“This is Boring!”
High School Students,
The Internet
and Gaming Culture
Nick Maniatis
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/
Three Workshop Goals
1. 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 4/7/05
Pattern 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
Telephone
Pager
Radio
Ten Years Ago:
Today:
Tin-can telephone
Posted letter
Thumb-Tack Bulletin Board
Communication Technologies
Twenty Years Ago:
Television
Telephone
Pager
Radio
Tin-can telephone
Posted letter
Thumb-Tack Bulletin Board
Ten Years Ago:
Email
The World Wide Web
List servs/ emailing lists
Basic web forums
Internet Newsgroups
LAN (Local Area Network) games
Dial-up modem networks
Analogue mobile phones
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 Feeds
Wired and wireless broadband infrastructure
VOIP 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
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•
•
•
•
•
•
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
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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