This has left me especially interested in the specifics of how massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online have flourished for the better part of the last decade. What is so compelling (from an educational standpoint) about any one title that it is capable of retaining 11 million players, all of whom pay as much as $15 per month in recurring subscription fees? (This, of course, does not include Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, both of which now function with pay-to-play downloadable content stores instead of subscription fees.)

In order to get better acquainted with this question and relay my thoughts on its possible answers, I feel that I should announce my newest experimental, game-based learning project...

World of Schoolcraft

You may be wondering:

What is World of Schoolcraft?

No, this is not some new, wicked epic MMORPG, but rather my personal analysis of a widely successful, established one. Because World of Warcraft (WoW) has managed to do what many teachers could only hope to accomplish in their careers (getting players/students to willingly spend hours on tasks as mundane as picking jewelry out of animal poop), I believe it may be worthwhile to study this phenomena firsthand through the perspective of a WoW "student."

Experimental Methods:

Though I have prior experience with WoW, I plan on beginning this experiment by utilizing a class I have never tried before: a warrior. The game's learning affordances should remain relatively novel as long as leveling a new class in WoW is similar to the experience of a high school student who has familiarity with general academic success but not the specifics of a brand new course.

Sententiosus, Night Elf Warrior

My character, a Night Elf named Sententiosus (Latin for "full of pithy wisdom"), will be played on the East Coast - Norgannon (PvE) server and leveled from 1 - 80 (the full level spectrum) through the Protection, or "tanking," spec. The reasoning behind this decision was primarily due to WoW's embedded "Looking For Group" system, which will allow me to get the most access to other players and examine how their feedback helps to shape my learning of the warrior class (this is also partially for the sake of expediency: tanks are frequently sought for player groups, thereby reducing downtime between group-centered play). I will not use any of the game's so-called "heirloom" gear as to better reflect the armor decisions a new player would make while leveling from 1 to 80. I will use only the game's affordances to guide my  learning; I will not (until directed to do so by other players) seek online forums containing information about which talents are the "best" for a Protection warrior since a new player would not know where to access that information. I will use only game mods that are available to all players and all classes in order to modify the game's built-in user interface without changing anything about the warrior-specific leveling experience. Additionally, I will attempt to quest and group in areas where I have limited knowledge of the narrative and learning objectives in order to get the most out of my learning experience.

In-Game Screen Capture of Sententiosus at the Outset of His Journey

I wholly encourage anyone interested in joining me in this endeavor to speak with me online - I'm looking forward to the results of this experiment and would love to have some fellow educators join in on the fun. I'll be using my WoW experiences to guide many of my upcoming blog entries, so even if you are not participating in the experiment itself, I hope that you will provide feedback to some of the educational hypotheses I form as a result of my experience.

I look forward to seeing you in-game!


FOR THE ALLIANCE!

 

____________________________________________________________________________

NOTE: For those of you interested in the detailed specifics of this post (namely how game-based education is supported by empirical research), please feel free to read on. The following is a literature review I recently authored as the first-step in a meta-analysis of video games and their value to educational psychology:

Gaming in Education: What Students Can
Learn From Video Games in School

As new teachers enter the workforce with greater technology familiarity than their predecessors, a wider margin of accepted teaching methods has developed, changing the way in which educators are able to form successful instructional relationships with their students. Many districts, in order to help faculty keep pace with their rapidly changing and technologically capable student bodies, are attempting to alter their most well established modes of erudition (namely lecture, discussion, co-operative group, and hands-on learning); as a result, there has been a continuing trend in the reduction of teacher reliance on textbooks and an upswing in the incorporation of classroom media across all levels of the education system. These changes, primarily serving to accommodate the vast increase in computer reliance for day-to-day tasks and the need for students to develop team-based collaboration skills, have led educators to begin more deeply investigating the potential benefits of video game-based pedagogy. Games, unlike textbooks and more traditional forms of direct instruction, may more thoroughly afford students the opportunity to integrate their learning of subject matter with the 21^st century leadership skills necessary for success in academia, law, the armed forces, and private industry.

However, as video games are examined with increased scrutiny, there remains little consensus on the benefits and detriments of applying them to the classroom environment. In some circles, games are seen not only as a useful tool in encouraging student motivation to learn outside of the academic environment (Coller & Scott, 2009), but also as a means to increase student engagement during in-class learning sessions (Annetta et al, 2009), foster valuable skills with respect to finite tasks or jobs (Duque et al, 2008; Coller & Scott, 2009; de Freitas & Griffiths, 2007),  and improve upon visual acuity, spatial recognition, contrast sensitivity, visuomotor coordination, and general intelligence (Spence & Feng 2010; Caplovitz & Kastner, 2009); Achtman, Green, & Bavelier, 2008; Quiroga et al, 2009). Conversely, detractors contend that games, at best, produce no statistically significant change in skill acquisition (Annetta et al, 2009) and, at worst, produce negative effects on academic motivation and success with relation to several common measures of learning (such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), student grade point averages (GPAs), and academic testing of both reading and writing skills) (Anand, 2007; Weis & Cerankosky, 2010). There has been ample demonstration, too, that addiction tendencies have a consistent, negative correlation with the implementation of game-based learning due to select groups of students developing a compulsion to obsess over games themselves (Skoric, Teo, & Neo, 2009). The schism in understanding video games and their role in education, broadly painting them as both aids and distractions, indicates that the usefulness of this media will ultimately rest on how parents and educators utilize it in a scholastic context (Gentile, 2010).

