Teaching students about social media - teaching your grandmother to knit?

Glancing through my morning twitter feeds I came across Saturdays featured article from the education forum edudemic. The article lists "6 Things To Teach Students About Social Media" and these things are indeed something I have also pondered and found relevant social media concerns over these last 10 years. Things like;

Be careful about your online reputation,
Control whats private and whats public,
Build a good strong network,
Express your expertise and develop your interests online
Know how to buy stuff online

and so on...

This is all quite sensible yes, and the article states that, in this day and age, these things should be as important a subject in school as algebra. It does however set off a somewhat doubtful whirlwind in my head... mostly centered on the thought, who are we to teach the new students ANYTHING about social matters in the digital world, in which they are natives and  someone like me (born in 1980) is still an immigrant, albeit a deeply integrated one.

The boundary between public and private has been shifting rapidly since the very start of social media and naturally it will continue to do so. The norms and expectations regarding the use and the discourse of social media is also constantly shifting. My mother is baffled by the way my brother and I use and express ourselves on Facebook. I am baffled by the way my 14 year old nephew uses and expresses himself on Facebook. And in his case we are talking about the kind of digital native, who cannot remember the first time he used the Internet. Who probably never really thought of the Internet as an entity apart from himself, that was not just a natural part of his own extended nervous system. Seriously, these kids are Hybrids and Cyborgs!

Of course kids need to learn how to navigate social media just as they need to learn how to navigate the playground and the classroom, and in the beginning, in some ways, we can point out the pitfalls.But the world of social media is a rapidly changing cosmos and they are the ones who will be giving it shape, not us. So we might say things like "future bosses will examine your online stuff so be careful about whats out there!" like mentioned in the edudemic article. But I cant help thinking, 6 or so years from now, when my nephew is trying to enter the workforce in his field of choice, how much will the general expectations of public narrative have shifted? The entire face of social media might even have changed and I am certain, that unless I keep my ears firmly and continuously pressed against the touch pad to catch every little rumbling of the digital ground, he will have a much better grasp on it than I.

I mean look at this kid. Observing this one-year old navigating a tablet and then becoming frustrated when the extended nervous system fails when dealing with a paper magazine, sends a little tremor through me, at the sheer pace in which everything is changing. And what do you really think you or I will be able to teach this soon-to-be young person about navigating social media?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

Alternate Reality Gaming

So, at the moment I'm working on the most exciting project imaginable! I am, with the aid of the group of geeks and creatives I've put together, developing an Alternate Reality Gaming campaign for the publisher Fahrenheit.

You might now wonder, what is this ARG stuff? I'll start by remarking that Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is completely awesome.

It's exciting transmedia storytelling, creating great and sometimes very complex collective experiences for anyone who plunges into it. Participants actively help each other patch together the story line from a myriad of clues, which can be gleaned from all kinds of sources both online and offline. So, it's sort of like a scavenger hunt were fragments of the story line is what you are hunting, using websites, social media networks, phones, newspaper articles, props, real live events and pretty much anything the Puppet Masters (that would be me and the gang) can come up with as sources and clues.

Here is an excellent explanation of how the concept works. A good example of an ARG game could be the first big mainstream one made, as a promotion for the Movie AI, a game better known as The Beast. Here's a description of how it was made and how it worked.

Now ARGs are sometimes made for fun, but often they serve a purpose. This purpose is typically drawing attention and interest to something... ARGS have been made to promote films (as in the case of the Beast), computer games and bands for example. Our current project is linked to the Danish release of a comic book series... but I shall say no more of this presently.

I shall blog endlessly on this subject, but for now ARGS ARE AWESOME! If one is very interested in ARGs I highly recommend the most informative forum www.argn.com and also these 3 books

"Reality is Broken" by our hero Jane McGonical
"This Is Not A Game: A guide to Alternate Reality Gaming" by  Dave Szulborski
"A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling" by Andrea Phillips

Enjoy!

What games feel like

So, while looking into this whole gamification area, I'm coming across a lot of excitement but also a lot of critique. A lot of the gamification effort out there have been focused on making things gamelike, or make them somehow look like a game. Adding game structure like levels, points and badges as rewards to marketing or education does not necessarily produce the desired effect of blissful productivity and engagement that Jane Mcgonical mentiones as a key factor in gaming.

