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Classroom Games: From Chaos to Meaning

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato

Games liven up a space, and they bring out the best and the worst in us. While playing, we design, connive, think creatively, fight on, give up and unabashedly show our emotions on the field.

Games have the power to help us learn about ourselves. All it requires is a little meta-cognitive thinking triggered by some Socratic questioning by a facilitator.

As a game designer, I’ve had the great fortune to keenly observe the process of learning through games. This helped me arrive at a progression pattern that most of our classroom games follow. Take a look:

1. Chaos and Understanding of Game Mechanics

Learners concentrate on understanding the mechanics of the game, they ask a lot of questions, and are in a state of chaos. This is the exploratory phase, where things may not be in complete order. Usually people begin to make sense of the game at this stage.

In a well-design game this phase lasts a short time.

2. Intense Play

By this stage learners have understood the game and are immersed in it. They team up to device strategies, brainstorm, or just simply jump into the game to try and explore. A lot of discoveries about the topics under study happen in this phase. Learners may draw upon past experiences and knowledge. Relationships among players and opponents emerge, and emotions begin to run high. The classroom’s decibel levels are very high at this stage.

This phase is full of discoveries, formation of new knowledge, drawing up on past knowledge, formation of relationships, and learning through connections. This is the stage that players will usually reflect back to once the game is over.

3. Concentration on the End Goal, and Competition

During this phase, the end goal takes over and learners concentrate on winning. This is a phase of heightened activity, where learners are in action, executing their strategies and thoughts. Competition among groups/individuals usually peaks at this stage.

Teams practically apply the topics under study and they may need to rethink concepts, strategies, and previously held beliefs. Facilitators may intervene to help losing teams to understand their situation very well.

4. Realizations

This is the last phase where winners emerge, and almost all teams have an “aha” moment of discovery, either by having played the winning game or by observing other teams.

This is where they start to look back at what they did during the game. Talk about what they did right or where they went wrong starts to emerge. People may try and buy more time to correct some actions.

5. Reflection

Good learning design usually helps facilitators to grab this opportunity to help learners reflect on what they actually did, and what they could have done. We usually make all our games reflection heavy, because this is where the learning becomes relevant and obvious to learners.

A lot of meta-cognitive thinking helps learners reflect back on their thoughts, behaviors, strategies, misconceptions. This phase is debate and thought heavy. Learners have several “aha” moments at this stage too and realization dawns on them about their own and their team’s actions. This is where a large part of the learning takes place.

6. Formation of Far and Wide Connections

This is an extension of the reflection phase where facilitators help learners connect their learning to real life situations, their job, and the tasks they perform.

Extension to real life and formation of connections with other things helps learners imbibe the concepts taught and take the learning with them forever.

Performance Assessment: A Self-Check

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Every time I assess performance of my team members, I do some meta-cognitive thinking. And the stuff that I find out about myself is always startling. Sometimes I find myself controlling the urge to shield a favorite high performer. Other times I'm outright political. I even catch myself getting swayed by popular opinion. And what's worse, often I don't even have enough evidence or observed data points about a person to qualify to give feedback. For those, who like me feel the brunt of being human, here are some fun ways to control that devil inside:

1. Peep into Your Own Mind—Avoid Bias

Ask yourself‚ "Am I biased?" If the little voice in you says, "No," give it an Implicit Association Test (IAT):

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html

I came across this test in Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Blink," and it was an eye-opener. Most of us are biased, and as this site explains, we may not even be aware of it. Just becoming alert towards our biases may help us avoid them while assessing performance.

2. Probe the 12 Angry Men—Go by Evidence, Not Perception

Many times we get so carried away by our perceptions that we don't look for enough evidence of performance or the lack of it. We're too quick to jump to conclusions. The film‚ "12 Angry Men‚" is an intense watch that sensitizes the mind to look for facts. At some level, it even reminds me of an appraisal discussion where we take decisions that affect people's careers. The film (1 hour 52 minutes) tells us to state facts and to provide evidence for every definitive statement we make about a person's performance.

