Let’s see how it works! I chose this lecture intentionally, so watch it if you have time. It is from my Vygtosky seminar and covers some of the many misconceptions in dealing with Lev Vygotsky. Of particular interest is how many people misunderstand the Zone of Proximal Development. If you have the time and/or inclination, I encourage you to watch and learn. And no, it’s not me lecturing!

As a part of our inquiry project they were required to create a video or a voicethread (or something equivalent) as a video repsonse to some “educational video”.

Watch hers, and tell me what you think! I was really impressed…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdr9bS6RW7Q

For the rest of the inquiry projects, check out our wiki.

Then tell me what you think. Is he right? I pretty much happen to think so.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hi Scott,

I must take issue with your comments on Vygtosky. I can say most emphatically that Vygtosky would not support video games as the more knowledgeable other. In fact, video games don’t speak to the ZPD at all. I realize that Dr. Gee (et al) often use this terminology but it is not typically used in concordance with Vygtosky’s intentions.

It’s worth noting that Vygotsky spent little time (6 pages out of thousands) on the ZPD and for the record, the ZPD requires assessment to determine.

To clarify, Vygotsky supports the ZPD to be used by an educator to determine the exact gap between what a child cannot do, and what a child can do with a little help. You’re right in calling that a growth area, but Vygotsky would not support interaction with video games as a form of this growth. In fact, he advocated interaction between a child and the Ideal Form of Behavior, which he meant as an adult.

As an aside, Vygotsky would not support peer groups as a form of the ZPD either. I often hear educators use the ZPD as a reason to have students work together on something, but it simply isn’t the case.

Let me direct you to some resources on the matter.

Gredler, M. E. & Shields, C. (2008). Vygotsky’s legacy: A foundation for research and practice. New York: Guilford.

Gredler, M. E. (2005). Learning and instruction: Theory into practice (5th ed.). New York: Prentice Hall.

Gredler, M. E. & Shields, C. (2004). Does no one read Vygotsky’s words? Commentary on Glassman (201). Educational Researcher, 33(2), 21-25.

I study under Dr. Gredler, a tenured professor who studied under Robert Gagne (can’t figure out how to put the accent on the e, yikes) and who has spent years researching Vygotsky and has read his entire works many times. She is considered a leading authority on the matter.

I invite you to revisit Vygotsky and I think your understanding will change a bit, especially in terms of video games.

I am well familiar with the Schaffer (sp?), Gee, Steinkeuhler (oh gosh what is her husband’s name? drawing a blank, his thesis was Civilization in a high school history class and he’s also at the U of Wisconsin-Madison), Dede, etc etc.

For an alternate perspective, let me point you to such folks as Feldon at Washington State, Clark, Yates, others at the U of Southern Califorina (his book Learning and Media is excellent, 2001) and others.

Point is this, there is an alternative viewpoint to the whole debate of video games in education, but many do not accept valid counter arguments due to the “fun” nature of video games.

To sum it up, after having read much in this area and after having completed a lengthy lit review concerning MUVE’s in K-12, I just don’t see the evidence for video games having a direct effect on learning content matter.

Notice, I’m looking for researched evidence, not anecdote. In fact, I’d say that video games in education can be harmful to learning content matter.

Notice I’m talking about content matter, not learning how to design prims in Second Life. I’m talking about learning the basics that we all need to know, the 3 R’s.

Sorry for the long comment, but I think much clarification is needed here.

Chris

I mean that partly tongue-in-cheek and partly not. Here’s how my course design is shaping up. I’d welcome your thoughts and input.

1. My University offers Blackboard access, which I’ll surely use for a couple of quizzes and the like, but mostly our home will be on a WordPress Multi-User installation on my server, so it’s outside of official university servers. I’m going to use it as a replacement for the locked-down Blackboard discussion forum. Often profs will have students post and respond. I’d rather open it up for outside comments, too.

2. My slides are coming together nicely, with little text and a lot in the notes field. My daily plan looks a bit like this…

Greet them at the door.

Begin with attendance done by CPS IR Remotes (that I bring from my middle school)

Move into the lecture, taking into account both my own thought on avoiding cognitive overload and dan’s next gen lecturer techniques. Lecture is good, and in fact useful when used appropriately with novices. Lecture will be full of good content and good conversation.

After lecture we talk about homework, assignments, etc.

Then we move into our “educational” content arena. This is when we’ll view and discuss some of the more popular educational videos out there and discuss their value (I’m looking at you, Did You Know, Pay Attention, a Ninja video, and a few others).

This will lead to some blog posts from them, and surely some feedback from you. We’ll then use those comments and feedback as fodder for class discussion.

I think it will be a good class. It’s two days a week for a 1 hour and 45 minutes. I think the time will fly by.

I might even ask a few of you to Skype in and talk to them for a few minutes. Interested? I’ll be in touch with you.

So what do you think?

Chris

I happened to see a tweet from Lisa Parisi about her summer to do list. I scanned through her blog which I hadn’t spent much time on and came across a notice about her being involved in a new EdTechTalk show called Conversations. That note is at the end of the post I referenced a moment ago.

This is what I said…

Are you really going to talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?

Please oh please go read everything by Eccles and Wigfield.

Then go read a fantastic book called Motivation in Education by Schunk et al.

And then, make sure you’re familiar with B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.

Bottom line, there’s no such thing as intrinsic or extrinsic motivation.

There are lots of amazing theories that surround motivation, such as the Expectancy-Value theory and others.

I’d almost rather you chat about motivation in general and get out of the specific question of extrinsic or intrinsic, it’s a false dichotomy.

