World Of Warcraft as an educational tool may not be a good idea

World of Warcraft Logo

A recent Time magazine article (June 2009) states that the future generation of workers can hone its knowledge of culture and teamwork skills by continuing to play World Of Warcraft…

But is this really the best thing for kids?

Haven’t heard of WOW yet? Here’s a link to a video trailer about World of Warcraft to show you.

WOW is a massively multi-player online gaming environment which Blizzard, who produces it, claims to be 10 million users strong. At about $15 a month to play, you do the math…that’s WOW indeed!

In WOW, players work in teams to complete quests and the game measures each team member’s contribution to the team. The one that contributes most get’s to be (or stay) the leader, and other rewards follow proportional to the team member’s level of contribution.

Yep, sounds like the job of the future alright — collaborate and problem solve with others from around the world, and get rewarded for your hard work. Nice.

But do a quick Google Search for World of Warcraft Addict* and you’ll see some alarming items. Divorce over gaming, a WOW detox center, and  parents suing Blizzard for addiction. A youth organization condemns WOW, calls WOW the “crack cocaine of the computer world”.

YouTube sports several videos on the topic — among the serious ones is the one below called World of Warcraft game addiction documentary – Game OVERdose

Is this really the best way for kids to learn teamwork, cooperation, and cultural differences? I’d think more than twice about choosing such environments as tools for learning. I’m thinking there are lots of less controversial ways that can still be meaningful and useful to our youth.

Maybe that should be the next Time magazine article…

Kids use technology do to more, better, and faster…but are we making sure they are happier?

I’ve always worried that the 21st century classroom, if achieved and fully realized, will unwittingly squash the spirits of a generation of learners.

I read articles by Marc Prensky about turning our youth into programmers and adopting  21st century learning practices and, while I agree with many of the points, I hear a clear and frightening message…

More.
Better.
Faster.

This scares me a little.

Is this really what kids need to focus on? Let’s not take the innocence from our youth any sooner than it needs to be. Yes, let’s put today’s powerful technologies in their hands — but let’s do it without creating a generation of go-getters who cannot stop go-gettin’.

Let’s not make more, better, faster the only thing we teach our youth to value or we’ll all be sorry.

Mark Osborne produced an award-winning video many years ago on this topic, which he appropriately called More. It’s fantastic. Please have a look — it’s about 6 min long. (Click the link to Despair.com to watch the movie).

Image from the video called MORE by Mark Osborne

(Click the link to Despair.com to watch the movie)

Text boxes — are they the new bullet point?

I have it on good authority that the new thinking in presentation-making is, and I quote, that “Text boxes are the new bullet point”. I get the idea here — let’s stop inflicting ‘death by powerpoint‘ on each other and start making some really good presentations. Ok, I like it.

But liking it and making it happen are two different things, and I’m not sure that such a monumental shift in presentation culture is possible. Fine, I’m a skeptic and a cynic all rolled into one (what do call a room full of skeptics and cynics? A skeptic tank). The bottom line is that people make presentations they way they do for a reason — it’s a culture left over from the days of the overhead projector. And in those days, text was king. This is addressed, among other things, in the presentation below called Presenting with Visuals…

I don’t think the world is ready (ok, maybe it’s just me who is not ready, but my ego demands I generalize this statement to all of humankind) for thinking about presentations as a series of text boxes. Besides, I really think rigidly adhering to presentation rules — no matter what the rules might be — has gotten folks into the mess they are in. Rules may not be the answer after all…

Stupid presentation rules

Perhaps the more generally-applied heuristic is in order here. This is where principles of instructional design can really help. Take Dual-Coding Theory [Paivio] — the idea that text and visuals combined make for stronger learning. Or instructional message design (link to an article), which suggests that using contrast, repetition, and chunking text can help the learner process an instructional message more effectively. These are not new ideas and the Internet is rife with advice related to them [see also 10 tips for more effective presentations or the Presenting with Visuals slideshow above].

While these ideas are not the catchy “THIS is the new THAT” slogan of the dissatisfied presentation-viewing public, they make mucho sense and are easy to apply immediately. “Mucho sense and easy to apply?”, you ask. Yes, I say. Mucho grande. And those elements are a recipe for making shift happen (in reference to presentation culture, of course!).

King of Kong, I ain’t

Movie Poster for King of Kong

I recently saw that documentary about Donkey Kong — called  King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It was about two men and their quest to become the best at Donkey Kong (or at least get the highest score on record). The movie was ok, but after seeing it I thought to myself, “How hard could it be to score a cool mil’ on the good ol’ Donkey Kong?”.

It was on like Donkey Kong.

I searched the web and found a great emulator at 1980’s Games that housed the Kong’er. The site has tons of arcade classics besides Donkey Kong, so check it out!

The site let’s you ‘insert quarters’ and select a one-player game — which I did.

Screen Shot from Donkey Kong

I began my quest to be the best. I made little Mario juke and dodge and jive and wail. I got further than I ever did as a kid — level two, the screen with elevators and springs. I was hot, I was ready, I was well on my way to a cool mil’.

