Composing Play: Epic Learning in Literacy Spaces
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I adopt Jane McGonigal's framework of "epic scale" to talk about elements of epic learning in and through the teaching of writing (Reality is Broken, 2011). It may be that no writing course can ever match the intensity of a campus wide tournament of Humans vs. Zombies or the sheer scale of World of Warcraft, but the language helps us think through ways that we use game design, paired with writing and writing pedagogy, both to make large class spaces feel intimate and to encourage small classes to feel empowered over their learning. This talk shares the design and success of two large "epic," game-based college experiences: the design of a "jumbo" writing class that infuses game design and play within the activities and structures, and an augmented reality, quest-driven, adventure game created for incoming freshmen called Early Start: EPIC. Data drawn from these game-based course designs show that the spaces provide contexts for action as a form of service to larger, shared goals, encourage wholehearted participation, and provide mechanisms for the exchange of expertise.
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Composing Play: Epic Learning in Literacy Spaces
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- 6. “the term participation describe[s] the social experience of living in the world in terms of membership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises” --Etienne Wenger 6
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- 9. LLeeaarrnniinngg aass SSoocciiaall,, aass PPaarrttiicciippaattiioonn Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger Etienne Wenger 9
- 10. Theoretical Frame SSoocciiaall CCooggnniittiioonn//SSiittuuaatteedd LLeeaarrnniinngg AAtttteennttiioonn ppllaacceedd oonn:: IIddeennttiittyy,, PPaarrttiicciippaattiioonn,, MMaatteerriiaall CCoonnddiittiioonnss LLeeaarrnniinngg ooccccuurrss iinn ppaarrttiicciippaattiioonn aanndd ssoocciiaall rreellaattiioonnsshhiippss,, nnoott ““iinn tthhee hheeaaddss ooff iinnddiivviidduuaallss”” ((HHaannkkss qqttdd.. iinn LLaavvee && WWeennggeerr,, 11999911)) PPrroovviiddeess aa ffrraammeewwoorrkk ffoorr ssttuuddyyiinngg aanndd uunnddeerrssttaannddiinngg hhooww iinnddiivviidduuaallss sshhaappee,, aarree sshhaappeedd bbyy,, aanndd lleeaarrnn ffrroomm,, tthhee ccoommmmuunniittiieess iinn wwhhiicchh tthheeyy ppaarrttiicciippaattee SShhiiffttss tthhee uunniitt ooff aannaallyyssiiss aawwaayy ffrroomm aa ffooccuuss oonn tthhee iinnddiivviidduuaall mmiinndd aanndd ttoowwaarrddss ssoocciiaall aanndd mmaatteerriiaall ccoonnddiittiioonnss tthhaatt iinnfflluueennccee lleeaarrnniinngg aanndd mm10eeaanniinngg mmaakkiinngg
- 11. DDiissttrriibbuutteedd CCooggnniittiioonn “knowledge and cognition is distributed across objects, individuals, artifacts, and tools in the environment” --Ed Hutchins 11
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- 16. “And the chance to do something you’re good at as part of a larger project helps students build real self-esteem among their peers”… “Not empty self-esteem based on nothing other than wanting to feel good about yourself, but actual respect and high regard based on contributions you’ve made.” (McGonigal, Reality is Broken, p. 130- 31). 16
- 17. Questions tthhaatt gguuiiddee ccoouurrssee ddeessiiggnn:: • What would an epic writing course look like? • How could the structure force us to consider taken-for-granted roles and identities between writing teacher and student? • How might we highlight the work of students and make the instructor less central to the work of the course? • How might we make the connections between more capable peers and students even stronger? 17
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- 19. SSmmaallll WWoorrkkiinngg GGrroouuppss 1100 SSttuuddeennttss ++ 11 MMeennttoorr FFuurrtthheerr DDiivviiddeedd iinnttoo PPeerrmmaanneenntt GGrroouupp ooff 55 19
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- 21. They see me rollin they hatin 2211
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- 25. For the past 20+ years, the pass rate in CSU, Chico’s first-year writing course has been between 89-92%. The jumbo classes follow this trend: Total Students Enrolled (12 sections): 1080 93% pass rate 25
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- 28. Our goal: Make it not teh suck. 28
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- 39. Link to Example Student Projects 39
- 40. Too early for hard findings, but we know a few things: •More than 2000+ Facebook posts made by 251 students in a 2 week period. More than 80% had comments. •Faculty evals were high: 4.47/5.00 •Students were asked to complete enough Quests to earn 150 points: all students went well beyond this minimum. 90+ students earned more than 300 points and 12 students earned over 1000 points. •Students have stayed connected to their peers. 40
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Hinweis der Redaktion
- My plan for this talk is to share two course designs that are highly informed by game design principles: One I’ll describe briefly, a jumbo writing course, and one I’ll spend a bit more time with since it’s more central to this conference… Early Start: EPIC
- The first course uses game design implicitly (not sure the students would know that game principles are at play if you asked them, except that we do spend some time thinking about gaming, so they could probably uncover them) and EPIC is an actual game, a quest-based quasi alternative reality game that incoming, first-year freshmen participate in. I’d like to share theoretical/conceptual frameworks that inform the course designs and then share the courses themselves. I’m going to focus much more on framework and design than findings or assessment, although I’ll touch on that briefly, and you are welcome to ask questions if that interests you.
