Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 563.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Tarvers, Josephine K." (23)
<tarversj@exchange.winthrop.edu>
Subject: RE: 13.0557 games, learning and teaching
[2] From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com> (63)
Subject: 13.0554 Come out to play?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 21:28:10 +0100
From: "Tarvers, Josephine K." <tarversj@exchange.winthrop.edu>
Subject: RE: 13.0557 games, learning and teaching
Dear Colleagues,
Being new to this group, I don't know if I'm repeating well-known
information or not, but Janet Murray does talk about how we become familiar
with, socialized to, and immersed in role-playing games in her book _Hamlet
on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace_ (Free Press, 1997).
Apropos of what Mary Dee Harris mentioned, Murray talks particularly about
how female roles can be created, how the scripts for these roles can unleash
or constrain desire--and therefore why they are powerful. The chapters on
"Immersion" and "Agency" seem particularly suited to the current thread of
discussion.
FWIW,
Jo
------------
Jo Koster Tarvers, Ph.D.
Department of English
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC 29733-0001
(803) 323-4557; fax (803) 323-4837
tarversj@winthrop.edu <mailto:tarversj@winthrop.edu>
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/tarversj
<http://faculty.winthrop.edu/tarversj>
"The only things certain in life are death and taxes; too bad they don't
come in that order."--Broom Hilda
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 21:29:05 +0100
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: 13.0554 Come out to play?
Dear Colleagues:
Willard has pointed out under this topic that games would raise the
question about how we know what we think we know, and that there are two
questions: 1. Can we reach the Sega-generation effectively through
games? If so, what is to be considered? 2. Who is doing this already and
doing it well?
I have located the online conference which Doctorow Consultants contributed
to: TCC 2000, Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, April
12-14, at <http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu>http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu. I
mentioned this earlier under the same topic. Our presentation, "Internet
Flashcards: Communication and Access," by Osher Doctorow, Marleen Doctorow
[mispelled by the internet (odd !) as Marlene], and Sam Hopper, details
some of the work on a type of game situation that Doctorow Consultants have
been working on. Colleagues are urged to access that presentation, and if
they have trouble downloading it without passwords or whatever, I'll try
see what I can do.
I can only touch the boundaries of the subject here, especially with regard
to answering the questions above. However, I have thought of an analogy
which I like very much. Suppose that you are trying to teach student S to
play the violin (or piano, for those so inclined). If you teach S to play
the violin by practicing concerto grosso's or sympthonies or operas, you
will usually fail. The reason is not that practice and complex problems
and active games are bad, but that you forgot to teach S how to move S's
fingers and hands on the violin or piano before going on to the harder
things. This seems so elementary as to be almost trivial.
Yet we in universities and lower schools have been assigning students
garage-fulls of homework, challenging problems, and even full blown
projects to work on as a group or individually, in almost every
subject. We compromise and make some of these problems relatively easy,
but if we eliminate the students who cheat, who ask friends for answers,
who ask parents and tutors for answers, who find answers on the internet
and in libraries without having the faintest idea what the answers mean,
there is almost nobody left (well, maybe the children of a few instructors
and one or two Einsteins). We attempt to create SYMPHONY or CONCERTO
GROSSO GAMES. We should be attempting to create FINGER/HAND EXERCISE
GAMES, or in most subjects DEFINITION/THEOREM/THEORY/PRINCIPLE GAMES. Only
AFTER students have mastered the latter games should we ask them to move on
to symphony games, even if it takes us an extra term or two in every subject.
Internet flash cards make learning definitions, theorems, theory,
principles, axioms relatively painless, and they can be used in a somewhat
gamelike context, but when the bottom line is reached, there is no
substitute for the student actually reading and learning the flash cards on
the internet, which is hard work that does not involve fun at most
points. Fun can come later, in symphonies. There is a point, hopefully
early enough in a child's development, where the parent must decide whether
to almost literally sit on the child or not to get the child to do the work
of learning the flash cards corresponding to finger/hand exercises. They
might find that they have already got a child on their hands who will not
tolerate the frustration of doing this. The parent must then decide
whether to get therapeutic help or not, and by this I literally mean
psychology, educational therapy, or even hypnosis. I would ask parents a
question (and instructors are parents too, quite often): would you rather
have your child grow up uneducated (poorly educated) or as a last resort
hypnotized? Marleen would phrase this more mildly, but I think that if you
cannot commit yourself to hypnotize your child in order to focus their
concentration and eliminate distractions from their friends and develop
good study habits and read flash cards, then you are in big trouble. If
parents cannot answer this question, then games will not help to reach
children. If parents answer "yes," then after the students learn their
flash cards, their hand/finger exercises, they can go on to games more
reminiscent of concerto grossos and symphonies. This is what Doctorow
Consultants has been working on.
Cheers
Osher
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