“This is Boring!”

High School Students,

The Internet

and Gaming Culture

Nick Maniatis

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/

Three Workshop Goals1. Is there an information / communication / technology

gap between teachers and students?2. If so, what is it (in my experience) and does it disrupt

student engagement?3. How do we (begin to) bridge the gap and (re)engage

students? Clearly not all of our students have access to the

technology I will be discussing.There are serious access and equity issues related to this

that I will not be addressing.

Loose Ends…• Why I’m here presenting this workshop

today.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. James Paul Gee, 2003.

• Addresses the issue: Video games are a waste of time because the child is learning no “content”.

• 36 learning principles.

• Question: How can I apply these learning principles to my teaching? (Without games)

Ilana Snyder – Gold Coast Conference 4/7/05Pattern Recognition. William Gibson, 2003.

• Cayce – Cool Hunter.• Fictional online film – ‘The Footage’.• Finding patterns and meaning. • Snyder – Early predictions about

computers fundamentally changing teaching have not come to fruition, but there has been huge social change.

Everything Bad is Good for You. Steven Johnson, 2005.

• Popular culture (video games, television, blockbuster films) as presented by the media targets the lowest common denominator. ‘Dumbing down’ of entertainment.

• Johnson argues that popular culture is more sophisticated and demanding than ever before.

The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. Chris Anderson,

2006.• Shops: 80/20 Rule. 20% products

account for 80% of sales. • Digital content: The 98% rule. • “In a world of almost zero packaging

cost and instant access to almost all content in this format consumers exhibit consistent behaviour: They look at almost everything.”

• Niche categories in ‘the long tail’ can make up a significant market.

•The Long Tail at Wired Online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set=

Wired Online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set=

What are our students doing outside school?

• How do they communicate? What has changed / is changing?

• Let’s start with what we know.

• Activity: Communication Technologies

Communication Technologies  Twenty Years Ago:

Television Tin-can telephoneTelephone Posted letterPager Thumb-Tack Bulletin BoardRadio

     

 Ten Years Ago:

 Today:   

  

Communication Technologies  Twenty Years Ago:

Television Tin-can telephoneTelephone Posted letterPager Thumb-Tack Bulletin BoardRadio

     

 Ten Years Ago: Email LAN (Local Area Network) gamesThe World Wide Web Dial-up modem networksList servs/ emailing lists Analogue mobile phonesBasic web forumsInternet Newsgroups  

 Today:Digital mobile phones: text messaging, video capable Instant messaging (ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger)Wireless networking devices (laptops, PDAs, portable computer game devices)Social networking websites (YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo)RSS News FeedsWired and wireless broadband infrastructureVOIP telephony (voice over internet protocol)BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol    

  

• Our students have access to a vast array of communication technologies that connect them to each other in wildly complicated and exciting networks.

• This is great for them… maybe not so good for us.

Communication Technologies

• Mobile Phones

• Television

• Online Chatting

• Gaming

• Blogging

• Social Networking / Video

• ARGs

Mobile Phones

• Young people are empowered by pre-paid schemes

• SMS / Text messaging.

• Camera functions.

• Video recording functions.

• Internet and television access.

Television

• Twin Peaks

• Big Brother / www.behindbigbrother.com

•Lost / www.lostpedia.com

•Post show online analysis.

Online Chatting• Email• IRC• Message boards / online forums• Instant messaging services (ICQ, MSN

Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Google talk)

• All are primarily text based.• Ability to conceal and/or create an identity.• Collaborative, social, homework.

Online Gaming

• Often competitive.

• Collaborative.

• Voice communication.

• Gaming clans as social groups.

Counter-Strike Source (PC)

• Maximum of 32 simultaneous players.

(16 vs 16)

• Tactical team based first person shooter.

• Game video. Watch.

Battlefield 2 (PC)

• Maximum of 64 simultaneous players.

(32 vs 32)

• Modern warfare ‘simulation’.

• Game video. Watch.