3. Be Like a Sleuth—Observe Carefully

Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 2, "The Science of Deduction" is a witty account of how Mr. Holmes stumps Dr. Watson with his capability to observe and to deduce:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet/Part_1/Chapter_2

While we don't need to be super sleuths, we do need to observe to be able to gather appropriate facts.

4. Avoid Political Appraisals—Support Good Performers

Give people their due. Avoid political appraisal of people's performance. In this candid address (7 minutes), Carl Icahn brings out the common culture and politics that surround promotions in our organizations. He gives a funny analogy of anti-darwinian organizations that promote talent that is weaker and weaker.

5. Monkey Say, Monkey Do—Don't Follow Popular Belief

Think for yourself. Don't get swayed by what others say about a person. We may not realize it, but we are not immune to peer pressure or popular opinion. Here is an interesting experiment (2 minutes) that tells us that we aren't infallible:

We must double check for such effects on our feedback and assessment ratings. While these resrouces opened my mind towards performance assessment, you can also use them in workshops to help executives become better performance and talent assessors. So have fun assessing people, and keep that devil in check.

Drop the Instruction, Not the Story

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KathakaliDancer_Medium There is a story from the Mahabharata, which almost every Indian child knows. This is how it goes:

Dronacharya, the great teacher to the royal family, was teaching his students the skill of archery. He placed a clay parrot on a tree, gave each student a bow and an arrow, and said to each one of them, “Aim at the eye of the parrot and tell me what you see.”

Each student took turns to aim at the parrot. One student said, “I see the sky, the tree, and the parrot.” Archer Another one said, “I see the beautiful tree, the fruit on the tree, and the parrot.” Listening to their responses, the teacher didn’t allow any student to shoot the parrot. After many students had tried and had not been allowed to shoot, one student called Arjuna, finally said, “I can only see the eye of the parrot.” This student was allowed to take an aim, and he managed to bring the parrot down.

When I was a child, this story inspired awe, and spoke of focus and observation to me. Now, in the context of learning, it brings forth a few new things to my mind. The tools of bow and arrow, and repetitive practice could have made the boys good archers. However, the teacher helped them construct the meaning of the terms, “focus” and “observation” on their own. What were the components of this experience?

The experience included:

A task (Shoot the clay parrot)
A question/problem (What do you see?)
Resources (The bow and arrow)
The freedom to construct their own responses to the question
The environment (Listening to other’s responses)
Timely feedback (The person who constructed the meaning of focus got the appreciation of the Guru and was allowed to shoot)

What is interesting to observe is the dynamic interplay of these components, which leads to a constructivist learning environment. It is very important to understand the story from the perspective of the children who did not get the right answer. How did they react? What did they learn out of this experience? Did they learn the meaning of the term, “focus?” Well, as the story goes, all students of this teacher became accomplished warriors in the epic tale of Mahabharata.

Another essential aspect of this story is the “story” itself. It’s a part of the oral tradition, and usually, the way it is told brings back the experience of Arjuna to each child. A child in Puppets India who has not received formal education also gets to hear this story (and many more) through their parents, grandparents, or through travelling storytellers. Stories have the power to transcend time, space, and literacy barriers. They can travel from one end of the nation to another in such a viral fashion that education can almost ride its way to Indian villages through them. Many artists/students take messages to the masses by performing stories on the streets. Some other examples of these travelling storytellers are the nautanki, the jatra, and the phad. Some dance forms like Kathakalli and Oddissi too tell stories to the people who have never entered a formal schooling system.

Can we harness the power of stories to take education to the remotest parts of the world, while maintaining the context that the people of these places understand and know?

Can we create a world of young storytellers who will be able to empathize with people from diverse cultures, diverse backgrounds and exchange stories to create meaning of the world they inhabit?