Motivation in education is a much larger topic than solely that, in fact there is a large body of research that indicates that this dichotomy is totally wrong.

Lots of folks are doing great work in the arena of motivation. Please go search them out and involve them in your conversations. I dare you to contact Schunk, Eccles, Wigfield, Feldon or any of the other major names in Motivation and ask them to appear on your show.

If you do, you’ll surely learn a lot and get beyond the echo chamber of intrinsic v extrinsic and what we all do in our classrooms. Let’s get some outside info from folks who have been researching this very topic for many years and can shed some real, research-proven tactics and theories with us.

Just my thinking..

Chris

I know I am going to be accused of being academic and uppity. I know I’m going to be accused of being snobby or something.

Either way, there is a lot more out there than solely the intrinsic versus extrinsic discussion. MUCH MORE.

A topic that has been running around in my head for a long time is the disconnect between the research being done at the University level and what is considered best practice on the K-12 level. A lot of what we consider best practice is not so good after all. I suppose that’s another post.

Man I wish I had more time to blog. Honestly, there’s little value in it right now as it’s not going to keep this roof over my head. I’m prepping for a sick course load next semester, so less blogging (not that I do much anyway).

NB: I didn’t link to the book in the comments to her post. I did in this note. Here it is again if you missed it the first time.

If you’re unfamiliar (and I was until a year ago) AERA is the American Educational Research Association. Each year they have an annual meeting (what I’ve often mistakingly called a conference). Cathy Jo asked me to write a bit about the conference, and I am glad to do so.

Here’s the deal, AERA is a humongous meeting. It was spread over four hotels and they had every conference room booked all day long. Next year, thank goodness, the annual meeting is in San Diego, CA and they’ve got some major convention center booked, so more easily navigated.

So, what the heck happens as this meeting, you ask?

Five things.

1. Poster sessions.

2. Paper presentations.

3. Invited speakers

4. Meetings of special groups

5. Networking galore.

All of this is submitted ahead of time. For April 2009 the submissions have to be in by August of 2008. So just like the major ed tech conferences, submissions are handled ahead of time. The submission goes to a panel of members of the association and they review it and rate it. Depending on how the poster/paper is rated is what determines whether it’s accepted. Just like academic journals, everything is peer reviewed.

Here’s each one in detail…

Poster sessions are literally that. You bring a poster printout of your reseach and stand by it and talk to interested folks. There are over 70 presentations every day. Theoretically, there is a set time frame that you get to present your poster. There are right at four time slots every day. Ergo, there are roughly 70 per day times 4 per day times a few days equals a heck of a lot of posters. Some were papers printed and tacked up, some were more formal. Ours looked darn nice, no thanks to me.

Paper presentations are probably the most plentiful. The format to these is interesting. The association groups similar papers into symposiums. So, let’s say you want to see the Cognitive Load in Teaching, Implications and Directions session. There will be a lot of people present, they are:

Chair – the chair is the one who keeps time and introduces the papers.

Presenters – Usually there is more than one for each paper, and they present their paper. Each paper gets 15 minutes. The papers are submitted ahead of time for review by the…

Discussant – The discussant takes a few minutes and summarizes the papers and provides critiques as well as thoughts on the session. If time allows, there may be questions at the end.

The use of a discussant was interesting, as it was nice to have someone sum up the papers. It’s easy to forget the first when you’ve heard four.

The invited speakers are noted academics and other really smart influential people that I don’t know.

The meetings of special groups are a great opportunity. I went to a graduate student fireside chat on the nature of academic collaborations. It was interesting, but I had to bug out. That was one of the more useful sessions I attended and I hated to leave early, but I had to catch one of my prof’s presentations.

Now, here are my personal thoughts about AERA.

First, there are far too many sessions. The conference program they give you is the size of a phonebook. Seriously, it’s huge. Maybe not a big phonebook, but it’s bigger than the books you buy at ed tech conferences by popular speakers. It’s big and heavy.

That means it’s hard to choose good sessions. If you think your local ed tech conference makes it hard to decide what to go and see, imagine there being nearly 10,000 attendees and it being all about really heady academic research.

Nope, there’s nothing web 2.0, nothing read/write web, nothing about student engagement in the title. I’m being silly of course, but needless to say this is a slightly different conference than the ones we usually attend. Again, not knocking ed tech, this is just a different world. It’s a weird world, too.

So, you choose your sessions and you’re off. In the very first session I attended I rubbed shoulders with Mitchell Resnick of MIT, Kurt Squire from the Unversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Constance Steinkeuhler (and her and Kurt’s new baby boy), Sasha Barab from the University of Indiana (Indiana University?) and others.

Quite possible the highlight of the trip was meeting John Sweller from the University of New South Wales. He is the originator of Cognitive Load Theory, which I am falling for more and more.

So, what are my gripes?

First and foremost it is darned hard to figure out which sessions are going to be actually interesting. Most aren’t.

If I pick by names, I run the risk of hearing the same stuff I already know or have read. If I pick by title, the session might turn out to be awful. I ended up having a first choice and alternates.

The other gripe is the way folks design their presentations. And by that I mean the design of what’s projected on the screen. Sometimes it was really hard not to enter into cognitive overload listening to folks read their slides.

This ended up being the primary topic of most of my tweets. I suppose the normal someone would overlook this stuff because it’s quite the norm, but I can’t look over it because I’m me, and I’m obsessed with this topic.

The other something frustrating was the spotty wireless. I ended up using my cell phone way more than my laptop during the trip, but that’s another post.

So there it is, AERA, quite the amazing meeting but also a bit frustrating. Hopefully next year I’ll present a paper session or two, as the feedback is invaluable in prepping for journal submissions.