The most succinct way to frame this muddled amalgamation of perspectives on educational gaming comes from Robert Gentile’s 2010 work, in which he described the influence of gaming on student learning as “not an either-or proposition; games can have both positive and negative consequences, and which consequences researchers find depends on what they are testing” (pp. 71). The major discrepancy in the educational literature seems to lie within the definition of what constitutes a video game and how any one game’s effectiveness can be accurately measured compared to another. Not surprisingly, this miscommunication has led designers and educators to often take for granted the notion that students will enjoy a video game purely because it is called a game, unintentionally ignoring or overlooking the elements that make them educationally useful to begin with (Bourgonjon et al, 2010).

Fortunately, after more than two decades of mounting commercial video game popularity, a substantial core of data is beginning to highlight precisely how video games can serve as a positive influence on the education system rather than a negative one. Most prominently, video game play (unlike many types of traditional pedagogy) appears to augment student self-efficacy through the elimination of many stigmatizing cultural differences between various ethnic and gender groups, enabling students of all backgrounds to share equally in the education process without fear of exclusion by their peers (Browell, 2008). While this may only seem to be a tangential advantage for the majority of students, researchers have found that the free collaboration of students through the sharing of game-based learning outlines a direct correlation with the development of vastly improved 21^st century occupational skills, including team-building, group management, and individual persistence (Browell, 2008; Gentile et al, 2009). World of Warcraft in particular, the leader in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), has been developed with these desirable occupational skills at the forefront of its game objectives, forcing its players to hone their group and inquiry-based learning abilities through the rigorous process of peer-to-peer meta-cognitive analysis (Schrader & McCreery, 2008). Other, more pro-socially constructed MMORPGs have even displayed a reversal in the learned aggression long attributed to violent video games, implying that games may act as vessels for delivering specific types of knowledge and skills (whether they be violent, helpful, or educational by design) in addition to providing subtle learning cues for leadership and group management (Gentile & Gentile, 2008; Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009).

To that end, teachers and school administrators need to identify how engaging narrative objectives may be gainfully superimposed over the state and national learning standards such that forthcoming educational games mimic the intellectually useful elements of privately produced games and incorporate positive social training measures. Game designers, unlike educators, function with the knowledge that their products are not essential to consumers, meaning that the games they release must have such widespread entertainment appeal that players will voluntarily pay for the ability to interface with the narratives being presented to them. Survival-horror and war games, for example, have become highly profitable to game designers because their well-designed learning affordances (those that compel players to continue playing despite high levels of violence) are well masked by narrative and problem-solving elements presented throughout each game (Kearney & Pivec, 2007). This economically valuable instructional strategy (scaffolding learning through enjoyable, visually stimulating, community-based play) has already proven to be extraordinarily helpful in training military and medical personnel (de Freitas & Griffiths, 2007; Duque et al, 2008). Rather than finding themselves bored with the subject matter, students reported that game-based simulations granted them the opportunity to practice skills in a far more engaging, entertaining way, fostering ownership over the course work and intrinsic motivation to succeed (Annetta et al, 2009; Duque et al, 2008). If such a strategy could be adequately implemented in a school community (thereby challenging, encouraging, and supporting students in their individual learning), struggling learners could potentially develop lasting, positive relationships with the subject matter being taught, thereby increasing academic performance in the long term (Dickey, 2007).

When applied appropriately, video games seem to offer greater affordances to students than their non-digital instructional counterparts. Despite their apparent efficacy, however, the chief obstacle to the widespread implementation of scholastic gaming remains the need for more substantial research in this area of study. Thus far, there has only been enough educational data collected to make limited recommendations as to which gaming elements are the most effective and important for successfully transitioning video games into the classroom environment (namely: intriguing stories, appealing characters, a sense of urgency, life or death decision-making, opportunities for the player to make predictions, and distinct, purposeful goals) (Browell, 2008; Becker, 2008; Mooney & Kirshenbaum, 2010). Not surprisingly, this has directly limited the quantity of research projects using game-based narratives as the basis for entire courses, signifying that much more work must be done to establish the effects of teaching specific academic knowledge, evaluative techniques, and skills through the guise of video games. Before any long-term pedagogical recommendations can be made, educational researchers will have to establish how the aforementioned gaming components can be successfully bound to state and nationally mandated standards in a robust way that moves beyond a series of capricious musings and into the realm of being both practically applicable and academically useful in a functioning classroom.