A few examples from India on the power and reach of storytelling:

http://www.ted.com/talks/mallika_sarabhai.html

http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in/resources/dy-july-2009/kaavad.pdf

An interesting storytelling experiment on the Internet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwOACfwtSWg&feature=PlayList&p=631E96AFE0E6CB9A&index=0&playnext=1

Documentary as a tool for storytelling—The Story of Human Origin (An online museum):

http://www.becominghuman.org/node/interactive-documentary

Branching scenarios—Interactive stories in the formal teaching environment:

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2010/05/elearning-example-branching-scenario/

Resources:

Image of the Indian boy with a bow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hydrous/237171496/

Image of Kathakali dancer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spisharam/2305721119/

Image of kathputli (puppet) story tellers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/2178576805/

Think Like the Marketers

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We’re not selling you anything. It’s your dreams, your aspirations, and your game. We can just enable things for you. If a commercially driven product like Nike can say this to me, why not a course that has been created for my benefit and is being offered to me for free? Are people sold out to your learning offerings and HR interventions? Do they love them, await them, and can’t wait to see them play out in their lives? To achieve this, you could:

Follow the success criteria of online retailers
Promote learning as a brand

Follow the Success Criteria of Online Retailers

Picking up a cue from www.amazon.com and www.ebay.com we can change the learning ecosystem of an organization to look like an online retail store where each course (online or offline) is vying for learner’s attention. Here are some of the ways in which you can allow learners to choose and rate their courses:

Ratings and Views

How many times do you visit www.amazon.com and check the ratings that books have received? Ratings correspond with the perceived value of a product, and they can help learners to assess the worth of the courses they intend to take. Also, viewing how others have rated a course can motivate learners to “look inside” the course.

Recommendations

If learners find your courses invigorating and useful, they will automatically make time to write about them and to recommend them to peers. Showing favorable and critical reviews adds authenticity to your offerings. It also makes learners interact with each other in a positive way through the means of a course.

Learners Who Took this Course Also Viewed

If in your organization most learners who took a Selling Skills course also took a course on Communication Skills, then this information will most likely benefit others too. These “affinity recommendations” make it easier for learners to reach beneficial content. When used appropriately, it can be a revolutionary way to replace a fixed curriculum with a loosely coupled set of learner centric courses or learning objects.

About the Subject Matter Expert

Giving out information about industry subject matter experts, their Twitter address, blogs, and so on can help an enthusiastic learner to dig out more information on the subject. If you can get learners to connect with experts you will have turned them into life-long learners.

Additionally you could look at the criteria that marketers use at the back end. These include:

Average Time on Page: This is the amount of time that learners spend on each page of the course.
Exit Rate: This indicates the percentage of people that drop out of a page having spent less than 10 seconds on it.
Page Per View: This shows the number of pages viewed by each learner in every session.
Goal Conversion: Goal conversion is the current traditional course success criteria, such as “course completion rates” and “assessment passing rates.”

Promote Learning as a Brand

With the success criteria redefined, you know that it is critical to be able to sell your courses to learners. Once again, put yourselves in the shoes of marketers and follow these steps:

Identify the Positioning of Your Courses
Create Awareness
Live Up to the Image
Generate Talk

Identify the Positioning of Your Course

There are many shoes in a retail store, but what sets Nike apart? Nike, doesn’t sell shoes, it sells “winning,” it sells “hope.” Similarly, don’t sell a course on “product knowledge,” sell “fun” and sell “the end of ignorance.”

Also, ensure that the course delivers what it claims to deliver. Nothing damages reputation like building expectations and then not delivering up to them.

Create Awareness

Like the advertisers, be present at the right time, at the right place, and get noticed often. Plan the media you will use, the messages you’ll send out, and the number of times you’ll reach your audience (the learners). For example a poster in an elevator can get you a captive audience.

Live Up to the Image

If your communication promises fun and end of ignorance, then deliver just that. For online courses, opening up opportunities to learn from a group of people and experts online, to solve real life problems, and to merge learning and work will most likely make learning fun and relevant. Silo-like, SCORM compliant courses won’t be required if the success criteria for the courses have been redefined (as described above). With the new criteria you can create an experience that learners will cherish.