- I do identify as a gamer and a geek, although with the crowd here I’m probably a 6 on a scale of 1-10. I don’t have a Steam account, for example, but I do know what Steam is, I mainly play on the PS4, and by mainly I mean playing the Ratchet & Clank series over and over, or I play old school…Atari, Centipede, Ms. PacMan, Pengo, Pong…which we own. The Centipede was a birthday gift this year from my awesome spouse. The Atari cartridges were his proposal. And SF Giant Lego’s. Because Giants. And Lego’s.
- For the past few years, I’ve thought carefully about course design and building participation into the ideology of the design. The way we make use of a term like participation is in need of rescuing: moving away from a limited view of participation as it is often linked to motivation, engagement, or hand-raising and toward the view that participation as a concept is more generative when connected to the idea of…
- …membership in communities of practice, which I borrow from Lave & Wenger. Reviewing syllabi in many of the GE courses on our campus, participation is often listed as 5%, 10%, or in rare cases, as high as 50% of the grade in a course. But I find this to be an odd way to think about participation:
- demonstrating engagement by hand-raising and talk are fairly limited views of participation, and in fact, these ways of being are more connected to performance—acting like a student—than participation. We certainly want students to participate more than 10%, of even half, of the time. Are they participating when they are listening and pondering the ideas of their peers? Yes. In thinking about course design, I consider how students become members of our classroom community, the university, and our discipline. Starting from some basic things about being human: Everyone wants to be seen and heard and that they are needed to make things work.
- Participation and Community frameworks arise from Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, and Neo-Vygotskian scholars who research situated learning and distributed learning.
- The research discussed in these texts is not focused on schools. Lave & Wenger set out to rescue the idea of apprenticeship.
- Informs my teaching and my research. In terms of teaching, focus on identity and participation. Always asking questions about my classroom in terms of how my structures afford participation. In research, unit of analysis not individual per se, but individual in situ. structures, roles, activities, material conditions. Vygotsky, Neo-Vygotskian, Lave & Wenger, Barbara Rogoff, Herve Varenne, Ray McDermott, Gordon Wells, Peter Smagorinsky, Carol Lee, David Russell, Gavriel Solomon
- The connections from Situated Learning to the ideas embedded in games and game theory are not difficult to make. Ideas from scholars such as Gee, McGonigal, Bogost, Squire resonate with me because of the focus on play, participation, person-directed learning, failure, risk—all part of similar and connected frameworks.
- A couple of years ago I started playing with the idea of Epic learning. Jane McGonigal often talks about this in relation to WOW …collaborating with people we like… to do something big.
- I started thinking about how we seek out epic events…like going to a concert where 10,000 other people are screaming the same lyrics at the top of their lungs. We don’t want to go to a Pearl Jam concert alone. I started to think: Wouldn’t a classroom be amazing that had a lot of people who were interested in working on a shared goal. And the arguments that are often made about class size fell away for me. It’s not about a class being large or small; it’s about having structures and activities in place to support the size and the goals. I would imagine many of us have been in awful grad seminars with 8 people…not the size, but the means of participation. Thinking of learning in terms of the “epic” gave our writing program a mechanism to bring all of these conceptual elements together.
- What McGonigal calls “epic scales” are those moments in which we recognize that the projects and actions we engage in and environments where they take place seem “bigger than ourselves” (p. 98).
- While many examples are drawn from online games like Portal and Halo, her argument extends to crowdsourcing and “real life” applications like Foursquare, or distributed computing platforms that create protein-folding simulations to search for actual cures to Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease. Epic scales provide contexts for action as a form of service to these larger goals, encourage wholehearted participation, and—perhaps most relevant to our goals in designing classrooms—provide mechanisms for the exchange of expertise. When systems are designed to help people share their interests and goals, she argues, people can be called upon and are motivated to do work they excel at.