           Ideally, continuing investigation on the effects of video gaming and learning (specifically in merging established curricula with game-based learning elements) will provide the information necessary to aid educators in their mission to bridge the ever-widening rift between student engagement levels and an increasing number of government mandated learning objectives. Contemporary educational literature suggests that video games themselves, despite their conditional short-comings, can indeed be a useful means to improving classroom climate, creating situated learning affordances, and increasing assessment granularity, inherently providing students with the skills necessary to succeed in 21^st century careers (Kearney & Pivec, 2007; Foster, 2010; Charsky, 2010). As such, it falls to educational psychologists to continue designing inquiries that encompass video game-based learning so they may eventually parse the underlying principles of what makes games effective teachers and reconstruct content curricula in a more engaging and entertaining game-like context.

____________________________________________________________________________

Works Cited

Achtman, R., Green, C., & Bavelier, D. (2008). Video games as a tool to train visual skills. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 26(4-5), 435-446. Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Anand, V. (2007). A study of time management: The correlation between video game usage and academic performance markers. Cyber Psychology & Behavior, 10(4), 552-559. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.9991.

Annetta, L., Minogue, J., Holmes, S., & Cheng, M. (2009). Investigating the impact of video games on high school students' engagement and learning about genetics. Computers & Education, 53(1), 74-85. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.020.

Becker, K. (2008). The invention of good games: Understanding learning design in commercial video games. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 69, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Boot, W. (2007). The effects of video game playing on perceptual and cognitive abilities. Dissertation Abstracts International, 68, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Bourgonjon, J., Valcke, M., Soetaert, R., & Schellens, T. (2010). Students’ perceptions about the use of video games in the classroom. Computers & Education, 54(4), 1145-1156. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.10.022.

Browell, D. (2008). World of studentcraft: An ethnographic study on the engagement of traditional students within an online world. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 68, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Caplovitz, G., & Kastner, S. (2009). Carrot sticks or joysticks: Video games improve vision. Nature Neuroscience, 12(5), 527-528. doi:10.1038/nn0509-527.

Charsky, D. (2010). From edutainment to serious games: A change in the use of game characteristics. Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, 5(2), 177-198. doi:10.1177/1555412009354727.

Coller, B., & Scott, M. (2009). Effectiveness of using a video game to teach a course in mechanical engineering. Computers & Education, 53(3), 900-912. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.05.012.

de Freitas, S., & Griffiths, M. (2007). Online gaming as an educational tool in learning and training. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(3), 535-537. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00720.x.

Dickey, M. (2007). Game design and learning: a conjectural analysis of how massively multiple online role-playing games (MMORPGs) foster intrinsic motivation. Educational Technology Research and Development,55(3), 253-273. doi:10.1007/s11423-006-9004-7.

Duque, G., Fung, S., Mallet, L., Posel, N., & Fleiszer, D. (2008). Learning while having fun: The use of video gaming to teach geriatric house calls to medical students. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society,56(7), 1328-1332. doi:10.1111/j.1532-5415.2008.01759.x.

Foster, A. (2010). Gaming their way: Learning in simulation strategy video games?. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 70, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Gentile, D. (2010). Video games affect the brain—for better and worse. Cerebrum 2010: Emerging ideas in brain science (pp. 71-80). Washington, DC US: Dana Press. Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Gentile, D., Anderson, C., Yukawa, S., Ihori, N., Saleem, M., Ming, L., et al. (2009). The effects of prosocial video games on prosocial behaviors: International evidence from correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(6), 752-763. doi:10.1177/0146167209333045.

Greitemeyer, T., & Osswald, S. (2009). Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognitions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 896-900. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.005.

Kearney, P., & Pivec, M. (2007). Sex, lies and video games. British Journal of Educational Technology,38(3), 489-501. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00712.x.

Mooney, C. & Kirshenbaum, S. (2009). Unscientific america: how scientific illiteracy threatens our future (First ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Schrader, P., & McCreery, M. (2008). The acquisition of skill and expertise in massively multiplayer online games. Educational Technology Research and Development, 56(5-6), 557-574. doi:10.1007/s11423-007-9055-4.

Spence, I., & Feng, J. (2010). Video games and spatial cognition. Review of General Psychology, 14(2), 92-104. doi:10.1037/a0019491.

Weis, R., & Cerankosky, B. (2010). Effects of video-game ownership on young boys’ academic and behavioral functioning: A randomized, controlled study. Psychological Science, 21(4), 463-470. Retrieved from PsycINFO database.