Then I quit.

Why? It took me days of playing to get to the fourth screen. The fourth screen! That was only 16,000 points! Who the heck wants to sit around and play this thing ’til a million points?!? Not me. I have a new-found respect and admiration for those guys who hit those scores on arcade classics like this.

But it was nice to play the classics again — they require memorization, hand-eye coordination, risk-taking, and a little exploration. Not bad qualities to impart, I have to say. So if you are looking for good ol’ heart-pumping, adrenaline-charging, physically-challenging and mentally-stimulating fun, these arcade classics are for you.

I may have quit my quest to be the next million-point player in Donkey Kong, but I’m glad I found the classics online. They already have a special place in my bookmarks.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Watchmen cover art issue 1

Apparently no one.

I read Watchmen when I was a teen, nearly 20 years ago. It was a defining moment — a mind-bending, deeply complex and philosophical tale of comic book heros and anti-heroes. I loved it. Over the next 20 years, my heart sank with promise after promise of the story becoming a full-scale movie event — each ultimately becoming a longer and longer delay in what was, in my mind, to be the most monumentous and downright awesome comic-book movie to hit the screens.

Flash to today, March 2009, and you see a bitterly disappointed fan who, much like Star Wars, wishes he never saw what he saw in the 21st century because it utterly ruined what he knew of his childhood in the 20th century.

Am I just ‘one of those people’ who complains when a movie isn’t like the book? No, not with any regularity. Besides, the Watchmen movie did follow the book really well. And the actors looked just like the comic characters. All pluses for Zach. Do I care that the actors were just ‘ok’, or that the acting was nothing extraordinary? No, that’s par for the course with a comic book movie.

Cover art for Watchmen issue 6

But somewhere between the coolest issue (#6, The Abyss) and the movie, the mystique just dies. I’m not sure how (although the 5+ shots of Dr. Manhattan’s porno-like genetaila d0 not help carry the audience much) but it just gets, for lack of a better term, lost in translation. After you read issue 6, you can’t get enough. You want to know what happens next, what each character is doing and what they are all about.

After watching issue 6 I just wanted to know when the end would come so I could go get some frozen yogurt.

I wish I could report otherwise, but I can’t. Reviewers don’t like it. Noobs don’t like it.

Mr. Horse from Ren & Stimpy

And I have to say:  ‘No sir, I don’t like it‘.

The movie’s powerful messages and images are still with me, days after seeing the movie. That says something. But to think about watching it again makes me ill, and that’s disappointing. I wanted to watch it over and over. I wanted to watch issue 6 jump to life, and feel what it was like to be Rorshach.

It just ain’t there.

Sea Kittens … food for thought about food

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has apparently renamed fish the cutsey term ‘Sea Kittens‘ (no, really). Apparently this is to make us think twice about eating fish — because no one wants to eat kittens, right? Or hook them in the kisser and drag them through the water. If you start to think of fish as cute and cuddly, maybe you won’t eat them? Read more about PETAs ideas here.

So let’s say you go along with this line of thinking.

Sea Cow is still Cow, right?

“Fish, ok to eat. Sea Kitten…Kitten. Never ate kitten before. Kitten bad to eat.”

Let’s try it with another species.

“Cow, ok to eat. Sea cow…cow. Ate cow before. So Sea Cow is now ok to eat, right? Mmmm.” (Poor manatee doesn’t stand a chance anymore, now does he?)

Wait, let’s stay in the fish family.

“Catfish ok to eat. Kitten fish…kitten and cat are the same, so… perhaps I’ll try a tasty fillet-o-kittenfish after all.”

Now, I’m not against PETA’s move, per se. But you have to admit –  it’s much more interesting to play funny logic games with the new title they gave fish than to debate whether getting a daily dose of omega fatty acids through filleted fish flesh is treating animals unethically or not.

Apple picking

I’ve recently enjoyed spending several hours combing the Apple Downloads site for Freeware. It’s fantastic. I highly recommend you spend time looking through for software that might come in handy. Here are my highlights…

• Check Off – A to-do list that hides neatly in the menu bar
• Fun Card Maker – Make post cards quick n’ easy, save as JPG or send straight to email
• XMind — A brainstorming / mind-mapping tool

Of course, there’s tons more shareware and demos to check out. But I’m all about free, and these fit the bill. Enjoy your own apple picking!

Information seekers to information getters to information [fill in the blank]

For a while, we lived under one paradigm on the Internet — information seeking. We hopped on the ‘net with our fancy web browsers and surfed for neat, fun, exciting information ’till we dropped.We learned all sorts of tricks for narrowing our searches – Boolean logic and the like. Plus this (+), minus that (-), quotes, related:, etc. We thought we were the cat’s meow.

