One of my good friends (also COETAIL instructor and 2015 Vietnam Tech Conf keynote presenter) Rob Appino is focusing his PhD in education on the subject of game-based learning and gamification. He was the first to point out to me the differences between game-based learning and gamification. This distinction appears again in Elizabeth Corcoran’s article, The Gamification of Education. Corcoran also talks about student created games as an additional, and highly important, aspect of games and education.

Game Based Learning

This refers to the use of games to teach educational skills and knowledge. Although, as blogger Scott McLeod points out, many educational games have woefully poor gaming mechanics and graphics, the realm of game based learning is larger than ‘drill to kill’ flashcard games. It also includes games like Civilization, SimCity and other fairly sophisticated strategy games. Even if these sorts of games often fail to teach history directly, they familiarize students with many historical elements that then can be developed.  I once had a student who knew who the Chinese female pirate (and badass) Ching Shih was because he had played her in a strategy game.

Although most game-based learning has a fairly static set of game-play rules, this is not always the case. When I was teaching economics seven years ago, I used the classic game Monopoly to teach macro-economic principles. Specifically, I as we studied various elements of the world of finances, I had my students design corresponding gaming elements for Monopoly.

Gamification

Although the specific formulation of this is relatively new, gamification has been around a long time. It is used by kids to teach each other how to run, used by elementary teachers when they reward good behavior with gold stars, and is used by high school teachers when we do Jeopardy style quiz nights.

The difference is that now gamification is more intentionally based on ideas from the video game world.  Experience points, levels, badges, and scoreboards all began in offline games, were adopted and popularized by video games, and are now entering back into the world of education.

In addition to using these sorts of game mechanics, building a compelling narrative is also critical in gamification. In Monopoly you are imagining yourself to be a capitalist tycoon.  In a role playing video game like World of Warcraft you create an actual character that has history, depth, strengths and weaknesses. In gamified education settings, teachers are adding both narrative and gaming mechanics to build student engagement.

One of the first examples of a gamified lesson that I encountered was last year at ASB Unplugged. I met Eric Nelson and learned about a game he had built to teach about infectious disease that was modeled on zombie movies. When I got back from the conference, I worked with Kelsey Giroux, a humanities teacher at UNIS, on gamifying her unit on the industrial revolution (which happened to be her Course 5 project for COETAIL).

She had already added gaming mechanics to the lessons, but after we talked she went back and added narrative elements as well. She set the story in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have been forced to abandon the Earth and are establishing a colony on Mars. As we develop the beginnings of a new industrial age, the leaders of the colony are hiring historians to research the first industrial revolution and report back on the causes, issues, and consequences of it.

According to the University of Minnesota Hype Cycle predictions, gamification is slowly rising up the “Slope of enlightenment”, although mainstream adoption is still 5+ years away. I think that it can be an incredible tool in the hands of a good game-maker, but building games like these is a skill that most teachers were never taught.

DIY: Student Created Games

Scratch (http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Category:Images) Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

These are also games, but come more from the DIY and maker-space movements than from that of gaming.  The most notable example of this is Scratch, but one could argue that building robots with Legos, Arduinos, and other tools also counts as a type of gaming.  As others have noted, these games, for the most part, attract students who are already interested and motivated. However, in looking at the rise of movements like Hour of Code I wonder if these sorts of games will become more main-stream in the near future.

As should be clear by now, I believe game-based learning, gamification, and student-created games have all been around for longer than typically understood and will continue to be around for the foreseeable future. The bottom line is that we all learn better when we are interested in a subject, when we care about it. In order to find ways to build engagement, it makes sense to study phenomena that many kids find utterly engrossing, like video games. Not every teacher who seeks to incorporate this will be successful – just as there are plenty of unsuccessful video games. However, once the hype has settled we’ll see which games are left and how they can make a difference for kids.

When we talk about the meaning of tech integration, we have to first start with the meaning of technology. The best definition of technology that I’ve heard comes from Alan Kay, who said in the 1980s that “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” (Wikiquote) Perhaps his most famous quote is “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

What’s fascinating to me about this definition is that it shows that our understanding of technology is inherently subjective; there is no objective reason why we talk about technology as computers and electronics but not pencils, chalkboards, and scissors.

Kay’s colleague Danny Hillis expanded on the definition when he said in an interview that “I think technology is all the stuff that doesn’t work yet” (Newsweek, “Disney’s Wizards”).

In his article “99% Invisible” for the New Media Consortium (that of the Horizon Report), Tom Haymes writes that “Unless you are a technician or technologist, the central function of technology should be as an invisible augmentation of the hard tasks we face every day.” From the perspective of Harris, once technology functions actually works and invisibly it actually ceases to be technology, much like chairs are not seen as technology.

Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg: michael hughes from berlin, germany derivative work: Beao (Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg) [CC BY-SA 2.0

• everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

• anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

• anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

If we talk about meaning of ‘tech integration’ it seems to me that we are talking about teaching and learning where technology isn’t seen as ‘technology’ but rather just a part of the lesson. In that sense, despite Jeff Utecht’s objections over the term, the term ‘integration’ is in my mind an appropriate one. To ‘integrate’ comes from the Latin integrat, which meant ‘made whole’. It seems that is our goal – to make technology as much a part of a lesson as people or pedagogy, not something in addition but something that is part of the whole.

And yet, as we see from Alan Kay’s definition of technology, there is something almost generational that makes technology been seen as technology rather than an integral part of the learning experience.  While Douglas’ age cut off at 30 is perhaps more figurative than literal, it does point to the bewilderment that many people feel towards change and technology later in their lives.

This, then, is the challenge of technology integration: we must reverse the psychology age of teachers so that they all have the wonder of youth, and we must make the latest technology as integral a part of learning as chairs, paper and people.

And yet, as I commented in an article from Edutopia, that’s not quite it either. If we talk about Tech Integration Specialists, we are talking about an oxymoron: technology that is integrated into a curriculum is not thought of as ‘technology’ as such, it is simply part of teaching and learning.

Rather than looking at technology integration, I think we should be talking about learning innovation. How do we help teachers and students find the best ideas, practices, and tools to promote learning? Because the teachers, students, tools, and environment are constantly changing, there is no single technique or lesson that we can cling to. Instead, we need to create places of learning that can themselves learn and grow.

Tech integration frameworks like SAMR, TPACK or Grapplings can be useful in this process. My own thinking about SAMR underwent a fairly substantial evolution after I did a workshop with its founder, Ruben Puentedura, last December. I find TPACK more useful for me as a Tech Coordinator than for actual teachers, for it helps me keep in mind the different types of knowledge needed across subject areas. The Grapplings model is somewhat less popular, though in some ways I find it more helpful. The difficulty with it is that (like many interpretations of SAMR) its example seem to downplay the importance of tech literacy as well as ‘transforming’ uses of technology.

I don’t think any of them are particularly helpful as tools to measure where individual teachers are along a spectrum. Even if a teacher could say that they are using technology for ‘Redefinition’, in the TPCK part of the diagram, or using tech transformatively, does that mean that there is nowhere to go or grow?

For myself and in my experience, there is always a way of taking a learning experience up a notch, whether through a change in pedagogy, execution, technology, or conception. This is part of our learning process as teachers, and it is not something that happens in a single lesson, year, or even decade.