MMORPGs

• Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

• Hundreds – Thousands of simultaneous players.• Most are subscription based.• Everquest (Sony) “Evercrack”• World of Warcraft

Guild taking on Prince Thunderaan to obtain the Legendary weapon, Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Watch

Disruptive Gaming Technologies

• Nintendo DS - 2004

Portable

Two Screens

Touch sensitive

Wireless connectivity

Disruptive Gaming Technologies

• Nintendo Wii - 2006

Motion Control

Topic 1: Bored Students

Topic 2: Engaged Students

Blogging• “A Blog (Web log) is a website where entries are written in

chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. “ -Wikipedia

• Primarily textual. Personal journals, reviews, news, politics etc.

• Blogs link to other blogs. Readers are able to respond to posts and to each other.

• The ‘blogosphere’ is the community of blogs, bloggers and readers.

• Technorati blog search engine. (http://www.technorati.com) In May 07 it was tracking 70 million blogs.

www.boingboing.net

www.kottke.org

BloggingTools

• www.livejournal.com

Very popular with young people.

• www.blogger.com

Purchased by Google Feb 03.

Social Networking

• The blogging explosion of 1997-2000 changed online social networks.

• 2003 http://del.icio.us/ social bookmarking.• 2003 MySpace www.myspace.com (2003)

100 million members (NewsCorp 2006)• 2004 Facebook (www.facebook.com)

28 million members.• 2005 Bebo (www.bebo.com).

del.icio.us

www.myspace.com

Social News

• slashdot.org and digg.com

• The “slashdot” and “digg” effect due to large readership swamping and crashing / overloading web host servers.

• News Trust (beta.newstrust.net) news stories are peer reviewed and discussed by members.

slashdot.org

digg.com

beta.newstrust.net

Social Video

• 2005 YouTube (www.youtube.com)

Bought by Google Nov 2006.

• LiveLeak: Redefining the media

(liveleak.com) War footage, crime, accidents.

www.youtube.com

liveleak.com

The ARG

• Alternate Reality Games are an evolution of role-playing games that use many different communication technologies.

• 2001: The Beast used to promote Steven Spielberg’s A.I. There were three entry points or ‘rabbit holes’, one was a phone number hidden in the text of a movie trailer.

• July 2004: I Love Bees to promote the game Halo 2 for Xbox

• 2007: Year Zero to promote the latest Nine Inch Nails album.

• http://www.unfiction.com/

Is it any surprise…

That we hear students exclaim,

“This is boring!”

The long tail… of teaching and learning

• The long tail as a metaphor for teaching and learning.

• Electronic resources, communities and online environments give us access to tools that allow us to engage students ‘in the tail’ that some of our ‘greatest hits’ pedagogies do not reach.

To move our teaching down the tail we need to:

• Acknowledge that the technologies our students use for entertainment are also powerful tools for communication.

• Use the same technologies in our teaching and our own learning.

• Use different technologies to motivate and teach different students.

Topic: Trying to engage students with communication technology

What can we do to begin to engage bored students?

• Use the Learning by Design framework (Kalantzis & Cope) http://l-by-d.com/

• Build options into teaching and assessment that require, utilise and develop communication technology skills.

• Re-imagine linear texts as hypertexts or create gaming manuals for a game based on the text being studied.

Hypertext / game manual literacy activities can be a powerful motivators.

• Use free tools and encourage students to blog, podcast, videoblog or remix existing media.

Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/(Free cross-platform sound editor)

YouTube remixer (account required) http://www.youtube.com/ytremixer_about

Use the www.archive.org collection of copyright free video to create video mash-ups.

• Create web comics using free comic creation tools.

http://www.stripcreator.com/make.php

http://www.wittycomics.com/make-comic.php

http://www.stripgenerator.com/ (Flash 9)

• Encourage students to use gaming engines that they can customise to create virtual environments, or create simple games using software such as Game Maker 7.http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

Survivor Camp from Robert Swindell’s Brother in the Land recreated in the Half Life 2 game engine. Watch

Barricades

• Personal expertise.

• Internet restrictions at school.

• Perceived danger / issues of freedom.

• Privacy.

• Time management.

Braiding Loose Ends…

• The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

• Created by Dr. Michael Wesch, Kansas State University.

• Digital Ethnography Working Group

http://mediatedcultures.net/

• Watch

and we’ll need to rethink… Teaching

I don’t have the answers.

I hope I’ve started you thinking.

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)http://mediatedcultures.net/

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g