Pondering these things I ran into this paper by M.P. Jacob Habgood and Shaaron E. Ainsworth called Motivating children to learn effectively: exploring the value of intrinsic integration in educational games. The main point in this paper is the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in games. Basically, if rewards gained through game achievements have no relevance in the game itself, they are extrinsic. This might for example be badges that you earn for completing an educational game. Its nice to get them, but they don't effect the gameplay itself. Now intrinsic motivation or in the game context intrinsic integration, the rewards are relevant in the game, enables you to go further or be more within the game context. The game experiment discussed in this paper was zombie math game for kids. In one version of the game, the learning content, the math, was integrated in the actual gameplay. Slay the zombie with MATH! In the extrinsic version the math content was interjected in little pop quizzes with no direct integration with the game. In the intrinsic version, the learning content was made part of the most exciting parts of the game without breaking the flow of the game. The results of the test showed much better learning results from the intrinsic game version.

So we're really looking at the difference between making learning an integrated part of the game and just wrapping the learning content in a game like structure. I think this is an important point when trying to create really effective and fun gamification!

On this note, lets look at the very important destinction between making something look like a game and making it FEEL like a game. This is a great point made by Jane Mcgonical, who terms it the difference between something being gamelike og gameful. In her talk at the 2011 Gamification Summit she explores what makes something actually feel like a game. One of the points I noticed especially is the voluntary tackling of unnecessary obstacles. In golf, we could just pick up the little white ball and go dump it in the hole. But its all the difficulty and the obstacles that make it a fun game. To create positive stress, the feeling that make us enjoy the challenges, the game needs to be difficult, not easy.

So what do these things suggest if we, lets say, want to gamify learning. The learning content should be completely integrated into the most exciting game actions and it shouldn't make it easier. It should make it harder in a silly way, and give us the feeling; "Wow, I cant believe I actually managed to do that! Awesome!"

Gamification and eLearning

So, recently my fascination with gaming has propelled me into a new field of geekdom. Gaming and its uses in learning, often referred to as gamification, a term also used for applying game-like elements to marketing and branding.

My interest was initially caught be the brilliant and awesome Jane Mcgonical and her views on using gaming and gamers to save the world, explained in this TED talk which I strongly recommend to everyone!

Now there seems to be wide agreement that gaming does indeed have vast potential as a learning tool and game theory elements are being used to engage and motivate. A good overview article on this could be Why Game Designers Are Better Motivators Than Your Boss.

One of the points that caught my attention was a reference to Dan Pink’s studies on performance and motivation and his 3 fundamentals of motivation; Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose, also termed M.A.P.

Achieving mastery at something that matters is greatly satisfying. The experience of getting better at something initially difficult when faced with, what Jane Mcgonical would call, an epic story of some sort is a great motivation. This leads us to purpose, the epic meaning, the important and enthralling goal. This is typically where good story telling and context comes in.

Drawing on the example of the Super Mario this point is expressed quite well in the above mentioned article: Is your work having you save any “princesses”, or are you smashing your head against bricks for nothing?

That leaves the the importance of autonomy, and this is an interesting and challenging issue in gamification. While I studied, I also worked for an eLearning company. The challenge of enabling sufficient levels of autonomy when creating eLearning is a significant one. The reason why autonomy is important, is that a crucial part of gaming is the freedom of choice. You choose which tasks to solve and to some extend, how to solve them.

As also mentioned in the article above, game designers are well aware that people game for different reasons, are driven by different motivations and enjoy different kinds of gameplay. In my own work with World of Warcraft I also found that my informants had completely different goals, motivations and ways of playing and experiencing the game. They all agreed that the game's ability to accommodate such different styles of gaming was one of its main assets.

So how can we best facilitate this when creating eLearning? Both the story and the autonomy are apparently important in order to create that oh so effective game-feel. But when does it become too complicated when compared to the learning purpose? An employee being subjected to eLearning in order to learn how to use a new piece of software or a new way of handling a specific situation is likely to get mightily annoyed by lengthy cartoon introductions and an initially confusing myriad of learning options. A person at work, who just needs the information to progress might not really need to spend time on being involved in an epic company-storyline.

So how to strike the balance? A wonderful guideline for any kind of online initiative now is to keep it simple, social and scalable. The level of game-elements, that invoke the three M.A.P fundamentals, must be scaled to the learning objective at hand. Creating a learning platform that facilitates autonomous learning without overpowering with too much "noise", where both the sender of the information and the recipient can scale the information to their own needs and preferences, might be the answer. If we provide a maleable and social platform, game elements might emerge on their own, as people help each other along to achieve their learning goals. After all, we all love playing games.