- It may be that no writing course can ever match the intensity of a campus wide tournament of Humans vs. Zombies or the sheer scale of World of Warcraft. But in terms of writing instruction, the language helps us think through new ways to make large classes feel intimate and to encourage small groups to feel empowered. This attention to games as authentic spaces for learning focuses us in on the issues of participation and community that often fail to take root in college classrooms.
- Given these ideas and experiences, we created the Jumbo because we were curious about these questions. And we wondered if students would come to see themselves as more valued responders if writing expertise were more distributed throughout the group, based on the size of the course. By building the Jumbo to accommodate 100 students, we had to imagine new ways of distributing the tasks associated with feedback across people, spaces, and across digital platforms—so that students would be better positioned to rely on each other as they proceeded through the course.
- Meet 4 hours per week total: Two together and two-hour workshop with mentor. Using social media to study social media. Lots of structures in place that make groups productive.
- Space matters. Scoured the campus trying to avoid these classroom spaces. Campus responded.
- Have more and more classrooms on our campus that are configurable spaces made for collaboration and making.
- The jumbo course has been taught by 7 different faculty since 2009. Usually 1-2 sections per semester. The student writing has been assessed, we have about 800 student survey responses and we’ve gathered and assessed multiple follow up interviews. By all measures the course and students are successful. I’ve given many talks on the jumbo course since 2009, 20+ invited talks, talked with many Deans and administrators. And honestly, despite the success, I usually say “don’t try this at home.” Because you need to have structures in place: a mentoring program, a way of thinking about learning, the interest in using of multiple platforms. But what I think our course and others demonstrate is that game-based principles—offering a range of identities, the notion of do-over, just in time learning, the role of walkthroughs and guidelines (even “cheating” by which I mean using all your resources—the kind of resources—wikipedia, Spark Notes, YouTube, your peers—that might get you in trouble in other learning environments), and even epic scale—provide a generative foundation for course design.
- Our most recent “course” actually grew out of barren soil. In 2010, the California State University system (comprised of 23 campuses) received an unfunded mandate from the Chancellor’s office asking all the campuses to create programs, course, activities for incoming freshmen in need of remediation.
- A couple of things about many of us who work in the fields of composition and literacy: we are usually not fans of “remediation.” Mainly, the testing that leads to these claims is not a good indicator or who might need support. All writers need support. All of us can use help with writing, particularly when we move into new genres (grant writing…anyone?). We believe that students should be doing the work of college in college, particularly the literacy work of college. You need to be in the community of practice that uses literacy in particular ways. And even if we did believe that literacy learning works out-of-context, the mandate requires 15 hours in the summer…not sure what we can do with literacy in 15 hours that did not happen in twelve years of schooling. And last blow—students have to pay for it: $182. All the composition faculty on all 23 campuses resisted. We wrote memos and position statements. And all of us just finished our third year running early start programs. FTL.
- Last spring, I took my 400-level course for students who want to be writing mentors in our program—mainly juniors, seniors and some grad students—and asked them if they would be interested in designing a version of Early Start with me. On the white board I wrote one goal: “make it not teh suck.” After about 5 weeks of learning theory and theories in tutoring writing, the 25 students read voraciously in game theory, starting with Reality is Broken, in order to create Early Start: EPIC. We curated many many resources related to game design in this Google Doc as well: https://docs.google.com/a/mail.csuchico.edu/document/d/1ZufL0bE6XlTC-6gsremxNISTzsiGyNvqirPS9qQrEWk/edit
- Still trying to name the thing we made: Quest-based, sort of an alternative reality game in that the game was woven into activities students were already participating in on campus, not very good at the storytelling part of ARG, not voluntary in many ways like games should be to play, options for mobile portion of the game through Tale Blazer app, so sort of Augmented Reality components…
- Link to the course site with introductory film and quests. Number one goal of design was to focus on the thing that keeps students in college: connections—to peers and campus. Peer connections that are academic and not simply social. Could we help them make those connections through a course that had an emphasis on play? We also thought about literacy very broadly, as connected to identity…develop “ways of being” that matter to college success. The mentors interviewed and surveyed freshmen, and they thought through their own recent college entry, and thought about what they “wished they’d known.” We borrowed from Lave & Wenger and asked “what does it take to move from newcomer to old timer on our campus—what makes a student successful?” And how might we create quests that embodied those ways of being and valued campus ideologies?
- Example Twitter and Facebook posts follow.
- Eventually, students used the quests as data collection resources and culled what they learned together to create resources for other incoming students.
- I had said to the mentors early on that my hope was we would create something so awesome and meaningful that other incoming freshmen, who were not required to do early start, would say “how did you get to do that” And they’d answer, “I failed the English Placement test.”
- TL:DR Just do the (epic) thing.