Generate Talk

Do the learners who take your courses (online or live) talk about the courses in their life or while at work? This is an immeasurable test of the success of your course. Like famous advertisements, the characters, the examples, the situations, the activities from your courses should become a part of the day-to-day vocabulary of your learners. They should motivate the learners to participate in and to contribute to what you offer. Your courses need to generate reviews (appreciation or criticism) and you will know that you’ve done your job well, and reached out to the audience the way the marketers do. You’ve sold change.

Reference for the image on the Home Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38983646@N06/3794175120/sizes/m/

This work by Design Storm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Twitter Skills for Learners

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On Twitter, ask and you shall receive much more than you asked for. Given the reputation of the Twitterati and their lunch and burp updates, this may sound like a counterproductive boon. However, you ask for the right stuff, and you will receive the right stuff—in abundance. While Twitter can be one of the best tools that learners will have in their toolkit, it needs some skills for them to avoid getting overwhelmed and lost.

So what are these skills? Here is a quick list:

Follow Your Interests
Select The Right Information
Reflect
Mindcast Not Lifecast

Let's explore each of these in a little more detail.

1. Follow Your Interests

"Follow Your Interests" is not just a tag line on the Twitter home page, but also a very good piece of advice. I learned early that if cricket interests you, you follow cricket, and not your star struck neighbor who chases film star updates and re-tweets them every five seconds.

Following organizations, gurus, peers, enthusiasts who are interested in the same subject as you can make you a life-long learner. You can do this by:

Evaluating people's profiles on Twitter before you start following them. This helps to cut out noise of unnecessary tweeters.
Following authors of books, articles, research papers, and blogs that you find interesting.
Searching for hashtags by subject. For example, if you are interested in the field of education, you could search for #education or #learning and then follow the people who frequently use these hashtags in their tweets. Similarly, when you tweet, use appropriate hashtags (hash sign # + relevant search word) to get the right kind of followership.

Tip: To search for trending hashtags in your subject of interest, you could run a search on: http://hashtags.org/.

As you know, knowledge in our organizations lies with our employees. Connecting them together through a common objective or interest, using a tool like Twitter, can help us harness this tremendous network. Some tools also provide the option of creating an organization based Twitter community.

Tip: If you wish to have a secure micro-blogging option for your organization, consider http://hashwork.com/. This tool by Hashworks utilizes Twitter to form a closed community of users. Here's a review of the tool: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/hashwork-bridges-with-twitter-for-internal-and-external-micro-blogging-005641.php.

2. Select the Right Information

Despite following the right people, you will be inundated with tweets. Initially you are bound to feel overwhelmed with the chaotic surge of information running past your eye. However, take a deep breath and let go.

Luckily, with frequent use our eyes become accustomed to selecting only the tweets that are relevant. Our mind learns the art of tuning out unimportant tweets. Surprising as it may be, we are automatically able to discard—select—classify—read the tweets that buzz past.

As George Siemens puts it, "Chaos is the new reality for knowledge workers." We deal with a mind boggling amount of information each day. Therefore, being able to quickly sift out information will not only help new age employees to use Twitter, it will also prepare them for life-long learning. Educators can encourage and promote this skill.

Tip: Here's some deep thought from John Seely Brown on "digital age" learners, and the power of connections in learning and innovation: http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/FEB02_Issue/article01.html. As you read this article, you'll also realize that the power of Twitter can be utilized to create a learning ecology where experts, amateurs, and enthusiasts interact to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.

3. Reflect

One very good use of Twitter is to reflect aloud. Each day, give yourself just one minute to think publicly about something interesting that you've read, heard, or watched. You will be surprised to see how 140 characters shape your thoughts. Use Twitter to formulate new ideas, summarize, comment upon, share about, or add to your topic of interest. The network that you form through such an activity will feed your thoughts further.

Let your personality and thoughts show through your tweets, be free, and be yourself. However, remember you're not ideating in isolation. You may want to make your tweets meaningful to your audience too.

