formal education

Life Is Just A Game?

Posted on by Jon K.

There’s been quite an upswing in talk about gaming your life, where you add an application to assist yourself in achieving a goal. For instance, you could use the Nike app for the iOS platform, and track your progress as you walk 5k, or more like me, walk to the fridge. Naturally, educators have seen how people learn on their own, usually with a great passion, and want to leverage that into the classroom. The common one I’ve heard is that people will memorize the various class requirements and bonuses on a piece of gear for World of Warcraft, but of course don’t bother memorizing the times tables, who the president of Nicaragua is, or any other mundane information that is useful but ultimately discarded in favour of how many bonuses Cloudsong has.

Full disclosure: I actually played World of Warcraft, and the game Dark Age of Camelot, and did in fact have my Cloudsong stolen during an artifact raid in Dark Age of Camelot. I also knew the bonuses for a level ten Cloudsong, but since then I have forgotten them. I’m sure I could look it up, but it’s not that important.

The simple conclusion is to make education more like a game – add “achievements” and “unlockables”… oh wait. Education has already tried that. Achievements like diplomas, and unlockables like second year. So what’s the difference? Well, now we add gaming designer to the crew of people who are involved in curriculum design. Actually, we already had a gaming designer, except the “games” (ahem, classes) weren’t that well designed. The problem isn’t that classes need more “gaming” elements or achievements, the problem is simply that education practice has not kept up with changes in society over the last (I’ll be generous and say) fifty years. Adding more gaming elements that don’t have a purpose for learners is not going to help them learn, it will only frustrate them. Moreover, anyone asking an instructor to be a gaming designer and not only be a web designer, engaging lecturer, techno-guru, curriculum designer, tech support for their class as well as subject matter expert, well, that’s not going to happen. One can only wear so many hats.

It’s interesting that television really brought this to my attention. I was flipping around the dial after the Daily Show, and up popped an interview with Jane McGonigal, the author of  the book “How Video Games Will Save The World”. Of course, anything with that title is going to pique my interest. I wasn’t that interested as it’s the same ground being tread by Stephen Johnson’s book about popular culture’s effect on society. Towards the end of the interview, Jane mentions a charter school in New York that has employed a game designer in addition to the  usual battery of curriculum designers. Of course, it was out of the scope of the interview, but it would have been really interesting to see what were the drawbacks of this approach. In gaming there is a relatively harsh penalty for not completing a task – your character dies, your game is over. Learning is not so binary (of course, good games don’t have to be that binary either).

So ultimately, I think gaming in education will be a marginalized thing for formal education, and it will continue to drive informal education as it has done for the last decade.  I think that gaming can learn from education though – and that hopefully gaming will learn not to push out so many crap games year after year.

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Formal Vs. Informal Learning

Posted on by Jon K.

I’m applying for a job that is out of my educational range. Sure, this is something lots of people do all the time – where they have the experience but not the education credentials to back up the informal, on-the-job training that people have – or the experience. I’ve often wondered about formal education, whether it’s worth it, and I always assume it will be worth it. But maybe it’s not. I look at my experience, and comparing that to the job description, I’m confident I can do the job and excel in it. I have the skills and I have the passion to do it well. The thing that will hang me up is the lack of a Master’s. It’s not that I can’t do the education – every indication is that I can, my marks are high and feedback from my professors have been positive. The thing that holds me back is I just don’t have the money. At close to $700 for a half credit course, I’m about $5000 away from completing my Bachelor’s of Education. Even doing prior learning assessments would only reduce my courses required by one or two half credits. I’ve looked at the PLA’s as well, and in many cases, the theory required from these PLA’s bear no resemblance to the practical application of that skill.

Especially with online skills like HTML and the myriad of programming languages, most practitioners of web skills are self-taught or have learned on the job, a picture perfect definition of informal learning. How should we credit these people? Do we examine the projects they’ve worked on, or maybe give them a test to assess their skills? I lean towards the project based nature of assessment – I feel it’s closer to a real assessment of what someone can do. The other piece is that there’s such an open community of people out there sharing their work, is there any way to assess the individual with something as ubiquitous as HTML? Never mind the leaps and bounds that tools have taken since 2000, where it requires no memorization of tags, just the ability to select the appropriate tool from a list. Does that make the person less qualified than someone who has taken the time to go to class and learn tags? Factor this in further, most curriculum is behind the times, I know the stuff I learned in school in 2001/2 for HTML was already a couple years behind (it was equivalent to the courses in HTML I had taken at the University of Texas in 1997, which really didn’t tell me more than what I had taught myself already from resources on the web). Fast forward 9 years, and hopefully that curriculum has been updated and advanced, but there is no guarantee that the curriculum now looks at separation of content and design. In many ways informal learning has been superior to formal learning, especially so in this realm. I’d suspect that very very few institutions are thinking about HTML5, but there are already several books, many websites and untold numbers of resources coming out of the blogs around the Internet. Maybe formal education will be a curated process (much like George Siemens guessed at) where the instructor assembles the online resources and orders them so that they make logical sense, but doesn’t stand at the front of the class. Thank goodness, because I think it’s time for a change.

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Is Formal Education Important?

Posted on by Jon K.

I was looking at the results of A List Aparts 2009 survey results, and was downright flabbergasted by the results of the question asking whether the respondent’s education was relevant (figure 8 on the main page for those looking at the data results right now). 18.2% found that their education was not relevant to web design. That’s one in five. When combined with the next figure (a little), it jumps to 47.9%. Almost half felt that formal education was essentially only marginally useful for their career. On the further breakdown by age (figure 2.3 on this page) ,   there is an almost 15% drop in relevance for the 65+ crowd. This makes a lot of sense, most of these people would have gone to school in a very different climate of the mid-60’s. Computers took up the size of rooms and networking was a high end venture. It makes sense that a lot of people who ended up as web designers would probably have come from graphic design backgrounds as print morphed into web. Many of these people may be in managerial positions as well – who may not need the technical skills that the front line grunts require. It would be nice to have a basic breakdown by age and job title to see if there’s any sense of that information.

Now there’s not a lot of web design programs – even fifteen years later. Most students who are interested in the field learn HTML in high school – either in a class or on their own, then develop whatever skills they need to complete the task. Informal learning for the most part, these people are task oriented, which school does not really address well. School does a good job of broadening people’s horizons.

I feel that while I didn’t get an education that informs my skills as a web designer (I am mostly self taught), I do draw from the lessons learned in software engineering  and in media arts as well as education (the three things I’ve studied formally) and apply them to design in a greater sense. I wonder if I think about these sorts of questions more than others though.

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