Now enter the new paradigm — information collecting. RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, social networking, etc. have all made it possible to manipulate a stream of information to come to us rather than us going to it. Granted, you need some seeking skills to initially direct the stream of information to your desktop. But in no time you’ve gone from seeker to gatherer. Information on the ‘net is like an open faucet, continuously flowing and from which we can take a drink as we please to slake our thirst for knowledge. Now we’re meowing away in the cat’s pajamas. Nice.

This made me wonder, as it may for you too — what’s next? I mean, where are we heading with all this? My prediction? Information using. Those with the power, those who will succeed, those who will successfully navigate the unknown waters of the 21st century will be those who not only know how to seek and gather the information. It will go to those who creatively, efficiently, and effectively use that information. To the victors (those who do this fastest and best) will go the spoils.

Meow, baby. Meow. We’re meowing all the way in our fancy pajamas for a tasty treat (from Jack-in-the-Box, which, coincidentally, is now outsourcing their order-takers at the drive through to Texas and, yes, India — what’s next, outsourcing relegious services for the religious folks? Someone far off across the world asking “Welcome to Our Lady of the Blah Blah Blah, may I take your order?”).

Gosh, I hope someday soon someone creates a standardized test for measuring those skills, or else we may never get our schools to start focusing on them. I say this toungue-in-cheek, sort of, and sort of not. Seriously, I wonder how this generation will learn to manipulate information like this given what our current teachers know and even what we are teaching our future teachers (I can criticize here, I’m one of the folks teaching them).

I think it’s time to focus on producing an army of teachers who thinks like this, knows about this, and is ready to deal with students who are growing up with this. It’s time to focus on the indespensible nature of the teacher and capitalize on what they can do to prepare students for tomorrow and not yesterday.

If not now, when? When our child’s education is ordered up from an outsourced, disembodied voice whose only job is to serve up quick, pre-packaged  online learning modules like a fast-food meal from Jack-in-the-Box? “Welcome to fifth grade, may I take your order?”

Don’t laugh. You get a bunch of non-education folks who get to make big budget decisions, whose see education budgets are being slashed, revenue sources are drying up, resources that are overburdended to the point of no return — these are the ideas that start to sound better and better to them. I jest, but I kind of don’t.

My (somewhat exhausting) love-hate relationship with Twitter

Twitteriffic Icon

I received some sage advice from a colleague — Twitter is only as good as your tweets. So I decided I needed to spend a little time exploring people to follow, paring and tailoring the list to my interests, and giving Twitter another chance.

I’d like to say that it was the best decision I ever made, but the jury is still out. I think I can safely say that I am no longer a Twitter dropout (see earlier post), but an optimistically cautious microblogger interested in having it in my life again. I think my initial fervor over the tool was bound to fizzle — and now, with a little hiatus, I’m ready to give Twitter the ol’ college try. Again.

Improving the chances of Twitter having a meaningful and long(er)-lasting role in my life is the use of the many free tools designed to plop my feed right on my desktop. Twitteriffic and Tweetdeck make receiving, organizing, and responding to tweets easy and less intrusive than keeping Twitter in an active window or tab for hours on end. Apparently Tweetdeck allow you to organize tweets into categories — work, leisure, humor, etc. I say apparently because I’ve tried Twitteriffic (and like it) but have only heard about Tweetdeck from others. Note that some Tweetdeck users have complained of lost data when upgrading from lesser versions.
Customized home pages like Page Flakes (www.pageflakes.com) have a twitter-feed widget built in — but again, you need to be on that page 24/7 to see updates. Not condusive to my style. I prefer to have a small updater in the corner of my desktop. But that’s just me.

I hope this helps those of you new to Twitter avoid the frustrations I’ve had with Twitter, and help you set Twitter up well from the get-go.

Doing so may lead to a lifelong friendship with technology as your friend in the digital age [can I get sued for using that? Maybe if I put it in quotes..."your lifelong friend in the digital age". Or thank Cox Communications? HEY! Thanks Cox (http://www.cox.com/). No, no -- wait. Better yet, let me write it like this...

Our 'friend' in the digital age. Now I've changed more than 10% of it (Two out of 7 words changed, ~30%), so it's my own version, right? Egads this copyright stuff is SOOOOOO dang confusing!]

If I’m a digital immigrant, will I get deported?

Ok, let me explain a little.

The local cable providers charge ridiculous amounts of $$ for digital cable, HD TV, high(est) speed internet, digital phone with the works, etc. Now, I love the works. I love the HD on my TV, I love the caller ID — love it all. I’m all about technology, but the fees were just getting crazy. So I dropped it all. Bare bones baby! Stripped phone, 33 local cable channels, and less-than-highest speed internet (ok, maybe it’s not exactly dropping in the case of the Internet, but for a guy who lives half his life in cyberspace it’s a real sacrifice!).

This led me to wonder…am I now a digital immigrant? Because I eschew the fancy-shmancy technology-geek level of technitus in my life, am I a pariah? A technology outcast? If the wrong people find out what I’ve done, will I get deported from my life in the circuitry of my computer-based self?

Probably not. But given the popularity of the digital native / immigrant terminology, one has to wonder…