You could try this in close teams or in workshops where people are working towards a common objective:

Ensure that the participants are aware of these tweeting skills (you could share this article)
Create a hashtag
Declare a tweet minute
Give one minute to the participants to tweet about the subject that they are working on
Encourage a culture of responding to meaningful tweets
Help participants walk off from the workshop with a small Twitter network of people they can learn from

Tip: Here's a list of some of my favorite tweeters in the field of learning:

@Quinnovator
@amyjokim
@SirKenRobinson
@RobinGood
@NYTimesLearning

4. Mindcast Not Lifecast

Most interaction on social media sites is said to follow the 90-9-1 rule. According to this, 90% of the users on a social networking site are lurkers, 9% are contributors, and 1% are creators of content.

On Twitter, creators or contributors can:

Mindcast, add value, contribute original ideas and thoughts, share experience, vocalize tacit knowledge, state the previously unnoticed obvious points, and so on

Lifecast‚ talk about what they had for breakfast, the color of their nail paint, or the new pair of shoes, and so on

It's up to you to choose where you'd like to fall in this user grid. However, like in life, so on Twitter—be to others as you'd like others to be to you.

Tip: The term "mindcasting" was coined by @JayRosen, a journalism teacher at NYU. This article elaborates about mindcasting as it traces the acceptance of the meme: http://jayrosen.tumblr.com/post/110043432/mindcasting-defining-the-form-spreading-the-meme

At DesignStorm we encourage the use of Twitter in workshops to foster meaningful, life-long learning networks for our learners. Follow us @design_storm on Twitter.

Images for this Blog entry have been sourced from:
http://www.chethstudios.net/2010/03/tweety-free-twitter-bird-icon-pack.html

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/24/birdies-cute-free-twitter-icons-for-your-blog/

http://www.iconarchive.com

Stretching the Limits of Twitter

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“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” I believe, Marshall McLuhan would agree that this has become a reiterative process. Our tools shape us, and then we shape them a little more creatively to carve our society’s brains.

While we are automatically bound by the affordance of each tool, the fun is in stretching their limits to create new dynamic interactions and learning opportunities. Twitter, for example, can be extended in many interesting ways for use with new age learners. Here are a few:

1. Have a Tweet Minute During a Workshop

Give exactly one minute to the learners to tweet about their understanding of a topic. Avoid asking any leading questions. Instead, encourage learners to think reflectively and to extend the topic by adding their own thoughts about it. Then give them a minute to read others’ tweets and to respond to them.

A similar activity can also be carried out in an organizational environment. However, here we seek responses via questions like:

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Tweet Minute: How do you think culture impacts startegy? #widcorp_lrn121

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Tweet Minute: What new did you learn today? #widcorp_lrn121

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Tweet Minute: How do you think the modern workplace is changing? #widcorp_lrn121

Tweet minutes help learners to observe their thoughts and to express them concisely.

2.Conduct a Periodic, Synchronous Twitter Quiz

Participants meet at a fixed time to answer questions and the host sends out Tweets in the following sequence:

Topic of the quiz, hashtag information, total number of questions
Tweets about the rules or a link to the rules
Quiz questions, posted one at a time
Shout out to the correct first response to each question
Shout out to the overall winner
Share a few resources such as, who to follow, blogs etc. related to the topic of the quiz

The tweets here illustrate how we could conduct a fortnightly Twitter quiz for a Web sales team:
Tweet 1
Design_Storm DesignStorm
Are you ready for the web sales quiz? We’ve got a bunch of 10 questions today. Remember to add #widcorp_wsquiz to your response. Have fun!

Tweet 2
Design_Storm DesignStorm
Rule 1: One question will be posted every one minute. Respond only once to a question. Are you ready for the web sales quiz? #widcorp_wsquiz

Tweet 3
Design_Storm DesignStorm
Rule 2: The correct/best answer to each question that comes in first wil be rewarded with a shout-out tweet. #widcorp_wsquiz

Tweet 4
Design_Storm DesignStorm
Check the tips page to optimize your experience: for any queries contact kevin@widcorp. Let’s begin. #widcorp_wsquiz

Tweet 5

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Q1: Best KPI for a successful social campaing is 1) Fans 2) Positive Talk 3) Shares 4) Views Provide reasons with answers. #widcorp_wsquiz

Tweet 6
Design_Storm DesignStorm
Shout out to @richard_324. Correct Response: Positive Talk. The ultimate motive of a social campaign is the buzz it generates. #widcorp_wsquiz

…
Tweet n
Design_Storm DesignStorm
And the winner of the #widcorp_wsquiz for today is: @tonee789 Great job and keep up the enthusiasm! A big round of applause please.