Seamless sharing

Today I read this interesting article

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebooks_seamless_sharing_is_wrong.php

As Im currently puzzled by this very phenomenon and how facebook as social stage is expanding, this discussion is greatly relevant. Basically this article states that, although nothing is necesarilly wrong with enabling the sharing of things like which books you buy and which articles you read, the way Facebook is doing it, with their Seamless sharing feature is wrong. We are being tricked into publishing things, because the process is confusing and misleading, creating uncertainty to what is actually published and what not, which can in the end lead to unfortunate self-cencorship. Very interesting stuff!

a few puzzled musings about Facebook...

The Facebook narrative is growing. A lot.

Lately I keep noticing more and more stuff that I can, with the ease of a couple of clicks, share on my Facebook account. When I buy a book on Amazon, theres a "share that you bought this book" button. When I want read an article on the online washington post, I can't get to before Ive decided whether or not I would like to share the fact of my reading this article on Facebook. Pretty much anything I buy online gives me the option of sharing the joyous news of my purchase with my facebook and/or twitter/google + network.

And then there's Spotify, which gives you the option of letting your facebook network see and possibly share what music you are listening to throughout the day. And Foursquare, so you can broadcast your whereabouts and perhaps even tag the people you were with.

Today, my twitter network (tx hrheingold) brought to my attention this blog post by a teacher who finds that letting the students create their own class discussion forum by making it a group on Facebook works much, much better than the forum he usually sets up for a class, probably in connection to a university website or intranet.

http://andrewdouch.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/myclassfacebookgroup/

Everything seems to be slowly sucked into Facebook (or maybe not so slowly). It makes sense, critical mass and all, but what really makes me wonder is the expansion of the self narrative we are publishing. The Facebook personal daily storytelling is of course an integral part of our narrative and our self presentation and all that, and the challenging thing regarding this, is that it is quite heavily co-constructed, as the comments and posts of other people play a constant part in it, making it a narrative that we are only partially in control of. (See Danah Boyds work on American teenagers' social media use or my own more humble bachelors paper for more thoughts on this). What is new and puzzling to me are all these aspects of our daily life that are being incorparated into this personal performance. The music. The newsreading. The online purchases. Checking into a new bar or just work or the Helsinki airport through Foursquare. Our consumerism has become more an act of performance than ever before. All actions are becoming a part of a semi-public personal web-opera. And for some, I know, the balance shifts towards doing things in anticipation of being able to post about it on facebook. The action in itself becomes less important than the network-sharing of it. I wonder if our actions will eventually only seem real to us once we get them validated by a few likes and comments.

Im not worried or against here. This is not a "the world is changing and I DONT LIKE IT!!" post. Im just intrigued. Im reminded of Anthony Giddens' thoughts of the fragmented narrative, the way we, exposed to all the information and cultural content of the world through the Internet, define our selves by the carefull selection of fragments to make up a coherent identity or, as he puts it, a coherent narrative. Being able to construct a coherent narrative is according to him a vital part of what makes us feel safe and whole and real. I wonder, now as we are growing accustomed to broadcasting more and more details of our daily lives, is this becoming easier or harder? More riddled with risk of breaks and incoherence? And can we actually keep managing to whom we present what? We may have a vague idea of whom our Facebook network actually consist of, but what if I, in my frantic self-publishing efforts get mixed up in what I reveal to Facebook and what I reveal on twitter or LinkedIn? Do I then loose all control of my narrative and how can that be managed?

Maybe we are truly all moving towards radical openess, as I remember being hyped for large businesses and very public figures a few years back. Its so very interesting. And of course the cautioning note from the grumpy old social anthropologist that lives inside me. Are we getting so bussy performing our daily opera that we are forgetting just to enjoy and be and live for its own sake? Well, thats probably not the case :)

rant rant rant.... enough for today.

From the notebook

Thesis writing is hard. Its quite the process. During the last year or two I mostly geeked out at home. From the few lectures and class sessions I actually went to, the contents of my notebook mostly display evidence of a mind gripped by miffedness and slight distress. These are the notebook pages as they progressed through the last couple of semesters:

Anyone who's had to do a lot of research and write a very very long text over a very very long time knows what I mean!