Tweet n1
Design_Storm DesignStorm
To learn more about analytics and web sales, download the following course:

Tip: If you would like to restrict these tweets to your organization only, you could use a tool like: http://hashwork.com/. This tool by Hashworks utilizes Twitter to form a closed community of users. Here’s a review of the tool: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/hashwork-bridges-with-twitter-for-internal-and-external-micro-blogging-005641.php

Tip: Using Tweet Deck from http://www.tweetdeck.com/ can filter tweets by hashtags. It’s a great tool to use especially while participating in a quiz or in any other synchronous Twitter event.

3. Play Twitter Games

Since one of the most important uses of Twitter is to create and extend our personal learning network, we can play a few games around this activity:

Provide five hints about a person to the participants, as the objective of the game is to find out who the person is, and to share the person’s Twitter ID. Hints are provided, one tweet at a time, and participants can use the Internet to search for the person. They can respond with answers after each hint.The next stage of the game requires the participants to tweet about the identified person’s work, thoughts, or top resources. They need to explain in a tweet why they think the resource (related to the identified person) that they are sharing is useful. Like the quiz, this game is synchronous, involves an introduction, rules, hints, and shout out to the winners. It can be played during a workshop and will help learners to create a lifelong learning network that they can take away from the workshop.
We ask the participants to respond to a question or to write a story in 140 characters:

YAFantasyGuide Stacey O’Neal
Hey #Writers, can you answer this question and use this hashtag: #whyiwrite. Question: why do you write? Please RT

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Complete this story, #I_was_sure…Use the hashtag anywhere in the story. Make it as interesting as possible. Stick to the character limit.

What you receive as a result is a plethora of open ended responses. The best responses can be made into a tweet collage and the image can be shared with all respondents as an artefact.

Tip: Here’s help on how to upload images on Twitter: https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/111-features/articles/20156423-about-image-uploading-on-twitter. You could check other sections of Twitter Help, which are also very useful and fun to read.

4. Hold Interesting Synchronous Debates

To initiate a debate the host posts a debate statement and the rules.

Design_Storm DesignStorm
Welcome to the #orgdebate! Today’s topic: Collaboration is not always useful for an organization. Watch out for the rules in the next tweets.

Participants are given 15 minutes to tweet in favour and another 15 minutes to reply to the tweets or tweet against the debate. This can be an invigorating exercise as learners get to express their opinion or understanding, and get immediate feedback from people in terms of what others think. If experts can be involved in such a debate, it can become even more challenging.

5. Conduct Chat and Back Channel Chat in Conferences

Twitter is used by many to have a public, synchronous chat. Everyone interested is allowed to join in. It is usually a high involvement, intense, public talk organized by a host. A very good example of this is #lrncnat, which lasts about 90 minutes. A similar chat can be started for any subject.

Twitter back channel conversations in conferences are also becoming very common. Although they may require some logistical arrangement, they add so much more value to conferences. They also allow people not physically present in the conference to participate and to gain from it. Here’s how you can make your conference Twitter/Blogging friendly: http://jeffhurtblog.com/2009/05/19/eight-ways-to-make-your-meeting-blog-twitter-friendly/

Thanks to the mobile revolution, we can leverage tools like Twitter to make learning an integral part our day to day lives, such that it no longer remains an isolated activity. Share your ideas on using Twitter creatively for learning. Use the hashtag #DesignStorm. We’ll create a collage of the best ideas and share it back with you. Keep tweeting.

References

http://office.microsoft.com/en-in/images/??Origin=EC790014051033&CTT=6&ver=12&app=winword.exe

This work by Design Storm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Author Archives: admin

Classroom Games: From Chaos to Meaning